Chuck Cohen interviews Lucy Hobbs Award winner Stephenie Goddard, Chief Experience Officer with Glidewell Dental.
Fourteen years ago, when she started at Glidewell Dental, Stephenie Goddard was not exactly an industry lifer. Indeed, she’s no dentist at all—instead, she’s the resident organizational psychologist at Glidewell, with influence that extends well beyond supply-chain management and corporate strategy into leadership and mentoring.
Under Goddard’s guidance over the last decade and a half, the Southern California manufacturing giant launched Glidewell University, a 10-month leadership development program—an internal mini-MBA, in essence—for midlevel managers, as well as a six-month version for senior management. “I get personal joy and satisfaction watching people and their careers grow,” she says. “When I came to Glidewell, we didn’t have a learning program at all. We had 1,100 employees, and we kept hiring leaders from outside, while we had this amazing talent inside that just needed to be developed.” (Glidewell today has some 5,000 employees.)
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