Vice President, Pharmacy Solutions

What is your definition of leadership? Leadership is the ability to create and maintain an environment that enables others and/or processes to achieve their maximum potential in a given effort or common cause. Leadership is tangible, measurable and can be cultivated. Many corporations have patterned their leadership development programs after the military and have experienced significant gains in critical metrics such as productivity, turnover rates and revenue.

An environment where positive leadership exists is a fertile ground for forward thinking (strategic planning), risk mitigation and innovation. In a time when most companies are struggling to determine ways to improve service, cut costs, match programs/offerings with clients and exceed financial goals, creating an environment where everyone understands how and why they add value is the great tool that enterprises must utilize to achieve these collective, and sometimes competing, goals.

What’s the worst fault a leader can have? Lack of humility is a terrible fault. If you support the notion that leadership is about creating the right environment to succeed, then it’s also important to realize that leaders need to be selfless and possess a high degree of humility. Humility is the foundation of serving others and acts as a moral compass in most situations. Humility offsets the self-serving, siloed, or zero-sum behaviors that are so often destructive. Humility is also the road to a greater cause… something everyone can see, aspire to, and rally around.

Headquarters: Indianapolis, Indiana
Web site: www.wellpoint.com
Primary Business: Health benefits
Employees: 42,000

What advice can you provide for young leaders? Stay humble and focus on serving. A clear focus on performance/service is the great equalizer… the results usually speak louder than any rhetoric and also serve as the single point of truth. The purpose of any business is to serve…. keep service as the most important thing. Be technically sound but understand a leader’s job takes you from the strategic to the tactical on a daily basis. Be mindful of when you need to be either or both.

What are the personal and/or professional sacrifices to being leader? The badge of leader never gets taken off. As a true leader develops over a lifetime, the expectations of outstanding results (and supporting others) never go away. In fact in some cases, due to need, exposure, and other outside forces, the expectations increase. The most successful leaders embrace their never-ending responsibilities and make the expectations a way of life—something that drives them, rather than shackles them. So embrace those responsibilities, share your experience, and ask for support from loved ones. And most of all, stay humble.