Fall 2026 Agenda

• The skill set required of senior HR leaders has shifted faster than most development paths have kept up — what’s actually load-bearing now, and what has quietly stopped mattering
• Cultural dexterity as a leadership discipline rather than a values statement: reading context, adapting approach, and building credibility across very different rooms
• Where coaching capability changes the job — moving from advising the business to genuinely developing the people who run it
• Building leadership resilience in a function that absorbs everyone else’s change while managing its own
• Practical reflections on developing yourself as an HR leader: what to invest in, what to delegate, and how to keep growing without a clear next rung

• Bringing data-driven, tech-native people practices into a organization
• Modernizing HR processes without disrupting the culture that drives the business
• Leading change when you’re the one introducing a new playbook
• Where technology accelerates transformation — and where the human touch must stay

How PepsiCo rethought attraction for its largest and most critical workforce—and what scales when the talent pool is local, the volume is relentless, and the traditional model no longer works.

• Frontline hiring has changed more in the last few years than the previous twenty and what that forces every high-volume employer to rethink
• Designing attraction to be “local at scale”: consistent global standards delivered through teams empowered as cultural translators, not script-followers
• Where AI earns its place in high-volume hiring and the moments that stay deliberately human
• Measuring what matters: moving beyond speed to efficiency, quality, and alignment as the real signals of frontline hiring strength

• Why most culture programs fail before they launch — and how Cencora flipped the model by starting with evidence: 51,000+ employee voices, journey mapping, and trust research that shaped leadership standards people recognize as their own, not another set of values on a wall.
• The employee-customer experience connection most companies miss. How treating EX and CX as one system — designed with the same rigor as any product — turns culture into a measurable performance driver for the business, your people, and the customers and patients they serve.
• Hardwiring behavior into the moments that matter. A practical look at experience design in action: embedding standards into onboarding, goal-setting, performance, and recognition — so culture shows up in the daily flow of work, not just the town hall.
• Measuring what leaders do, not what they say. How to move beyond sentiment surveys to observable behavior change — including the year-one metrics, the honest lessons, and what Cencora would do differently.

• What changes in talent strategy when leaner teams are the deliberate operating assumption rather than a cost outcome — and how you plan capacity against a baseline that’s been intentionally reset
• Rebuilding career architecture and progression when layers have been removed: what you can credibly tell people about growth in a flatter organization
• Holding the critical few through a structural reset — what actually retains people in the year after, and what needed rebuilding versus what held
• Where the talent function has to catch up to an adoption curve the business is already ahead of, and the real gap between deployment and workforce readiness
• Joining a transformation you didn’t design: diagnosing fast and building credibility when the organization has already made its largest decision
• The questions still open at month five — what she’s testing now and what she’d approach differently

• Why Shelley believes investing in internal talent development, skills-based career pathways, and employee mobility creates stronger long-term business outcomes than relying primarily on external hiring, and how SiriusXM is putting that philosophy into practice.
• How SiriusXM has shaped its people strategy through periods of growth and transformation, bringing together teams, cultures, and ways of working while fostering a unified employee experience.
• How people leaders can prepare their organizations for the future of work by rethinking career growth, evolving leadership expectations, and using AI to enhance human potential while keeping people at the center of every decision.