What happens when you take firing off the table?

For most leaders, firing is the escape hatch. Someone underperforms, you replace them, and you never have to learn whether the failure was theirs or yours.

Next Jump welded the hatch shut. No firing. Which meant the only way through a struggling employee was to make them better, forcing the company to master the one skill most organizations quietly avoid: developing people.

In this week's episode of Culture Creators, Greg Kunkel, Co-Founder of Next Jump, shares the playbook behind one of the few companies Harvard researcher Bob Kegan named a "deliberately developmental organization," a short list that also includes Ray Dalio's Bridgewater.

Greg has run Next Jump through a near-death collapse, from 200 employees down to six, then rebuilt it around a bet most leaders miss: developing your people is the most powerful and underused way to build a high-performance team.

For HR and People leaders, it's the case for reclaiming development as your highest-leverage work, plus the honest-feedback culture that makes it actually happen.

What you'll learn:
→ Why Next Jump stopped firing people, and what it did to performance
→ The higher bar that beats "transparency" for getting the truth out of a team
→ What adding a "thumbs down" to peer recognition actually did to the culture
→ The second "talent lever" almost every leader ignores

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 – The company that stopped firing
1:00 – A company with no HR
5:00 – Building culture for your mission
11:30 – No lying, no hiding, no faking
14:40 – No-firing and the two levers
19:45 – Developing your best and rest
29:45 – Leading people through AI
42:10 – Should HR own the people side
53:15 – Coaching up and biggest regrets
1:04:45 – Culture Crush