Director, Performance Excellence & Rewards

You are as unique as your background, experience and point of view. Here, you’ll be encouraged, empowered and challenged to be your best self. You'll work with dynamic colleagues - experts in their fields - who are eager to share their knowledge with you. Your leaders will inspire and help you reach your potential and soar to new heights. Every day, you'll have new and exciting opportunities to make life brighter for our Clients - who are at the heart of everything we do.

At Sun Life, we're driven by our Purpose: helping our Clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. Our values shape how we work: caring, authentic, bold, inspiring, and impactful.

When you join Sun Life, you'll work with passionate colleagues and empowering leaders who support your growth and celebrate your contributions, so you can make a meaningful difference in our Clients' lives.

Discover how you can make a difference in the lives of individuals, families and communities around the world.

Job Description:

Reporting to the Vice President, Enterprise Total Rewards, the Director, Performance Excellence & Rewards provides enterprise leadership for the design, evolution, and delivery of Sun Life’s Performance Excellence experience. The role translates enterprise priorities into practical, scalable experiences that help leaders and employees set clear expectations and engage in meaningful performance and development conversations to advance organizational performance.

Sitting at the intersection of performance, talent, and rewards, the Director helps strengthen the connection between performance outcomes and pay decisions, while creating an integrated employee and leader experience. The role ensures performance experiences are simple, data-driven, and aligned with Sun Life’s leadership principles, governance standards, and pay-for-performance philosophy.

The Director moves between thought leader, project lead, advisor and execution partner, moving easily between enterprise roadmap development, stakeholder alignment, cycle delivery and continuous improvement.  The Director will also modernize the performance ecosystem, embed practical AI capabilities, enable leaders to make better performance decisions and contribute to broader Total Rewards priorities by leading and supporting initiatives across the team, as assigned.

Please note this role requires regular presence at our Toronto One York office.

How you will make an impact

• Performance excellence strategic priorities: Refine and execute enterprise performance excellence priorities, providing thought leadership to support a multi-year roadmap that advances a high-performance culture, and anticipating the future of work and emerging workforce expectations as well as market leading performance practices.
• Performance program design and delivery: Lead the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of performance frameworks, goal-setting approaches, check-ins, feedback practices, assessment, rating methodologies, calibration, and differentiation.
• Digital transformation and process excellence: Partner with HR Technology to shape and deliver the performance excellence technology roadmap, applying AI and digital capabilities, simplify and streamline processes and elevate the user experience.
• Governance & Enterprise Standards: Establish and maintain enterprise standards, routines, and controls, monitoring consistency, fairness, compliance and risk considerations across business units and geographies.
• Pay-for-performance alignment: Partner with Total Rewards and HR Business Partners to strengthen the connection between performance and reward decisions, using insights to promote fairness, consistency, and improve differentiation.
• Analytics and insights: Use performance, employee listening and rewards data, and external insights to assess the effectiveness of goal quality and completion, rating distributions, calibration and managing underperformance.
• Stakeholder partnership: Partner across HR and the business to provide advice, co-create solutions, build alignment, resolve issues, and support enterprise adoption, while developing solutions that are adaptive to local needs.
• Change management and enablement: Lead communications, education, presentations, tools, and resources that strengthen performance conversations, support adoption, and reinforce accountability.
• Leadership and team effectiveness: Provide leadership, coaching, feedback, and development support to one direct report while leading cross-functional teams and fostering a collaborative, inclusive team environment.
• Total Rewards priorities: Participate and/or lead Total Rewards initiatives and experiences that advance priorities, strengthen enterprise programs, and respond to emerging business needs.

What you bring to the role

• Progressive HR experience in Performance Excellence, Talent Management, Total Rewards, Workforce Planning, HR Business Partnering, or a related discipline.
• Experience designing, implementing, and improving enterprise or business specific programs, processes, tools, and practices in a large, complex, matrixed organization.
• Understanding of pay-for-performance principles, and the connection between pay and performance outcomes.
• Expertise in performance excellence, including goal-setting, feedback, assessment, differentiation, calibration, performance improvement, and leader enablement, is an asset.
• Digital and AI fluency, with sound judgment and experience using digital tools, or AI-enabled capabilities to improve the user experience, program delivery, measurement, and decision-making.
• Strong analytical, data storytelling, and problem-solving capabilities.
• Strong program, project, and change management capabilities, including the ability to lead complex cross-functional initiatives and manage dependencies.
• Strong stakeholder management and relationship-building skills, with the ability to influence without direct authority, navigate ambiguity, and build alignment in a matrixed environment.
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with operational execution, moving between roadmap development, program design, cycle delivery and execution, and continuous improvement.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including experience preparing concise, audience-specific communications, insights, and delivering presentations for senior executives, HR leadership teams, and business leaders.
• Ability to lead through others, mentor colleagues, build capability within project teams, and contribute to a resilient, inclusive, and high-performing team environment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business, Psychology, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

The Base Pay range is for the primary location for which the job is posted. It may vary depending on the work location of the successful candidate or other factors. In addition to Base Pay, eligible Sun Life employees participate in various incentive plans, payment under which is discretionary and subject to individual and company performance. Certain sales focused roles have sales incentive plans based on individual or group sales results.

Diversity and inclusion have always been at the core of our values at Sun Life. A diverse workforce with wide perspectives and creative ideas benefits our Clients, the communities where we operate and all of us as colleagues. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.

Persons with disabilities who need accommodation in the application process, or those needing job postings in an alternative format, may e-mail a request to [email protected].

We are proud to be a hybrid organization that offers our employees the choice and flexibility to work from both the office and virtually based on the needs of the business, our Clients and you.

We may use artificial intelligence to support candidate sourcing, screening, interview scheduling.

We thank all applicants for showing an interest in this position. Only those selected for an interview will be contacted.

Salary Range:

Job Category:

Posting End Date: