Business leaders, entrepreneurs and working professionals from across Hampton Roads gathered in Norfolk on Wednesday for the Live2Lead Leadership Summit, a day built around one persistent workplace problem: how to grow careers and keep good employees from walking out the door.
The summit was hosted by Dr. Natalie Halloran, who launched the event to create opportunities for Hampton Roads professionals to connect, collaborate and learn from one another, according to 13News Now. The gathering brought together professionals from across the region to discuss leadership strategies, career advancement and stronger workplace cultures, and organizers designed the summit to help attendees strengthen leadership skills, advance their careers and make a positive workplace impact.
Halloran is founder, CEO and lead consultant at TillHall Enterprise, LLC, a role detailed in a March profile that traces her background through positions including chief human resources officer and assistant superintendent of human resources and federal programs. Her firm's own site describes the Live2Lead summit as designed for executives, emerging leaders, professionals, teams and organizations, with a focus on leadership effectiveness, workplace well-being, workforce development and organizational culture, per TillHall Enterprise.
Career Advancement Comes Down to Prep Work
During the summit, Halloran said career advancement involves doing background work, homework and increasing communication, identifying preparation and communication as key qualities for moving up professionally. The event itself focused on professional development, networking and leadership growth, the station's report notes, and included both leadership training and networking opportunities aimed at helping attendees develop professionally and strengthen their impact within their organizations.
Halloran told the outlet that leadership development centers on service, building capacity and personal growth — a framing that ran through much of the day's programming. She said she hoped participants would leave with a clearer understanding of their purpose and how to continue growing as leaders, a goal that shaped both the summit's content and its emphasis on peer connection among attendees.
Retention as the Region's Recurring Headache
Much of the discussion at the summit centered on keeping employees in place once they've been hired — a challenge that predates this week's event. Halloran said strong leadership practices can help organizations retain employees, identifying clear communication, accountability and providing workers the resources they need as central factors in workplace retention. She said organizational clarity, accountability and giving employees what they need can support retention efforts more broadly.
That concern tracks with findings from a 2019 report prepared for the region's workforce council, which found that many employers — particularly in advanced manufacturing, health care and information technology — said retaining employees was difficult, according to the Hampton Roads Report 2: Gap Analysis. The same report noted that some businesses had already developed internal career-pathway programs to help retain and advance workers, part of a broader push through the Hampton Roads Talent Alignment Strategy to align education and workforce development with what employers actually need.
The stakes are sizable for a region this size. The Hampton Roads Alliance describes the area's labor force as topping 850,000 people within a total population of 1.75 million, with more than 15,000 people exiting the military in the region each year — more than half of whom stay in Hampton Roads — alongside over 13,000 annual graduates from regional universities feeding into the same labor pool.
Whether any of the strategies discussed at Wednesday's summit translate into measurable changes at participating organizations remains to be seen; no outcomes data tied to the event has been reported. But for the Hampton Roads professionals who showed up, the summit offered a shared space to wrestle with questions of leadership, communication and career growth that the region's own workforce data suggests aren't going away anytime soon.
