DaVita is committed to providing the best healthcare, with kidney care and dialysis centers around the world and 55,000 teammates in the US alone serving over 200,000 patients. They are driven to deliver, differential, equitable and holistic care to their patients throughout their entire kidney disease journey.
DaVita
DaVita
The Challenge
Each year, DaVita recruits talent from top universities across the country to be lead analysts on their corporate teams and provides them with an 18-month leadership development program to build their skills, across an array of topics, and help prepare them for more senior roles within the company.
As part of this program, they conducted a data analysis to determine development gaps and identified emotional intelligence as a key skill missing from the training program. In particular, managers felt that the new incoming analysts struggled to accept feedback in a constructive way to further their learning and development.
“Our culture at DaVita is about people first, company second. We really strive to help our people throughout their entire lives,” said Bre Leinweber, Manager at DaVita University, who leads the analyst development program. “Our analysts have the technical skills, but we wanted to quickly help them develop their emotional intelligence skills to enhance the effectiveness of the feedback cycle so they are ready to take on more senior roles within the company.”
The Solution
To provide the needed emotional intelligence skills to their analysts, Bre designed an 18-month long EQ program, implementing TalentSmartEQ’s Multi-Rater Assessment and Mastering EQ – Level 1 program with all of their entry-level analysts. This impactful program includes the following:
- Emotional Intelligence Appraisal – Self Edition – After a month of onboarding, the analysts take TalentSmartEQ’s self-assessment, which provides participants with personalized information about their current EQ level, including their natural strengths and opportunities for development.
- Mastering EQ – Level 1, Part 1 – Analysts participate in an in-person training focused solely on the first two skills of Self-Awareness and Self-Management. Based on their assessment results, participants create individualized skill development plans to improve their awareness and management of their own emotions.
- Mastering EQ – Level 1, Part 2 – After a couple of months, the analysts complete part 2 which focuses on the second two skills of Social Awareness and Relationship Management and develop plans to improve how they perceive and respond to the emotions of others.
- Emotional Intelligence Appraisal – Multi-Rater Edition – After 6 months, the analysts re-take the self-assessment and have their manager and colleagues complete the multi-rater 360° assessment. This allows them to see the progress they’ve made and, importantly, provides them with valuable feedback on how they are perceived by others and how different that is from how they perceive themselves.
- Goal Setting – Based on the results of the self-assessment and multi-rater assessment, they are able to identify gaps between their self-perception and the perceptions of others. They use the feedback and insights to set goals for the year and identify strategies to improve their EQ skills.
- Accountability Check-Ins – Each analyst is paired with a mentor that they meet with every other month to check in on their progress, refine their goals, as needed, and make any changes to their development plans.
- End of Program Assessment – At the end of the 18-month program, analysts have their manager and colleagues retake the multi-rater 360° assessment.
- Community Board – The learning and development team also provides a discussion board for sharing EQ topics, tools and best practices.
Davita sees this program as incredibly valuable to the success of their development program. “Our analysts are right out of college so this program is incredibly important in helping them to adopt a growth mindset,” said Bre. “It makes them more open to new content and learning, and helps them to be more aware of how they show up to opportunities and build their personal brand within the company.”
Results
DaVita has seen a significant impact from their EQ training program, with their analysts showing strong improvements in their communications with stakeholders, presentation skills, handling of high-stress situations, ability to receive constructive feedback, collaboration with colleagues, and their readiness to lead and take on more responsibilities. The company has also seen a positive impact on their ability retain their top analysts.
The overall Net Promoter Score for the analyst development program has gone up 50 points since integrating the new 18-month EQ initiative. In their year-end evaluations, every analyst, who had been through the EQ program, increased their overall performance scores from just “performing” to “exceeds expectations.”
Bre summarizes the impact of their EQ program, “We set out to provide our analysts with strong people skills and to enhance the effectiveness of the feedback cycle to help prepare them for leadership roles at DaVita, and the 18-month EQ program has 100% accomplished those goals. They are open to learning and grateful for the opportunity, and it has a ripple effect throughout the company as the analysts share their learnings and skills with their teams.”
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