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Breanna De Leon:

Thank you for visiting the Baltimore City Health Department’s poster titled, “Training and Retaining Empowered Visionary Leaders in Baltimore City Success Story and Promising Sustainable Practices of the Baltimore City Health Department.” We are presenting this as part of the 2025 Public Health
Infrastructure Grant Annual Recipient Convening held in St Louis, Missouri. The poster was designed in person by members of the Baltimore City Health Department’s PHIG team, Candace Ann Scott, Brianna de Leon, and Phyllis Lee.

Beginning with the introduction section, through PHIG funding and technicalassistance, the Baltimore City Health Department is working to improve various aspects of its organizational infrastructure, including Workforce Development.

One way the Baltimore City Health Department has sought to improve Workforce Development is by designing and implementing a Leadership Development Training Program. Next, a description of our program. We developed and implemented an eight-week Leadership Development Training Program tailored to the leadership capacity needs of our staff. This is the first program in the Baltimore City
Health Department’s over 200-year-old history. We developed a five-module roadmap to leadership development, outlined in Figure 1.

Figure 1, titled “The Baltimore City Health Department’s Module Roadmap to Leadership Development,” outlines the five learning modules that we implemented within each cohort of the Leadership Development Training Program in the following order: a DISC assessment and introduction to leadership, effective communication, emotional intelligence, stress management, and coaching and mentoring. Each module was four hours long and facilitated by our academic partner, Loyola University.

Key characteristics of each cohort are provided in Table 1. Table one, titled cohort descriptions, outlines the number timeline, number of participants, and participant characteristics for each cohort. Cohort One was conducted between June and July 2024 and included 12 mid-level managers as participants. Cohort Two was conducted between October and November 2024 and included 11 non-managerial staff participants. Cohort three was conducted between April and June 2025 and included 13 non-managerial staff.

Next, a look into our evaluation methodology. Step one, our program employed a one-group, pretest, post-test design and analysis approach to investigate the improvements in learning objective growth for each learning module. Step two: Data was collected through online surveys on Microsoft Forms. Surveys were developed by the PHIG Program Evaluator and disseminated by the Baltimore City Health Department’s Organizational Development Manager before and after each Leadership Development Training Program module. Step three: Each module had varying sample sizes for complete pre- and post-test data. Sample size variability was due to the participant absences and lack of survey responses. Step four, data analysis techniques included descriptive statistics and paired t-tests for qualitative data, and rapid qualitative analysis for qualitative data. Step five: data was used for continuous quality improvement for the Leadership Development Training Program.

Next, a brief overview of our results. Each Leadership Development Training Program module has a varying number of learning objectives, depending on the curriculum outlined by the unique facilitators. Range three through nine learning objectives. Our aggregated data demonstrated that participants show an overall increase in learning objective growth across all five modules for each cohort. This suggests increased leadership development, knowledge, confidence, skills, and self-advocacy for participants after graduating from the leadership development training program.

We have included a dot plot graph for each cohort to demonstrate the module learning objective growth. Within each dot plot graph, we have the aggregated learning objective scores for the participant’s pre- and post-tests. We included the green arrows and percentages to demonstrate the positive aggregated learning objective growth across participants per module.

Finally, in conclusion, all program participants say that the Leadership Development Training Program can be applied to their work at the Baltimore City Health Department, leading to improvements in the community programming services and outreach that participants support. Participation in the Leadership Development Training Program has encouraged workforce retention, motivated workplace engagement, and increased knowledge, skills, and self-confidence to be successful leaders. Improvements in our leadership capacity are significantly contributing to improvements in the individual and community health outcomes in Baltimore City.