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Betty Thompson
I'm the chief people officer for Booz

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Allen Hamilton and I've been with Booz Allen for ten years as the head of HR and

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I prior to that I was with Fannie Mae
where I was the head of HR and had a

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number of different roles there and
prior to that I was with IBM and I

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started my HR career at IBM but I didn't
start my career in HR I started in

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the business and then moved into HR and
fell in love with it and stayed with it

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I had a great interest in trying to
address the wellness of our employees at

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Booz Allen and I created a committee and
we came up with a theme called power up

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and it was focused on physical
well-being financial well-being and

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emotional well-being and the emotional
one the other two were pretty easy to

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get people to pay attention to and start
working on and have challenges and

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rewards and things like that but the
emotional one was a tough one to get

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people to buy into they wanted to call
it something else they didn't want it to

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it just was kind of a taboo subject and
this was a couple of years ago and I

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thought it was really important because
you you just have to read the paper

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suicides PTSD any number of emotional
issues and so I got a group of senior

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people together to talk about it and we
had a meeting of our senior folks and we

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took that opportunity to talk about
mental health and we had three of our

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senior leaders come up and individually
tell their stories and there was not a

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dry eye there was not a a pin could have
dropped and you would have heard it

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because you only he could hear is people
reaching for tissues and it was such a

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pivotal moment to tell people it was
okay to have this

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conversation and it has resonated across
our firm our CEO is on the American

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Heart Association CEO roundtable and we
asked him to take up that with them

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because there's obviously a connection
between mental wellness and physical

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wellness and they have now taken that up
and I'm really proud of the fact that we

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were willing to step out there even with
all the pushback and all the concerns

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and quite honestly a lot of the concerns
came from my own team

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they didn't want to be responsible for
it they thought it was too risky and so

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we trained them up on how to help people
have the conversations and now it is

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something that we talk about and I think
it's really really important because I

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don't know of anyone who doesn't have
somebody that they know or themselves

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that says dealt with it at some level
and I think it's just really important

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that we were willing to take that step
and and push through that and make it

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okay to have those conversations.