The Voices WeLearn From with Ben Sieke, Director of Talent Development and Learning at Delta Dental of California

Sean Stowers, CPTM, CEO of WeLearn, hosts candid conversations with learning leaders who are driving change across industries.

In each Q&A, guests share their experiences, challenges, and the moments that shaped their approach to learning and development. These aren’t scripted interviews. They’re honest, human stories from people who are doing the work. Whether you're in L&D, people development, or just curious about where the future of learning is headed, there's something valuable in every exchange. Hear fresh perspectives, spark new ideas, and get inspired by how others are navigating this ever-evolving space. Catch the full conversation and explore the insights shared.

SEAN: Ben, thanks for being here today. So, for our audience, can you introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do?

BEN: Yeah, absolutely. It's always a pleasure to get to spend time with you, Sean. I'm Ben Sieke, I'm the Director of Talent Development and Learning at Delta Dental of California and affiliated companies. We are the world's largest private dental insurer, and we're embarking on a transformation to be a leading oral health care company.

SEAN: Ben, that sounds super fun. So let me ask you: what's one lesson you've learned that every L&D leader should know?

BEN: So a great question, Sean. You know, it's not a hot take. But it's worth repeating that learning and development is a business. And I think sometimes we can get the fruits of our labor confused with the point of all of this—meaning it's easy for this work to get reduced down to “it's about training.” It's about, you know, how many people did you train? Or how much content did you build?

At the end of the day, we're here to enable the businesses that we work in, right? And so we're working with learners to build skills in order to transform the business, enable the business, grow the business. So at the end of the day, we're a business function and we can never forget it.

SEAN: Well first of all, I feel like that's a fairly hot take. So thank you for sharing it.

BEN: Yeah—I mean, you got it. Like I'm not the first to say it for sure. But… well, yeah, I don't know where that thought was going.

SEAN: It's okay. So Ben, how do you keep learning, both personally and professionally?

BEN: So I keep learning in a few different ways. You know, I've got—I subscribe to a few newsletters, I'm a part of ATD [Association for Talent Development]. On the newsletter front, I'll just say shout out to HR Brew. It's a great newsletter. I find value in looking at news and stories and insights, not just about learning and development, but about the broader HR world and the business world, because the work that we do happens in context.

I also find so much value from my professional network where I think, Sean, you and I have that in common, that we are fortunate to be connected to a lot of really smart people, a lot of people doing a lot of good, interesting things. And so, you know, I'm in a couple of Mastermind groups. There's folks that I regularly stay connected to that are learning leaders and learning practitioners.

Just because, you know, when you've got a bunch of smart people in your network, you'd be silly not to learn from them.

SEAN: I absolutely agree with that. And Ben, you were one of the smart people I connect with.

BEN: And likewise, Sean. That's why we're here.

SEAN: Yeah. So Ben, what's one challenge L&D leaders need to start tackling differently?

BEN: You know, there's so many. I think the one that comes to mind first, is really collaborating across our allied talent functions. And that's not to say that there aren't organizations and people that have figured this out, but we can't do our learning work in a silo. We need to be partnering with talent acquisition. We need to be partnering with talent management.

I think there's a few reasons to call that out. One of them is when we're trying to solve organizational problems, drive organizational outcomes. We can't just look at it—we can't take a siloed approach that just says: what is the learning lever that we can pull here? Right? We need to have, there's value in having an integrated build versus buy versus borrow talent strategy.

And I think the only way you can do that is by not just partnering with the business to understand their outcomes and what we're trying to drive together, but partnering with our partners in H.R. There's that old saying, “if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I think sometimes if we're not working together, right, if you show up, if the business comes to the training team and says, “We need to solve this problem.” We may recommend training.

It's what we're here to do. If we're doing a really good job, we're thinking beyond that and we're helping clients say, “well, maybe this isn't us, you should go talk to these folks.” I think it's the same thing with talent acquisition. Or, you know, you need to solve this talent need. We can go hire those folks, right?

So we really all need to be working together, sitting at the table and asking how we partner to drive those outcomes. Because of course, there's times where it makes more sense to build. There's times where it makes more sense to borrow, contract labor, or hire externally most of the time. And this is not a secret. It's a mix of both, which again, we can't do super well if we're not all collaborating with each other.

SEAN: So I love that answer. I think that what that brings up for me is I think a lot of times organizations are super bad at internal talent mobility, which is really that intersection between L&D and talent management, talent acquisition.

And I think you just encapsulated, you know, one of the ways that could really be, really crucial in that conversation. So I love that answer. Thank you for that.

BEN: It's my pleasure. I'll just—a quick plug for Delta Dental on that. We have year-over-year consistently had above average internal fill rates. But we're also still always trying to crack that nut because we've got 4,000 talented employees across the organization, and we're always looking for opportunities to put the right person in the right place to have the most impact.

So if we're not focused on that, we're overlooking these folks that already know our culture, our ways of working as well.

SEAN: Hey, for anyone who's listening to this or suddenly going, “Wait, I want to know how to get that sort of internal fill rate." Reach out to Ben on LinkedIn and ask to have a conversation with him. This is why we learn from people that we talk to.

So Ben, if you had to get rid of every tool in your toolbox as an L&D leader and except for one, what would you keep and why?

BEN: This is a really tough question. And if you're okay, I'll answer it in two different ways. It's not two different answers to the question—that's cheating. So if we're talking about, like, tools, like technology, this is an unpopular answer. But bear with me on this.

It's Outlook. I know, yeah. You know, there's many of us who are like, “I get too many emails. I get more e-mails than I’d like to.” But communication is at the center of everything. And so whether it's Outlook, whether it's Teams, whether it's something like that, it'd be hard to get rid of any other tool or else you're not collaborating with people.

The other thing we're talking about, the metaphorical toolbox that we use as L&D professionals, it's performance consulting. I was a performance consultant a couple roles ago at another company. And it's a point of view that I've taken. It's something that's really important culturally inside Delta Dental, taking a root cause based approach to solving problems and kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier around wanting to partner well, across the talent or to make sure that we are really solving in the most thoughtful way, the businesses problem.

You know, too often we don't dig in and ask enough questions about what we're trying to accomplish and performance consulting can take that mindset and use that toolkit. It helps solve for that because you're not trying to start with: what is the thing we're trying to build or thing we're trying to do? It really starts with: what does the end state look like?

SEAN: I love that, I love that, and you know what? Answering it in two ways is not cheating. It's all good.

BEN: Well, it would have been cheating if I said, like, PowerPoint and this and that, right? But it's like are we talking about a software tool, or are we talking about a metaphorical tool?

SEAN: Yeah, I love the way you framed it. Hey, what's one habit or ritual that makes you a better leader?

BEN Well, for a better leader, I'm glad you framed it that way. Right? Because I think being a leader is a practice, right? I hope everyone that has the privilege of leading people is thoughtful about how we approach that, and always trying to get better.

So I'm not the perfect leader by any means, but I do the best I can. I'm a servant leader. Servant leadership is really important to me. I think I'm here to enable and support my team because it's through my team that our work gets done. It's through our team that we have impact. And that's really my role.

One of my roles as a leader. I end every one-on-one that I have, with my directs, skip levels, everybody with: is there anything you need from me? Something like that. Is there anything you need for me? Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you need help with? Because I never want someone's need for support to go unanswered.

And I feel like it's better to ask to make sure that that's what we're we're getting to, rather than sort of hope people bring things up, which they do. But that's my way of reminding folks like, I'm here to help you.

SEAN: I love that, I often use the question: “How may I best be of service to you today?”

BEN: I love that.

SEAN: Yeah. Complete this sentence: the future of learning is…

BEN: This is a tough question, but a great question. So I'd say the future of learning is still human and learner-centered. And what I mean by that is there's so much and there has been for a while talk about technology and how it changes learning.

And it does—not downplaying that, right? All the conversations that are happening right now about AI and how that affects the learning space and the broader business space, like totally valuable. So not trying to discount that. At the end of the day, though, this work is about building capability in human beings. And so as we're having those conversations about how technology changes this work and how it changes the work of our learners, right?

So not just how we develop them, but how they do their job. We can never lose sight of the reality that the way that we build capability within organizations is through focusing on developing skills, and the people in those organizations. I think that's something from, I'll give a shout out to Harold Stolovitch and Telling Ain’t Training.

We have to be learner-centered. That's the middle of everything we do.

SEAN: I love that, and as you know, we talk a lot about putting the learner and the human at the center of everything we do. So I love that. Ben, this wasn’t one of the questions on the list. But channeling my inner James Lipton Inside The Actors Studio moment, I love this question.

He used to ask everybody what your favorite curse word was. And since we are PG, we don't want to ask you your favorite curse word, but what's your favorite curse word substitute, or the word that you use to substitute for another curse word?

BEN: I do love my curse words. Sean. But to your point, both because it's PG here, you know, at work, I can't just curse like a sailor all the time. Yeah… I guess it's “shoot.”

SEAN: Okay. Fair enough, fair enough.

BEN: It gets the point across.

SEAN: Yeah, yeah. Hey, I don't know if you saw it, but Karen Ganitsky from 3M gave us “what the monkeys” which I loved. “Shoot” is perfectly, perfectly fine. So maybe we need to do a different version of this video that isn't so— not so suitable for work where we can get everyone's favorite curse words.

BEN: Do like an after-dark version, a happy hour version. Yeah. Not suitable for daytime.

SEAN: Exactly, exactly. Ben, I want to thank you for being here and having a conversation with us. Is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with that are going to listen to this or read the transcript of the interview that you want to share with our colleagues in the profession?

BEN I mean, I—Sean, you and I could go on for hours about so many different things. But, I mean, I think we hit a lot of the salient points, honestly, which is be root cause focused, be human focused at the same time, be focused on solving business problems. I mean, maybe that if I take a step back, it's—we always have to be clear on our North Star.

What are we here to do? And it's a fun part of our job, is building and delivering training programs. And I shouldn't even just say training programs, learning solutions. Right? More broadly, but that's the means to the end. Right? And so I think we can never forget why we do this, which is for the enterprises we support for the people within those enterprises.

And it is to solve problems and create capability in the organization.

SEAN: I love that. Ben, thanks for being here today.

BEN: It is always my pleasure to get to spend time with you, Sean.