In episode 29 of “Diary of a CHRO,” João Ricardo interviews Dónal McConnell, the founder and creator of LeaderTools — a deck of 50+ actionable leadership cards, each one offering a specific framework for handling common situations and themes at work.
McConnell’s path to building a leadership product wasn’t a direct one. “I have a kind of an unorthodox career path. So, I trained as a pharmacist originally, back in Ireland. So, I thought I’d be working behind a counter dispensing medicines,” he says. Instead, he took a different route: eight and a half years at IT company Viva Systems, where he started out selling IT solutions before moving into management. He grew his team to more than 65 people — a role that meant heavy involvement in hiring during the pandemic-era IT boom.
“I left Viva a year ago, and alongside my journey at Viva, I was also, uh, toying around with some solutions that I built myself,” he explains. LeaderTools grew out of that experience: managing large teams, coaching managers, and — as it turns out — noticing a gap.
Why cards, not books
“There’s a lot of value to be gotten from books or courses, but the issue that I found with a lot of them is that — books are amazing, right? There’s so much value in them, but when you’re a manager, you just don’t have time to be reading lots and lots of books,” McConnell says.
That time constraint is the core problem LeaderTools tries to solve — distilling advice into something a manager can act on in the moment, without carving out hours for a course or a chapter. It’s a kind of gamification of management: breaking leadership advice into a format that’s fast and easy to digest.
McConnell explains that not all the tools within the toolkit are innovations or brand new: “What I’ve done is, I’ve picked the best toolkits or the best tools that I found within books, within podcasts, within YouTube videos, whatever they may be, and I’ve compiled them within the toolkit,” he says.
Who it’s for
The product isn’t aimed at every manager. “It isn’t for everyone. I think the sweet spot is really mid-career managers or earlier. If you’re somebody who’s been managing people for 10 years, you’ve probably seen or come across these concepts. You have your own ways of working, and you’re not going to learn too much new,” McConnell says.
So far, McConnell has sold over 3,000 decks — tested first within his own close-knit community of managers before wider release. What surprised him most, he says, wasn’t the sales figures but how much people liked the product once they had it: “The return rate of the product is very minimal. I think I’ve got like five or six returns of the product within 3,000 sales.”
“I’m genuinely making an impact for managers (…) so that they’re able to, you know, not lose sleep over decisions that they’re making or not be spending time reading and doing courses and stuff like that, whereby they can get that time back for their personal life.”
Watch the full episode:
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