Director, Performance Excellence & Rewards

Sun Life • Toronto, ON

12d • CA$110,000 - CA$180,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.

Nice To Haves

• Expertise in performance excellence, including goal-setting, feedback, assessment, differentiation, calibration, performance improvement, and leader enablement, is an asset.

Responsibilities

• 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.
• Lead the design, delivery, and continuous improvement of performance frameworks, goal-setting approaches, check-ins, feedback practices, assessment, rating methodologies, calibration, and differentiation.
• 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.
• Establish and maintain enterprise standards, routines, and controls, monitoring consistency, fairness, compliance and risk considerations across business units and geographies.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Lead communications, education, presentations, tools, and resources that strengthen performance conversations, support adoption, and reinforce accountability.
• Provide leadership, coaching, feedback, and development support to one direct report while leading cross-functional teams and fostering a collaborative, inclusive team environment.
• Participate and/or lead Total Rewards initiatives and experiences that advance priorities, strengthen enterprise programs, and respond to emerging business needs.

Benefits

• 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.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director