The new year enables health plan leaders to leverage new approaches to improve their team’s performance. Inspired by this article, here are 25 ways to become a better health plan leader in 2025.
Collaboration
Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a great book about Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet members, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edwin Gates. They had been political rivals vying for the Republican nomination in the 1860 election. After winning the election, Lincoln invited each of them to join his cabinet and fostered a collaborative relationship with them all. Though they’d been rivals, each contributed to the Union’s win in the Civil War.
Though it’s unlikely your team is facing such dire consequences, building a collaborative environment that respects and elevates each member’s unique abilities will increase your chance for success.
Be Agile
Most health plans aren’t known for their agility. They’re typically large organizations that take significant time to make decisions. We’ve experienced this several times in sales situations.
But those slow decision-making processes can prove costly. For example, if you’re shopping for a premium billing solution like Certifi because your existing solution is inaccurate and/or requires manual work, not making a timely decision can cost you significantly in dollars and resources. Focus on getting things done faster in 2025.
Lifelong Learning
Warren Buffett didn’t get rich by resting on his laurels. A voracious reader, Buffett spends hours every day reading and thinking—his advice: Read 500 pages every week because learning compounds like interest.
You may not have time to read 500 pages a week. However, set aside time to learn a new skill, analyze a new business opportunity, or attend a trade show to meet and learn from your peers.
Listening
Effective leadership involves listening. Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, was renowned for her inclusive leadership style, which prioritized active listening and valuing diverse perspectives. Not only did she foster a culture of open communication within PepsiCo, encouraging employees at all levels to share their ideas, concerns, and feedback, but she actively sought out diverse perspectives, recognizing that the best solutions often emerge from a collective understanding.
Budget time in 2025 to work on your active listening skills. Understand non-verbal cues and, if you don’t, work on active listening techniques like paraphrasing, reflecting, clarifying, and avoiding interruptions.
Empower Creativity
Creativity is vital to your team’s success. Creativity fuels innovation. New ideas, products, services, and solutions arise from creative thinking. It allows us to tackle complex challenges with unique approaches.
Make a goal to unleash your team’s creativity in 2025. Do that by cultivating an environment that embraces creative approaches. You can encourage creative thinking with brainstorming sessions or challenging the status quo. Don’t be afraid to embrace failure – creative ideas may be more prone to failure. Recognition also matters; recognize your team when they act creatively.
Open Communication
Great leaders are often great communicators. Keys to improving your communication in 2025 include:
- Be clear: Get to the point, organize your thoughts logically, and use visual aids if possible.
- Pay attention: Listening is a key part of communication. Pay attention, ask questions, and summarize to confirm you understand what a team member has said.
- Be responsive: Respond to team members clearly and concisely when communicating via email or chat.
Develop Empathy
Brené Brown, research professor and author, is well-known for her work on vulnerability and empathy. She’s impacted leadership thinking by emphasizing the importance of authenticity, connection, and courage in leadership. She encourages leaders to embrace vulnerability and create a culture of belonging.
The following are signs of an empathetic leader:
- Active listening – Truly hear and understand the perspectives of others.
- Vulnerability – Be open and honest about your challenges and experiences.
- Compassion – Show genuine care and concern for the well-being of their employees and stakeholders.
- Inclusivity – Create a culture where everyone feels valued and respected.
- Action – Translate empathy into concrete actions that benefit your employees and communities.
Seek Feedback
Jeff Bezos famously said, “The most important thing is to be customer-obsessed.” Amazon prioritizes customer feedback through various channels, including:
- Product Reviews: Customer reviews are prominently displayed and heavily influence purchasing decisions.
- Customer Service Interactions: Amazon encourages customer service representatives to gather feedback during interactions.
- Surveys: They conduct regular surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
- A/B Testing: Amazon constantly experiments with different website layouts and features based on user feedback.
As a leader, soliciting client, partner, and employee feedback can help uncover insights that improve products, relationships, and employee performance.
Foster Team Building
You’ve likely completed the two truths and a lie exercise designed to build trust and rapport. That’s an example of a team-building exercise you can leverage to build a more cohesive team.
There are other team-building exercises, but one I’ve found helps teams gel is simple. If you have a periodic team meeting – say weekly – start the meeting by asking each employee for their personal and professional “best” since the last meeting. It gets employees discussing what they’ve done as an employee while also introducing their personality outside work. It’s a great way to learn more about each employee.
Build Human Connections
When leaders build genuine connections with their team members, it fosters trust. Employees feel more comfortable sharing their ideas, concerns, and challenges openly when they know their leader cares about them as individuals. People want to work with people they like.
Focus on building human connections. Show interest in employee’s lives. Ask about their interests outside of work. Remember birthdays, anniversaries, and personal milestones.
Get to know co-workers as individuals. Recognize and appreciate their unique strengths, personalities, and contributions. Don’t forget to ask about career goals and aspirations. Then, work to help them achieve those goals.
Invest in Your Team
Google famously emphasizes employee development. The company offers several learning opportunities, including online courses, workshops, conferences, and tuition reimbursement. They formerly encouraged “20% time” for employees to work on personal projects one day a week, which led to many innovative products like Gmail.
Investments in your team can lead to numerous business benefits. Examples may include:
- Training Programs: Offer workshops, seminars, and online courses to enhance employees’ skills and knowledge. Programs could include technical skills, leadership training, communication workshops, or industry-specific certifications.
- Mentorship Programs: Pair experienced employees with newer ones to provide guidance, support, and career development.
- Cross-Training: Allow employees to learn about different roles within the company, broadening their skills and opening up opportunities for internal mobility.
- Conferences and Industry Events: Encourage employees to attend conferences and industry events to stay up-to-date on the latest trends and network with peers.
- Stretch Assignments: Offer challenging assignments that allow employees to grow and develop new skills.
Create Professional Development Goals For Your Team
Most businesses set quarterly/annual/long-term goals for team members related to their role in the organization. But don’t forget to set professional development goals, as well. Doing so helps employees understand how to improve their skills and advance within the organization.
That plan should include:
- Identify Resources: Determine the resources needed to achieve goals, such as training programs, mentorship opportunities, online courses, or on-the-job experience.
- Outline Action Steps: Break down the goals into smaller, more manageable steps.
- Establish a Timeline: Create a timeline for completing the action steps and achieving the goals.
- Assign Responsibilities: Clearly define who is responsible for each action step.
- Check-In: Meet to discuss progress toward the development goals and adjust as needed.
Be a Role Model
As I’ve aged, I’ve found myself doing many things that my father did when I was a child. I learned many of my parenting skills by watching my parents.
Your employees with likewise parrot your actions and words. Be a role model to them. Model behaviors you want your team to follow. If you want an empathetic team, show empathy. If you want your team to think outside the box, don’t shut down creative solutions to problems. Whether you realize it or not, employees internalize your behavior, so be mindful of your impact on others.
Laugh
Why can’t dinosaurs clap their hands?
Because they’re extinct.
Bad joke aside, laughter truly is the best medicine. Laughter helps to:
- Break Down Barriers: Humor can help to break down barriers between leaders and their teams, making them seem more approachable and relatable.
- Builds Rapport: Sharing a laugh can create a sense of connection and camaraderie, fostering stronger relationships within the team.
- Improves Communication: Humor can make messages more memorable and engaging, helping leaders to communicate their vision and goals more effectively.
So don’t be afraid to tell a joke. Hopefully, it’s better than mine.
Inspire
One of your goals as a health plan leader is to improve your team’s performance. But that’s more than just setting goals and telling them to achieve them. The best leaders inspire employees so they can achieve their goals. How?
- Communicate the “Why”: Clearly articulate the company’s mission, vision, and values. Help employees understand how their work contributes to the bigger picture and makes a difference.
- Paint a Compelling Picture: Share a future vision that excites and motivates employees. Describe the positive impact of the work and opportunities for growth and development.
- Celebrate Success: Celebrate team and individual successes to reinforce positive behaviors and build morale.
- Provide Autonomy: Empower employees to take ownership of their work and make decisions. Delegate tasks that challenge them and allow them to develop new skills.
- Provide Resources and Support: Ensure employees have the resources, tools, and support they need to succeed.
Build Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of those around you. It’s about being aware of how emotions can affect your behavior and how you interact with others and using that awareness to navigate situations thoughtfully.
Emotional intelligence includes:
- Self-awareness: This is the foundation of emotional intelligence. It involves recognizing your emotions and how they affect your thoughts and actions. It also includes understanding your strengths and weaknesses.
- Self-regulation: Focus on controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods. Think before acting and manage your emotions healthily.
- Motivation: This involves having a strong drive to achieve goals, a positive attitude, and the ability to persevere in the face of setbacks.
- Empathy: Work to understand the emotional makeup of other people. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and recognize their feelings.
- Social skills: Build and maintain good relationships, manage conflict, and communicate effectively.
If you believe you lack in any of these attributes, set a goal to focus on it in 2025.
Build Trust
Numerous studies have shown that employees who trust their organization’s leadership are less likely to leave. Not only that, but they may also be more productive as a result.
Work on building trust with your co-workers. Here are some thoughts to get you started:
- Do what you say you’ll do. Nothing erodes trust more than leaders who don’t follow through. If you say you’ll do something, ensure it gets done.
- Foster a culture of open communication. Opaque organizations generally lead to more employee distrust. Be open and honest in your communication.
- Delegate and elevate your employees. For employees to trust you, you need to trust them as well. Delegate tasks to show you trust your employees to do the work.
Improve Transparency
Luka Doncic, one of the best basketball players in the world, was recently traded in a blockbuster deal that took the entire NBA by surprise. Doncic’s team, the Mavericks, only negotiated with one team, and those negotiations were unknown to the players involved.
Doncic was seemingly hurt by the trade, with some reports saying he cried when informed of the trade. That lack of transparency likely killed the relationship between the Mavericks and Doncic. He’s no longer on the team, but the lack of transparency was hurtful.
Manage your team with transparency. Communication is the key. Set goals, openly track progress toward those goals, and communicate every step of the way so employees know what they should be doing. That improved transparency ensures a more functional team that meets or exceeds expectations.
Improve Storytelling
I’ve seen Dharmesh Shah, the CIO and co-founder of HubSpot, present at conferences and events since 2009. He’s a great storyteller because his presentations have a clear structure: A logical progression with a beginning, middle, and end inhabited by compelling characters (including him and his son) that evoke emotions (mostly laughter at his dad jokes).
A good storyteller can inspire team members to embrace a shared vision, leading to tangible results. It’s no surprise that Shah has been a part of HubSpot’s growth into a company with more than 8,000 employees worldwide and revenue surpassing $2 billion.
Embrace Innovation
Steve Jobs and Apple are well known for bringing innovative products like the McIntosh, iPhone, and iPad to market. That was a direct result of a culture that believed in thinking differently to achieve new products and designs.
But they even innovated within products. For example, in 2016, Apple was the first major phone manufacturer to remove the headphone jack, an act that caused more than a little outcry. Yet that removal improved the phone by enabling Apple to use that space for a larger battery or increased storage.
Don’t be afraid to explore how to do things differently. Health plans are notorious slow movers. But they don’t have to be. Explore ways to innovate products, processes, or technology to improve your health plan.
Learn About Servant Leadership
Servant leadership is the concept that the leader is there to serve – employees, customers, partners, etc. It’s less about accumulating power and control and more about serving others. Think Nelson Mandela, not Vladimir Putin.
Servant leaders can’t staff all leadership roles, but you can apply those principles to any job. They include many items we’ve discussed previously, including:
- Being empathetic
- Listening
- Integrity
- Empowerment
- Foresight
- Collaboration
- Awareness
- Continuous Learning
Be Curious
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it won’t kill your business. As a health plan leader, be curious. Ask questions and constantly probe for more information to help you and your team achieve your goals.
Curiosity has several benefits, including:
- Fosters Innovation: A curious leader creates a safe space for experimentation. They understand that not every idea will succeed but value the learning process and encourage calculated risks.
- Drives Continuous Learning: This passion for learning is contagious. Curious leaders inspire their teams to be lifelong learners as well, fostering a culture of continuous growth and development.
- Improves Decision-Making: Curious leaders actively seek out diverse perspectives and challenge their own assumptions. This leads to more informed and well-rounded decisions.
- Adaptability and Resilience: Curious leaders are more resilient in the face of setbacks. They view challenges as opportunities for learning and growth.
Challenge Norms
John Gagliardi is the winningest football coach in college football history, winning 489 games in 63 seasons as a coach, including four national championships. He coached from 1949 to 2012 when stern taskmasters like Bear Bryant and Woody Hayes were the norm.
Yet Gagliardi succeeded by breaking many college football norms. His famous “Winning with No’s” philosophy included prohibiting his players from calling him “coach,” not using a whistle or blocking sleds, prohibiting tackling in practices, not requiring his players to lift weights, and limiting his team practices to 90 minutes. He laughed at football’s pre-game calisthenics, instead having his teams do the Nice Day Drill, which consisted of the team lying on their backs staring at the sky and saying, “What a nice day!”
To say Gagliardi challenged football’s norms is an understatement. And it led to him winning the most games in college football history – by 80 wins.
Don’t be afraid to challenge norms in 2025. Find things that work, not things you’ve always done. Doing things the same way doesn’t necessarily mean the right way.
Identify AI Impacts
AI appears to be on the cusp of revolutionizing business, especially for health plans that have historically employed large numbers of people doing work that AI can do much faster and accurately.
Identify how AI may impact your team and processes. Develop AI use cases, prioritizing them based on strategic priorities. Then, start small and build or buy basic projects first.
Common AI use cases include claims processing automation, prior authorization, chatbots, call routing, fraud and abuse prevention, and personalized interventions.
Set Goals and Create Plans to Reach Those Goals
Shohei Ohtani may be the greatest baseball player in the history. He’s one of the best pitchers AND one of the best hitters playing today. Last year, Ohtani became the first 50/50 hitter by smashing 54 home runs and stealing 59 bases. Though he didn’t pitch last year while recovering from an arm injury, he did lead the league in strikeouts per 9 innings in 2022 as a pitcher.
He’s not a great player by accident. While in high school, he wrote a list of goals he wanted to achieve every year. For example, by age 22, he set a goal to win a Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in baseball. By age 26, he aimed to win the World Series. He also wrote the steps he planned to take to achieve those goals. Though he hasn’t met every goal yet, that focus on goals has made Ohtani elite.
Focus on your 2025 goals. I’ve found that setting goals as a team and then developing a plan to achieve those goals with pre-determined milestones – like Ohtani created in high school – improves everyone’s ability to understand and work toward team goals. Periodic check-ins help ensure progress.
Certifi’s health insurance premium billing and payment solutions help healthcare payers improve member satisfaction while reducing administrative costs.
