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

“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