Chris McGill and Cheryl Becker aren’t your typical trainers. Chris is an industrial engineer, and Cheryl was once afraid of public speaking. They’re Lean Six Sigma blackbelts who work in the process improvement space at Cintas, a global business services corporation. They do not work in human resources or learning and development, and yet this dynamic duo trains teams around the world, leveraging their nontraditional backgrounds and unique perspectives to encourage their learners to stretch beyond their comfort zones.
“I’m an engineer—I should not be doing what I’m doing,” McGill said. “I use that as part of my mojo to talk about, ‘Hey, listen, don’t pigeonhole yourself into what role you think you need to be in or think you should be in. You can be anything you want.’”
Between the two, McGill and Becker are certified in all five Crucial Learning courses and boast a combined 50-plus years at Cintas. Their courses fall under the umbrella of change management in the operations space, and they draw from their vast and varied experiences to make connections between the courses and Cintas employee-partners’ daily lives.
“It’s almost like yin and yang,” McGill said. “She’s more left-brained, [and] I’m more right-brained, so we kind of make a really nice pair in that way. She’s structured, she’s organized, she keeps me on track. I’m the big-picture guy, I’m the flamboyant guy. She’s more calm, collected. But both of us have a passion for teaching and training.”
“I think that’s super important to have the different left-brain/right-brain strengths, open minds, and a good attitude,” Becker added. “We both have a passion for helping people discover themselves, build confidence, and grow with the company or in whatever direction they want to go, and I think the Crucial Learning classes help with that.”
The pair has worked together for the past decade, and they’ve developed a rhythm in which they tag-team seamlessly, whether that means co-teaching on camera or one producing while the other teaches—and even trading roles throughout the course.
“It’s very fluid for us,” McGill said. “We’re not just traditional producing. We, of course, jump in and insert ourselves because we can, so it’s almost like co-teaching the entire time with somebody helping with breakouts and all that kind of stuff. It’s really kind of fun when we’re both trained in the content and can flip-flop as needed, and also we can catch things the other misses, like not setting a timer, very quickly and in a playful way.”
The pair started out as avid learners, taking Crucial Learning courses and attending REACH conference.
“I think we started to lay out a vision of, ‘All right, let’s go to the classes, and if we’re going, we might as well get certified so we can start bringing this to our organization,’” McGill said. “Slowly over time there was a point where if you purchase so many licenses, you got a free [Fast Track] certification. We maxed that offer out! So every time we purchased [learner] licenses, either Cheryl or I was getting certified in something for free.”
The pair offers all five Crucial Learning courses at least once a quarter, with all courses being optional, open to Cintas employee-partners worldwide, and very in demand.
“We can’t keep up, which is good,” McGill said. “It’s a good problem to have.”
When the pandemic forced a shift from in-person to virtual training, McGill and Becker embraced the online platform as a natural fit for their multinational workforce. They now teach virtual courses almost exclusively and even secured a dedicated studio space at Cintas headquarters in Mason, Ohio.
“It is literally an old maintenance closet, which is totally fine with us,” Becker said. “We don’t care about that. It’s a nice space. It fits all our stuff. It suits our needs. It’s back in a corner. It’s private space where we have all our things.”
“The fact that we have a dedicated studio means a lot truly to being able to do this effectively as well,” McGill added. “We got all the equipment, we got the official lob mic and the cameras and everything, the table that raises up and down. We have a nice setup so that we can do this in a way that is not wonky and just kind of putting it together like hodgepodge.”
Having the coverage with certifications also means that the pair can divide and conquer as needed to avoid burnout.
“You can overdo it because literally we’re teaching every week, and so there’s times where we’re on the smaller courses or smaller classes, I’m like, ‘Hey Cheryl, do you got this one by yourself?’ If we double up every single class every single week, we’re both going to be fried.”
In addition to training, the pair serves as internal consultants within Cintas, helping with team building, team facilitation, coaching, and more. It’s not where either would have expected their career path to lead.
“As I got over my fear of public speaking, I was like, ‘This is kind of fun, I wonder if there’s a job at Cintas that I can do so that I can be in front of a room of people all the time,’” Becker said. “One great thing about working for a multinational and growing company is that there’s lots of opportunities, and I just kept checking the career space to see if I could find anything that fit what I was looking for. Ten years ago, I found it. I was not expecting the blackbelt world, the process improvement world, but I’m super glad I did.”
