What Does it Mean to Lead Well?
It starts by understanding what employees need to feel engaged, empowered, and recognized.
In my last post, I revealed what I believe is the key to a genuinely great HR function:
Creating exceptional experiences that promote and protect the wellbeing of their company’s greatest asset – its employees.
At Delta Dental of California & Affiliates (Delta Dental), this means creating equitable programs that create opportunities for advancement, foster meaningful connections, and improve the well-being of our employees and their families. We have three programs that, together, frame the experience we provide our employees and comprise Delta Dental’s People Operating System:
· LeadWell: Our leadership development framework;
· WorkWell: Defining the future of work at Delta Dental; and
· LiveWell: Where Total Rewards meets the needs of our employees, within and outside of work.
In this post dives deeper into LeadWell, the first arm of our Operating System:
LeadWell offers a shared understanding of what it means to be a leader at Delta Dental. It’s a set of expectations – rooted in our vision, purpose, and values – designed to empower our leaders to create the experiences needed for employees to feel engaged, supported, recognized, and cared for.
OK…but what about the wellbeing piece? After all, that’s the differentiator between a good HR function and a great one.
Well, it’s no secret—we don’t leave our jobs; we leave our leaders. Great leaders create and deliver value for the business, but the exceptional experiences they create have a tremendous impact on our well-being (both at work and at home).
How much value are we talking? According to this Forbes article, one poor leader costs a company “more than $126,000 over the course of a year” due to low productivity, turnover and staff dissension. The same article also estimates employee replacement costs to be “as high as 50 percent” of the team member’s salary.
In her recent study, Jamie Shapiro, Ph.D., found that well-being is foundational to leadership and empowers leaders to make a positive impact. Shapiro interviewed 20 Fortune 1,000 CEOs to understand how leaders perform when they’re thriving vs. when they’re burned out. She discovered that thriving CEOs “consistently create positive and inclusive environments, energize and encourage others, make clear decisions [and] are visionary leaders.” In contrast, burned-out CEOs “consistently operate with reduced productivity, become closed off, create a negative environment, lack focus for decision-making, and act narrow-mindedly.”
So, why does this matter?
LeadWell is just one way we’re enhancing our employees’ well-being. Through LeadWell, we’ve established a set of expectations for leaders, augmented by existing tools and resources from across our enterprise, to empower leaders to live our values and create exceptional experiences for all employees. We bring this to life in in a few different ways; one prominent example is our annual Leadership Insights survey, which measures our current state and future progress across the exceptional experiences we defined in the design stage. The data collected from this survey will be used across the enterprise to ensure accountability and growth, identify which experiences matter most to our employees, empower leaders with actionable data to create those experiences at Delta Dental and support our LeadWell strategy using insights that are custom to our enterprise.
All of this is in service to creating a defined path of what “great” leadership looks like. We need great leaders to succeed in business, and our business needs great leaders to succeed. Investing in those leaders as whole people ensures our long-term success.
Stay tuned for my next post, discussing the next piece in our People Operating System: WorkWell.
About The Author
Brian Sherman is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer for Delta Dental of California and its affiliates. In his role, Brian manages a team of experts across the Talent, People Operations, People Experience, DEI, and Organizational Effectiveness functions. Additionally, Brian oversees enterprise Business Resilience and the Delta Dental Community Care Foundation.
With more than two decades of people operations and strategy experience. Before Delta Dental of California, he served as Chief Human Resources Officer at Healthy Living Network, Vice President of Human Capital at Optum, and Human Resources Director at Dignity Health.
Brian received his B.A. in Human Resource Management from California State University, Chico, and his master’s degree in Organizational Development from the University of San Francisco.
Other articles by Brian Sherman:
Stop Calling HR A “Support Function”
Meet Brian and join us in engaging conversations and community as we transform the now and next of work together at Transform 2025.