June Quarterly Meeting
Friday, June 12th
10:00am - 12:00pm
Meeting will be held in-person and virtually via Microsoft Teams.
Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendees.
Your Network Starts on Day One: Building Relational Wellness for Yourself and the People You Lead
Presenter:
Heather Walker, Ph.D. (she/her)
Organizational Psychologist | Founder & CEO, Lead with Levity
Dr. Heather Walker is an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist who helps organizations strengthen the human systems that drive performance. Her work centers on what she calls the social infrastructure of organizations — trust, psychological safety, connectedness, and the relational networks that help people do their best work.
Heather is the Founder and CEO of Lead with Levity, a culture consulting firm serving Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, universities, and healthcare organizations. Her client work spans onboarding design, leadership development, burnout reduction, and team culture. One of her most recognized projects was the design of Procter & Gamble's Power Pairs onboarding program, which produced up to a 50% reduction in new hire turnover and was expanded globally as a gold standard for early manager-employee relationships.
She has also partnered with healthcare and mission-driven organizations including Ohio's Project ECHO and Integral Care, where she led a multi-year cultural competency initiative for over 1,000 employees.
Heather holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Saint Louis University and serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor there, teaching Contemporary Organizational Leadership at the graduate level. She is the host of the Lead with Levity Podcast, now in its seventh year with more than 180 episodes on culture, trust, and high performance.
She is a Silver Brandon Hall Excellence Award recipient and has been recognized as a Top 50 Women Leader of Austin.
Session Overview:
Public health and health education professionals are some of the most committed people in the workforce. They are also among the most vulnerable to burnout and career fatigue when their professional relationships run thin. Research consistently shows that the quality of our relationships at work shapes how long we stay, how much we grow, and how well we perform — yet most professionals have never been taught how to build a strong internal network on purpose.
In this interactive 2-hour session, participants will explore five key relationship roles that every professional needs to sustain a fulfilling and resilient career. Through a guided network-mapping activity, participants will take an honest look at their own professional relationships, identify where gaps exist, and begin building a personal action plan to cultivate the connections that matter most.
The session also zooms out to the organizational level. Participants will learn how these same five relationship roles can be embedded into onboarding and mentorship practices so that new hires and early-career colleagues get connected to the right people from the start. Whether you are an individual contributor, a supervisor, or a program lead, you will leave with practical tools you can use right away (for yourself and for the people you support).
Learning Objectives:
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
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Assess the current state of their professional network by identifying which of the five key relationship roles are present, underdeveloped, or missing, and explain how relational gaps contribute to burnout and career stagnation in public health settings.
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Apply the five-role relational network framework to design intentional connection strategies for their own career sustainability and for supporting new hires or early-career colleagues during onboarding and job transitions.
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Create a personalized relationship-building action plan that includes at least two steps to strengthen their own network and at least one practice they can bring back to their team or program within the next 30 to 90 days.
For in-person attendees.
The meeting will be held at the Ohio University
Dublin Integrated Education Center
6805 Bobcat Way, Dublin, Ohio 43016, Room 243
For virtual attendees.
