Government contractors spend enormous energy getting compliance right. The training, the policies, the documentation, the audits. But there's a layer that sits underneath all of it and rarely gets talked about: whether the managers running day-to-day teams actually reinforce what the training taught. A policy only works if someone makes sure it's followed.
To dig into that layer, we spoke with Nick Herinckx, Co-CEO of Oxygen, the top-rated management training solution that helps growing companies turn strong individual contributors into confident, capable managers (leadwithoxygen.com). Nick is quick to say he's not a government contracting expert. His expertise is managers: how they're made, why so many struggle, and what it takes to build teams that follow through. And that, he argues, is exactly where a lot of compliance risk quietly lives.
Federal Publications Seminars: You train managers, not government contractors. Why did you want to talk to an audience of compliance professionals?
Nick Herinckx: Because I think there's a blind spot, and it's one I can actually speak to. I'm not going to pretend I know the regulations the way your readers do. That's their world, and they know it far better than I ever will. But every compliance program, no matter how well designed, ultimately runs through managers. Somebody has to make sure the training turns into behavior. That handoff from policy to practice is my world, and it's where I see organizations under-invest constantly.
Federal Publications Seminars: What do you mean when you say compliance is a management problem?
Nick: I mean that knowing the rule and acting on the rule are two different things, and the distance between them is almost always a manager. Think about what happens when someone spots a problem. When employees do raise a concern about misconduct, most take it to their immediate manager first, not a hotline or a compliance office. So your frontline managers are effectively the intake system for risk. If a manager knows how to receive a hard message and take it seriously, the system works. If they get defensive or quietly let it slide to avoid the hassle, the issue dies right there. That's not a knowledge gap. That's a management gap.
Federal Publications Seminars: Why are so many managers unprepared for that part of the job?
Nick: Because of how they got promoted. In most technical fields, and I'd imagine this is true in contracting too, people get promoted for being excellent at the individual work. Your sharpest specialist becomes a manager as a reward for being great at the task. Then the job completely changes. Suddenly it's not about their own output, it's about holding other people accountable and having uncomfortable conversations when someone is off track. Nobody teaches them that. There's a well-known Gallup finding that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, and engaged teams are the ones that speak up and hold the line. Disengaged teams cut corners and stay quiet. The manager drives that, not the policy binder.
Federal Publications Seminars: So what can organizations actually do about it?
Nick: Stop treating these as skills people should just have and start treating them as skills you build. Giving direct feedback, running accountability, handling a difficult conversation without blowing up trust: those are learnable, but only through practice. That's what our Management Essentials program is built around. Managers practice the hard conversations with peers and get live coaching, so when a real one shows up at work, they've already done it once. You can see what that produces on our client results page. The compliance expertise still has to come from people like your readers. I'm just saying the best training in the world still needs a capable manager to carry it the last mile.
The Takeaway
Compliance programs are only as strong as the managers who reinforce them. As Nick puts it, the organizations that stay clean are the ones that recognize their managers as the layer where policy either becomes practice or quietly falls apart, and they invest in those managers accordingly. The rules are the domain of the experts. Whether those rules get followed, day in and day out, comes down to management.
About Oxygen
Oxygen is a cohort-based management training company that helps growing organizations turn strong individual contributors into confident, capable managers. Through programs like Management Essentials, Oxygen equips managers with practical tools for feedback, accountability, and difficult conversations. Learn more at leadwithoxygen.com.
