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As the head of talent management at Delek, Mark Lewis is driven by his unwavering belief in the potential of people and the transformative power of effective talent strategies to drive organizational excellence. Lewis leads the areas of talent acquisition, L&D, talent planning, and organizational performance for more than 4,000 employees. He provides the organization with highly effective and technologically advanced employee development, consulting, and talent to support the operating goals, mission, vision, values, and strategic plan while enhancing individual, team, and organizational effectiveness.Prior to joining Delek, Lewis was head of L&D for Marathon Petroleum Corporation’s Transportation and Rail organization, where he led the strategy and execution of learning and performance programs for more than 2,100 employees. Lewis holds a bachelor’s degree in aviation administration from the University of Nebraska-Omaha and a master of science degree in management from Bellevue University. He is a graduate of George Mason University’s Chief Learning Officer Executive Development Certificate Program and is a Society for Human Resource Management Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP).Lewis is an Air Force veteran and served 24 years as a senior intelligence officer, retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Mark Lewis

What to do when L&D and organizational goals collide

Managing Misalignment

February 2025 - TD Magazine

Leadership training programs receive significant support without yielding results.

Missing the Mark

August 2021 - The Buzz

Late last month, California Rep. Mark Takano introduced legislation that would help make the four-day workweek a reality for many US workers.

Could a Four-Day Workweek Become the Standard in the US?

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There are several reasons you should consider adding curation to your skill set.

Is Curation the Cure to Content Overload?

Innovation almost never happens in isolation. In business, especially, innovative ideas are usually the result of multiple brains hard at work. Consider the work of Steven Johnson. His book, The Natural History of Innovation: Where Good Ideas Come From, looked at research by theoretical physicist Geoffrey West who proved that large cities produce exponentially more ideas than small cities. Johnson writes, “\[Geoffrey\] West and his team discovered … A city that was 10 times larger than its neighbor wasn’t 10 times more innovative; it was 17 times more innovative. A metropolis 50 times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.” Extending that idea to the sales organization, we can conclude that a sales person operating independently won’t innovate as much as a sales team working together. The team can leverage its own talents within the organization or draw in partners, associates, and even customers outside of the organization, creating an ecosystem of ideas. Clearly, who is on your team is important. Consider shaking things up and creating thinking groups that don’t often work together. Familiarity plays an important part in establishing the right dynamic, but new blood can also invigorate the team’s thinking. Greg Johnson, vice president of product delivery and consulting at LexisNexis, likens team collaboration to a larger pool of thought. He describes it as a drawing of a target, with circles inside circles. “I draw a dot in the middle and say, ‘This is a rep’s perspective,’” he says. The LexisNexis VP adds, “And this is not a criticism; this is reality. They only touch a certain number of accounts. And then you start drawing the circles around the accounts their manager has. If a manager has eight reps and he’s going on calls with eight reps, it’s a bigger circle and a bigger perspective. Their world is bigger. If you draw a larger circle around a regional manager, that person might be going all over the southeast. The rep has the smallest perspective, usually, and the more people you can get in a collaboration meeting, whether it’s sales managers or product managers or someone else, you expand that knowledge base exponentially. You broaden it in terms of the perspective and the experiences that they have in an industry or in a market or in a geography. And with those additional perspectives come more ideas and more strategies and additional approaches.” Putting aside the hierarchy of team members is also critical to moving in a productive direction. Bill Chilton is a principal architect at Pickard Chilton, an award winning architectural design firm. He’s led projects for corporations around the world including the ExxonMobil office complex in Houston, Texas; the Four Seasons Place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency headquarters near Washington, D.C. His work is always the effort of a large team, consisting not only of the client, but people from many other companies including engineers and building contractors. “Many of the people on the team that are essential to the collaboration aren’t trained as architects. They don’t need to be. It’s very much a collaboration between disparate voices that are each bringing their own expertise,” says Chilton. “We’ve had great ideas for buildings that have come out of the structural engineer saying, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking about this, and what if we thought about the structure this way?’ That unlocks our thinking about the expression of the building in a way we never thought of before. But if we weren’t listening to that structural engineer, it would be easier to just say, ‘I’m going to design the building, and you’re just going to make sure it doesn’t fall over.’ We view the structural engineer as a creative, collaborative partner, and the process and the building are better as a result,” Chilton explains. Bottom line: On an effective sales innovation team, roles exist independent of position and hierarchy, and team members may work within or outside of the company. How can your team members work together toward innovation—instead of trying to create in isolation?

Innovation is a Team Sport

The Simple Activity That Boosts Your Teams’ Personal and Professional DevelopmentAccording to LinkedIn Learning’s 2021 Workplace Learning Report, 64 percent of learning and development (L&D) professionals said that L&D shifted from a “nice to have” to a “need to have” in 2021. One study showed 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in helping them learn. Major companies like Amazon and JPMorgan Chase have committed to investing millions in L&D programs over the next few years. While we know the investment in L&D is always worth it, we also know that it’s costly. So, how can organizations ensure they’re meeting the mark while remaining cost effective?Benefits of Reading for L&DOne easy solution is reading. Reading has long been known to reduce stress, increase empathy, enhance general knowledge, improve decision-making skills, and strengthen your brain, among other benefits. It is one of the best sources of continuous learning, and its benefits transcend to nearly every aspect of personal and professional development.Empathy and LeadershipReading is linked to having a greater sense of empathy because it requires readers to imagine different perspectives and put themselves in someone else’s position to understand their feelings and choices. Research shows that empathy in the workplace, particularly in leadership, is positively related to job performance. A 2020 study by Catalyst to understand the effects of empathetic leadership on employees found that “empathy is an important driver of employee outcomes such as innovation, engagement, and inclusion.” In fact, 61 percent of people with highly empathetic senior leaders reported they often or always are innovative at work compared to 13 percent of people with less empathetic leaders.Diversity and InclusionRegardless of genre or subject, reading exposes you to different experiences, schools of thought, and ideas, which creates a more culturally diverse workforce. Having employees who are open-minded and bring different experiences to the team leads to creativity, innovation, and ultimately profitability. Beyond this, giving employees access to books that support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) creates more inclusive and enlightened teams.Impact of Good CommunicationOne study from the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature, and Society at the University of Liverpool showed that people who read for just 30 minutes a week are 27 percent more likely to find it easy to start a conversation with a stranger and 50 percent more likely to enjoy it.Good communication is one of the most beneficial skills to an organization. It helps mitigate conflict, build better relationships among teams and customers, improve productivity, and increase employee job satisfaction. The ability for people, from executives to individual contributors, to have the skills to communicate and develop relationships is a major driver of company engagement and performance.Upskilling and TrainingBooks provide a simple way to train and upskill teams with titles applicable to every role in an organization, from general professional topics like management and communication to job-specific technical training like coding and analytics. Using a digital library ensures every employee has the choice to pick training opportunities that match their individual goals and interests and provides them access at any time.How to Offer These Benefits to Your WorkforceThe benefits reading brings to your L&D initiatives are endless. It’s why companies like Microsoft and SpaceX have invested in a digital library for their teams. Creating a digital library gives companies the ability to provide resources that align with their company’s mission and employees’ development goals. It supports training and upskilling initiatives, while also providing titles that support company culture and employee wellness, like DEI, mental health, and leisure reading.When it comes to L&D, conferences, in-person trainings, and high-dollar investments are valuable, but investing in cost-effective and time-saving options like a digital library will quickly and simply increase your return on investment.

How Video Can Help You Train and Retain New Employees

January 2022 - The Buzz

Could the four-day workweek be coming to America? Potentially, if the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest bloc of liberal lawmakers in Congress, have anything to say about it. On December 7, the caucus endorsed a bill proposed by Representative Mark Takano (D-Calif.) that would shorten the traditional 40-hour workweek to 32. The idea has gained traction worldwide as pilot programs in several countries have demonstrated no loss in productivity while increasing the overall engagement and satisfaction of employees. If enacted, the legislation wouldn’t cap the number of hours someone would work during the week. It would, instead, require employers to pay overtime past 32 hours. Certain types of work, such as salaried employees and gig workers, would not be covered; however, the majority of the American workforce would be. It’s assumed, though, that the sweeping legislation would lead to a cultural shift that would pressure employers only to require four days of work as the norm.

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