Heather R. Younger

Navigate high-stress situations, rebuild trust after setbacks, and sustain performance without burnout

Today’s teams are operating under sustained pressure.

Only 27% of managers feel enthusiastic about their work, more than 40% of employees report significant stress, and just one in five feels fully engaged. Leaders are facing constant change, higher expectations, faster decision cycles, and fewer buffers to absorb the impact.

The most effective teams don’t rely on heroic effort or constant hustle. They build shared systems that allow them to navigate pressure, recover quickly from setbacks, and maintain focus even when uncertainty is high.

This keynote, based on her forthcoming book The Unshakable Team, Heather R. Younger draws on more than 20 years of leadership experience guiding teams through mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, layoffs, and major technology shifts.

She shares a practical framework for leading and working together under pressure, helping teams create the clarity, trust, and alignment they need to move forward, even in the most demanding environments.

Audiences will leave with:

A practical framework for resilient leadership under pressure that helps teams tackle high-stakes challenges together
Strategies to sustain high performance without burnout
Tools to reduce ambiguity and increase clarity, even when certainty isn’t available
A repeatable approach for rebuilding trust and momentum after setbacks

Self-leadership is the foundation of resilient, high-impact influence. It’s what allows people to navigate uncertainty, bounce forward from setbacks, and model the kind of adaptability their teams need now more than ever.

In this transformative keynote based on her book, Heather R Younger empowers leaders to trade perfectionism for progress, fear for flexibility, and burnout for balance — without sacrificing performance. She’ll share actionable strategies to help leaders harness resilience as a competitive edge and unlock their full potential in the face of constant change.

And the results speak for themselves:

• 90% of top-performing employees demonstrate high emotional resilience (Harvard Business Review)
• Organizations that invest in leadership development see 2.4x higher revenue growth and 3x better retention (Deloitte)

Because when leaders lead themselves well — they elevate everyone around them.

Ideal for leaders and team members who:

• Want to develop resilience strategies to fuel agility, adaptability, and sustainable success
• Are navigating rapid change, uncertainty, or high-pressure environments and need a mental framework to thrive
• Struggle with perfectionism and want to shift their mindset to prioritize progress over unattainable ideals
• Are ready to step into greater ownership as a leader, by fostering a growth mindset and self-empowerment
• Want to inspire teams to stay engaged, motivated, and high-performing—despite obstacles

The audience will walk away with:

• The Self-Leadership Framework – A proven model to stay strong, flexible, and focused through change
• Progress Over Perfection – A mindset shift to embrace growth, adaptability, and continuous improvement
• A Self-Empowerment Toolkit – How to take control of your career trajectory and leadership influence
• How to Foster a Culture of Resilience – Inspire teams to become adaptable, solution-oriented, and engaged
• Emotional Agility & Decision-Making Mastery – Strengthen clarity, composure, and effectiveness under pressure

This keynote equips leaders to redefine challenges as opportunities, embrace change without fear, and step fully into their leadership power—turning personal growth into enterprise-wide success.

Build high-trust teams, boost engagement and retention, and drive performance

“Care at work” is often dismissed as soft or optional. But in a workplace defined by AI acceleration, change fatigue, and increasing leadership pressure, the absence of care creates disengagement, turnover, and fractured teams.

Caring leadership isn’t a perk, it’s a business strategy. Leaders who intentionally build trust create teams that communicate better, execute faster, and stay engaged, even across remote and hybrid environments.

Based on her bestselling book The Art of Caring Leadership, Heather R. Younger shares insights from 40,000+ employee comments to reveal what care actually looks like at scale: measurable, operational, and leader-owned. She introduces the Nine Daily Behaviors of Caring Leadership®, a practical framework that helps leaders strengthen culture, improve employee experience, and reduce preventable turnover, without lowering standards.

Audiences will leave with:

• The Nine Daily Behaviors of Caring Leadership® that build trust and accountability
• Practical ways to scale care across remote, hybrid, and distributed teams
• Repeatable actions that increase engagement, retention, and performance
• A clear framework for making care an operational leadership practice

Build trust, strengthen relationships, and drive results with a repeatable approach to making people feel heard. When people feel genuinely heard, trust accelerates. Teams collaborate better. Customers stay longer. Tension de-escalates faster. In a distraction-heavy, hybrid world, listening has become a critical leadership communication skill and one of the most practical levers for engagement, retention, customer experience, and sales performance.

In this keynote based on her book, The Art of Active Listening, Heather introduces The Cycle of Active Listening™—a clear, repeatable framework leaders, sales teams, and customer-facing professionals can use to build trust, strengthen relationships, improve communication, and drive results. Participants learn how to move beyond “I listened” to “they felt heard”: the key difference that changes outcomes in performance conversations, client meetings, and high-stakes moments. This program is perfect for: People leaders and frontline managers who need practical tools for difficult conversations Sales teams and customer-facing professionals who need to build trust fast to reduce friction and improve loyalty HR and talent leaders responsible for employee engagement and retention The audience will walk away with: The Cycle of Active Listening™: a repeatable listening framework they can use immediately with teams, clients, and customers The ability to recognize the difference between listening and making someone feel heard Practical techniques for staying present in conversations, even on screens, even under pressure Language and tools to reduce friction, de-escalate tension, and build trust faster

Heather Younger’s work can extend far beyond the keynote. As a workplace culture strategist, qualitative researcher, author, podcast host, and CEO of Employee Fanatix, Heather partners with organizations to create customized leadership and culture experiences before, during, and after an event. From executive roundtables and leadership retreats to listening sessions, focus groups, moderated conversations, workshops, and culture consulting, these experiences help organizations turn the energy of an event into deeper conversation, actionable insight, and meaningful change.

A keynote can create an important spark. Sometimes, though, an organization needs more than the moment on stage.

Heather Younger brings more than 25 years of leadership experience, qualitative research, workplace culture consulting, executive facilitation, and listening expertise to every engagement. Through Employee Fanatix, she has worked with organizations to:

• Uncover what is happening beneath the surface
• Strengthen leadership and team effectiveness
• Navigate change
• Rebuild trust
• Turn employee insights into meaningful action

These experiences can be incorporated before, during, or after a keynote to create a more customized engagement and help organizations move from inspiration to application.

Leadership Roundtables and Executive Conversations

Heather facilitates candid, highly interactive conversations with executives and senior leaders around the issues creating the most pressure inside their organizations.

These sessions can explore:

• Leadership effectiveness
• Trust and accountability
• Organizational change
• Team dynamics and culture
• Burnout
• Communication
• Issues leaders may be hesitant to discuss in larger settings

Rather than arriving with predetermined answers, Heather creates the conditions for leaders to surface what matters, challenge assumptions, learn from one another, and leave with greater clarity about what needs attention next.

Ideal for: Executive teams, senior leadership meetings, leadership summits, association executive forums, and post-keynote leadership sessions.

Listening Sessions and Employee Focus Groups

Listening is one of Heather’s deepest areas of expertise. Through Employee Fanatix, she has analyzed tens of thousands of employee survey responses and facilitated more than 100 focus groups and listening sessions.

Heather can conduct confidential listening sessions or focus groups before an event to understand what employees and leaders are actually experiencing. Those insights can help inform and customize the keynote while giving organizational leaders a clearer picture of the themes affecting:

• Trust
• Engagement
• Communication
• Performance
• Workplace culture

Following the engagement, Heather can synthesize what she heard and help leaders determine where action is most needed.

This approach is particularly valuable when organizations are navigating:

• Organizational change or restructuring
• Leadership transitions
• Culture challenges
• Gaps between what senior leaders believe is happening and what employees are experiencing

Workshops and Breakout Sessions

Heather’s keynotes can be extended into interactive workshops or breakout sessions that allow participants to practice the ideas introduced on stage.

Topics can include:

• Self-leadership
• Steadiness under pressure
• Active listening
• Communication
• Trust
• Caring leadership
• Team effectiveness
• Navigating change
• Feedback
• Sustainable high performance

These sessions are highly participatory and designed around real workplace situations, so participants leave knowing how to apply the concepts when they return to work.

Ideal for: Leadership conferences, manager development programs, team meetings, association conferences, learning programs, and organizations that want deeper application following a keynote.

Leadership and Executive Team Retreats

For leadership teams that need time away from day-to-day operations to address bigger questions, Heather designs and facilitates customized leadership retreats and offsites.

A retreat might focus on:

• Strengthening trust
• Resetting team expectations
• Improving communication
• Navigating organizational change
• Clarifying priorities
• Rebuilding alignment
• Helping a newly formed or restructured leadership team establish how it wants to work together

Heather’s combination of facilitation, leadership expertise, qualitative research, and listening allows her to help teams get underneath surface-level conversations while keeping the experience constructive, practical, and forward-focused.

Moderated Executive Interviews, Panels, and Fireside Conversations

Heather can serve as a moderator, interviewer, or facilitator for executive conversations, panels, and fireside chats.

As the host of hundreds of leadership interviews throughout her podcasting career, Heather knows how to move beyond rehearsed talking points and create conversations that are thoughtful, human, relevant, and engaging for the audience.

She can interview CEOs and senior executives about:

• Leadership
• Culture
• Transformation
• Change
• Workforce challenges
• The organization’s strategic priorities

These conversations can be offered as a standalone experience or integrated into her keynote engagement.

Becoming Unshakable Podcast Executive Interviews

For select engagements, Heather can interview members of the organization’s executive team for her Becoming Unshakable podcast in advance of the event.

The conversation can explore the organization’s:

• Leadership priorities
• Transformation journey
• Workforce challenges
• Approach to leading through pressure

When appropriate, insights from the conversation can also help Heather understand the organization more deeply before stepping onto the stage.

This creates an opportunity to elevate executive voices, build anticipation around the event, and extend the conversation beyond the conference itself.

Culture Consulting and Strategic Planning

When an event surfaces something that deserves deeper attention, Heather and Employee Fanatix can continue the work beyond the stage.

Engagements may include:

• Culture discovery
• Employee listening
• Leadership interviews
• Focus groups
• Culture strategy
• Action planning
• Leadership alignment
• Communication strategy
• Ongoing advisory support

Heather’s role is particularly valuable when leaders know something needs to change but need help understanding what is actually happening, identifying where to begin, and translating what they hear from employees into credible action.

The goal is not simply to collect more information. It is to help leaders understand what the information is telling them and decide what they are willing to do about it.

Proven Beyond the Stage

Heather’s work with organizations has demonstrated the value of combining listening, facilitation, leadership development, and action planning.

In her work with DaVita, for example, Employee Fanatix facilitated virtual conversations, breakout sessions, and discussions. Heather and her team then helped the organization determine which insights should become priorities and how to embed them into everyday work.

Following the engagement, team members reported increased trust and greater psychological safety around voicing concerns.

As DaVita leader Karyn Gonzales described the impact:

“We felt like we really moved the needle. Now we know what our focus should be, and we’ve embedded new goals and initiatives into our everyday work.”

Build the Right Experience

These offerings do not need to become separate engagements. They can be thoughtfully combined around the client’s goals.

For example:

• A keynote might be preceded by employee focus groups so Heather walks onto the stage already understanding the room.
• A leadership roundtable might follow the keynote so executives can apply the ideas to their specific challenges.
• A CEO interview could become part of the event experience.
• A workshop might turn keynote concepts into practical behaviors.
• A leadership retreat or culture engagement can continue the work when the organization discovers that the conversation needs to go deeper.

The question is not simply, “What else can we add?”

It is: What combination would make this engagement most useful for the organization and its people?