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David DeAngelis, Senior Director of Technology Training and Support Services at Brightstar Lottery, joins Sarah Nicastro for a detailed, practical conversation about how to identify the behaviors that distinguish top-performing field service talent — and build a program that scales.
David DeAngelis has been with Brightstar Lottery, then called GTEC, since 1988. He built the training organization from the ground up, and today oversees training and support for more than 600 field service technicians across 26 states. His team trains every person involved in making a lottery work: the technicians who install and service terminals, the retailers who sell tickets, the data center staff who run the systems.
When Brightstar’s field service leadership started telling technicians they were the face of the company, that customer experience was as important as technical execution, the technicians asked a reasonable question: where’s the training for that? This episode is the story of the three and a half years that followed.
The Light Bulb Moment
Brightstar had a rigorous technical competency model. Every task a field service technician needed to perform was logged, cataloged, and tracked through a career development system. There was no ambiguity about what technicians needed to learn technically, or what they needed to demonstrate to move up.
There was nothing equivalent for professional skills. No framework. No language. No training. And when supervisors were asked to describe what made their top performers stand out, many of them struggled to articulate it beyond “I just know.”
“When the field service leadership was out talking to our technicians and saying, ‘You’re much more than technicians to our company - you’re the face of our company,’ the questions started coming back: where is the training for that? That was the genesis of this program.” - David DeAngelis
18 Months of Research: Finding What Actually Differentiates Top Performers
Before building anything, David’s team went looking for the answer. They asked supervisors across 26 states and multiple territories to identify top performers and average performers at each of the five FST levels - people who were roughly equivalent technically, but who differed in ways that supervisors noticed and customers responded to.
Then they ran behavioral interviews. Thirty to ninety minutes each. Recording every conversation. Asking open questions about what behaviors people believed had made them successful in difficult situations, in learning the job, in building relationships with peers and customers. The analysis took a year and a half.
What they found was striking in its consistency. Across geography, across levels, the differentiating behaviors were clear and they changed as technicians moved up. At entry level, credibility and interpersonal skills were the biggest differentiators: new FSTs who could build trust quickly with the strangers they needed to rely on were the ones who stood out. At senior levels, mentoring behaviors and early leadership qualities became the distinguishing factors.
“The competencies that made an FST four a top performer were different from what made an FST one stand out. The expectations changed. The role changed. And so what we were looking for had to change too.” - David DeAngelis
The Program: One Week to Learn, Four Weeks to Practice
The professional competency program at Brightstar now covers 15 core competencies, including self-confidence, customer orientation, adaptability, interpersonal effectiveness, fostering teamwork, and forward thinking. Within each competency there are seven to ten specific behaviors. Technicians work through the program in six-month blocks, focusing on one competency at a time.
The training structure is deliberately different from technical training. One week of learning: understanding what the competency is, why it matters, and what it looks like at the individual contributor level, using examples that field service technicians can actually relate to, not examples written for executives. Then four weeks of practice: each week, technicians are given an exercise to put a specific behavior into action in their everyday job, and they check in with their supervisor to discuss what happened.
The supervisors who were initially unable to articulate why certain technicians stood out found that the program’s language gave them a framework they had always needed. For many of them, the debrief conversations became the most valuable part.
“You can teach behaviors. You just can’t teach them once, observe it, and walk away. You have to reinforce it. You have to build exercises so that people are doing it for six months before moving on. It’s a slow cultural change, not a training event.” - David DeAngelis
The Blind Spot: Adaptability and Commercial Awareness
Asked which competency field service technicians most commonly struggle with, David’s answer is immediate: adaptability — specifically, awareness of their commercial impact. Technicians are often focused on what they understand their job to be: install the terminal, fix the machine, move to the next site. The idea that every interaction is also a brand moment — that the impression they leave with a retailer or a customer’s customer shapes how that customer feels about the business — can genuinely come as a surprise.
Brightstar’s approach has been to share direct evidence. At town halls, they read technicians feedback from RFP evaluations — moments where Brightstar’s investment in this program was cited as a differentiating factor that helped win business. Connecting the behavior to the commercial outcome, and then connecting the commercial outcome back to the technician’s own career and security, is what makes it land.
The Feedback That Made It Worth It
Three and a half years in, the anecdotal evidence is strong. Supervisors report more engagement in team meetings. Technicians are thinking about problems from the customer’s perspective before their own. People are bringing potential solutions, not just problems. The first six months were hard. The next six were better. Each cycle since has built on the last.
But the piece of feedback David returns to most is simpler than any survey. A technician wrote in to the team newsletter to say that an audiobook on self-confidence had changed them forever. That they had always been quiet and reserved. That the program had made them think: maybe I need to voice myself more. Maybe I need to show that I’m here and I want to move up. Maybe I need to start speaking out and showing what I know.
“To get that kind of feedback - to know that you influenced not just your customers and your RFP results, but your people, and that someone said something like ‘it changed my life’ - that made the whole year and a half of putting this together worthwhile.” - David DeAngelis
The Business Case: Build a Blueprint First
David’s advice to any service leader considering this work is direct. Do the due diligence first. Don’t assume you know what behaviors differentiate your top performers, do the behavioral interviews. Talk to supervisors. Talk to technicians at every level. Look for the patterns. Map what you find to a professional competency model.
Without that blueprint, you’re guessing. And the cost of getting it wrong, training that doesn’t resonate, programs that don’t stick, technicians who can’t see the point, is harder to recover from than the cost of doing the research upfront.
The other message: be prepared for the timeline. It took two years to research and pilot. The third year was when the turnaround became visible. Cultural change moves like a ship. Steering it requires patience, communication, and the willingness to show people evidence that it’s working before they’re ready to believe it.
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