HR Leaders Summit

Software teams spend enormous effort on codes - yet many of the biggest productivity issues are not technical at all. They come from miscommunication, mismatched expectations, and avoidable friction between equally capable engineers. In this talk, I will explore how MBTI - a 16 personality assessment - can be used as a practical communication framework for engineer teams - not as a personality label or hiring tool, but as a shared language to understand different working and communication preferences. I will share how small adjustments in communication can dramatically improve team effectiveness. This session focuses on actionable, engineer-friendly techniques to reduce friction, improve collaboration, and build high-performing teams.

Only 23% of employees globally are engaged in their work. Burnout has hit 66%, and the average age for experiencing it is now just 32. On top of that, only 44% of managers have ever been trained in how to lead people, despite being directly responsible for 70% of team engagement outcomes. We don’t have a productivity crisis, we have a leadership crisis. In this 20-minute keynote, I share how the Process Communication Model (PCM), a behavioural tool originally developed for NASA, helps founders and managers lead people the way they’re actually wired. This is not a PCM training session. It’s a practical, story-led talk designed to shift how leaders think about performance: not as something to push for, but something to unlock through smarter communication, deeper understanding, and earlier stress recognition. Using PCM as a lens, I’ll walk the audience through: Why people disengage (and how to see it coming) Why one-size-fits-all motivation fails modern teams How to recognise when a communication style is misfiring Audience members will reflect on their own teams in real-time, explore the gap between how they lead and how people want to be led, and leave with a clear insight: you don’t manage performance, you manage people.

Large or fast-growing engineering organizations often foster silos, separating teams, hindering collaboration, and reducing the impact of collective knowledge and opportunities for technology sharing. But you don’t need a management mandate or a big budget to start breaking them down. I’ll share five approaches I’ve successfully used that can be used by individual contributors and managers to bridge gaps between different parts of your organization. From fostering intrinsically driven grassroots communities of practice and running internal tech conferences or hackathons to encouraging cross-team code contributions and rotating engineers between products, each approach is designed to be flexible, scalable, and low-cost. I’ll also share personal experiences and the impact these approaches had on the organization. Whether you're an experienced individual contributor or a manager, this talk will offer practical ideas and inspiration to drive change and encourage you to not give up, even when you experience setbacks.

The recruitment market is changing dramatically — again — and those of us in HR are barely noticing. Rather than addressing and adapting to these significant changes, we are ignoring them completely. The shift to conversational job searching alone is turning our recruitment process on its head. With the addition of AI agents, we must rethink our processes and our technological setup. In this lecture, I would like to draw attention to the underestimated changes and highlight the dramatic nature of the situation, so that no one is caught unawares.

Many companies and startups are looking to hire AI Native talent, but only few are experienced how to interview them. If you struggle to define approach and your interview starts with “Have you used Github Copilot?” question – welcome to my talk, where I will share experince I earned in 2025 after interviewing over 100 team members globally for enterprise IT projects. You will learn real-world lessons on how GenAI has reshaped the hiring criteria for developers, QAs, architects and managers, and what are the best practices (including questions and practical tasks) to distinguish vibe-coders from AI-Native software engineers.

Alternative title - Hiring Technical Leaders: Build or Buy? When it comes to (technical) people leaders, should we nurture and promote from within the organization or hire from the outside? What is the not-so-hidden cost of both of those approaches (fresh ideas, different approaches to people and technical leadership, leadership maturity vs organization maturity); technical leadership - building credibility within a team; leading at different sizes and different maturity of organization - the role of a leader in a start-up vs scale-up vs large organization.

In this session we will dive into some of the global demographical changes and how it could impact ability to attract & retain talent. The session will then explore how the LEGO Group is navigating these changes and what other companies could be focusing on to mitigate.

The world of work is shifting faster than most organisations can adapt. Rising costs, demographic change, AI disruption and evolving employee expectations are reshaping talent strategy. In this session, we explore why traditional, location-bound hiring models no longer work - and how leading companies are moving toward borderless, skills-first workforce strategies to stay competitive in 2026 and beyond.

We show how AI and intelligent automation can be used as a digital mentor and efficiency driver to significantly relieve HR burdens while systematically preserving experiential knowledge within the company for the next generation. HR work is currently at a historic turning point. More than 50 percent of HR time is spent on administrative tasks, while a massive loss of knowledge looms by 2035 as a large share of operational specialists retire.

Core idea: If AI handles execution, humans become the decision layer. HR’s & Leadership's role is to design for good judgment at scale. Human superpowers highlighted: Ethical discernment Decision quality Systems thinking Trust-building