Member Fees: $149
Non-Member Fees: $199
Live Online | October 15, 2026 | 1:00PM-3:00PM CST
**Early-bird pricing ends on October 1st!**
HR is being asked to hold people steady through constant change, tie its work to the numbers, hold its own with executives, and figure out AI. Most of that arrived without a budget line, a course, or a spare afternoon.
HR NEXT Summit 2026 puts those four capabilities into one focused two-hour block, taught by people who use them for a living. It is built around you — your adaptability, your business fluency, your voice with senior leadership, your future — rather than around the HR function.
Four speakers. Four sessions. Each one closes with a single practical challenge you can start when you get back to your desk.
By the end of the two hours, you will be able to:
✅ Recognize how perception shapes energy, choices, and results during change and uncertainty
✅ Discover how greater awareness creates the power to shift perspective, expand possibilities, and respond differently
✅ Apply a simple practice to expand awareness, create greater choice, and navigate what’s next with intention
✅ Evaluate your own projects against the outcomes the business measures, rather than the output you produce
✅ Identify the financial indicators senior leaders use to assess organizational performance, and locate where your work connects to them
✅ Translate a people-focused initiative into business terms a CFO, operations leader, or CEO will act on
✅ Anticipate and address executive objections before they derail a recommendation
✅ Identify recurring manual tasks in your own week that AI can absorb, and apply AI to strengthen a business case before you present it
✅ Emerging HR professionals building business fluency early
✅ HR managers and directors preparing for greater influence
✅ Senior HR leaders adapting how they lead and work
✅ People leaders outside HR facing the same executive expectations
The four sessions:
N — Navigate Change: Steadiness Is Built, Not Born
Betsy Grzybinski, Founder, One Percent Today; Director of People Operations, Lewis & Clark Capital
Change is not slowing down, and waiting for it to get easier is not a plan. What you can influence is your response — more than you probably think. This opening session challenges you to look beneath your reactions and examine how perception shapes thoughts, energy, choices, and results. With greater awareness comes the ability to shift perspective, treat challenges as opportunities to learn and grow, and build resilience, adaptability, and confidence along the way. You will leave with a simple tool you can use the very next time uncertainty, pressure, or change knocks you off balance.
E — Elevate Your Strategy: Start Working on Outcomes, Not Output
Nikki L. Garry, MSA, Founder and Chief Evolution Officer, Resolve To Evolve
You work hard all week. Then someone asks what it did for the business, and the honest answer gets complicated. Every organization runs on three connected priorities: people, productivity, and profitability. This session shows you the financial information a CFO or CEO actually uses to judge how the year is going, and helps you find the one number in your own function a senior leader would care about.
X — Xpand Your Impact: Get Heard Where the Decisions Get Made
Steve Hughes, Founder, Hit Your Stride, LLC; author of Captivate
The idea was good and the room still said no. That is usually a translation problem, not a data problem. This session covers how to lead with the headline instead of the history, talk business instead of HR, show what your work did to performance and retention, and flex the same set of facts three ways — for a CFO, an operations leader, and a CEO.
T — Transform Your Future: The Promotion Nobody Has to Approve
Lauren Patel, AI Guru, AAIM Employers’ Association
You cannot get to higher-value work while the low-value work is still being done by hand. This closing session shows how AI clears the recurring tasks eating your week, and how to use it to pressure-test a decision and sharpen a case before you take it upstairs. The opportunity is not getting more done. It is becoming the HR professional your organization needs next.
For Cancellation/Reschedule and Inclement Weather Policy please click HERE
HRCI Accreditation:
Recertification Credit Hours: 2.0
Specified Credit Hours: HR
SHRM Accreditation:
Professional Development Credits Awarded: 2.0
CPE Accreditation:
N/A
Course Date and Time