Robin Schooling

Send in the Clowns: HR’s Problem with Conference Themes

Somewhere right now, a volunteer conference committee is deciding between “HR Under the Big Top” and “Lights, Camera, HR!” for their HR professional association’s annual event. This means there will either be a logo with a circus tent or a logo with a film reel and a klieg light. There may be costumes. Someone will suggest a photo booth with feather boas and crazy hats, and everyone will agree this is a wonderful idea.

I would like to gently ask: what are we doing?

Because as far as I can tell, HR is the only profession that does this. Your local CPA society is not hosting “Under the Sea with the Accountants.” The bar association has never once themed its annual meeting as “Let’s Luau!” Even the marketing and PR associations — the people who theme things for a living, the folks you’d absolutely expect to show up in matching t-shirts with a tagline — manage to hold professional conferences that are simply called professional conferences. They gather, they learn, they network, and they go home without anyone having dressed as a pirate.

But SHRM chapters and state councils? They simply cannot resist. Year after year, event after event, they wrap serious professional development in carnival packaging, as though a full day of sessions on compliance, compensation strategy, and workforce planning cannot possibly be endured unless it arrives dressed as Hollywood, Vegas, the Roaring Twenties, or a superhero universe.

What, I keep wondering, is wrong with “The [Your City Here] HR Association Annual Conference”? It’s clear. It’s professional. It tells attendees — and, more importantly, tells the executives approving their registration fees — exactly what this is: an industry association gathering for the purpose of professional education. That’s a brand. A perfectly respectable one, in fact, and one that every other profession seems content to use.

The Infantilization Problem

Here’s my deeper concern, and it goes beyond aesthetic taste (though my aesthetic objections are considerable). The themes infantilize us.

When we package our professional development in dress-up-day wrapping, we signal — to ourselves and to everyone watching — that the content alone isn’t enough. That HR practitioners need to be coaxed into learning the way toddlers are coaxed into eating vegetables: hide it inside something fun. Other professions assume their members will show up for substance because the substance matters. We apparently assume our members need a costume contest.

And there’s a second, thornier layer to this. HR remains a female-dominated profession, and it has spent decades fighting the perception that it’s the corporate equivalent of the social committee — the department that plans the potlucks, orders the retirement cakes, and decorates for the holiday party. That stereotype is unfair, tired, and has done measurable damage to HR’s organizational standing and reputation. So when our own professional associations voluntarily lean into it — and when the most visible public artifact of our professional community is a conference that looks like a themed bridal shower — we’re doing our critics’ work for them. We’re confirming, in glitter and balloon arches, exactly what they already suspected: that HR is a profession run by people who would rather be event planners.

Now let me say this loudly — I want to be perfectly clear that the individuals on these committees are usually volunteers giving their time, and the impulse comes from a generous place — a desire to make events welcoming and memorable. I don’t doubt the intent; I doubt the calculus. Because “memorable” and “credible” are not the same.

The Spectacle Becomes a Pattern

I wrote recently about SHRM’s long courtship of celebrity keynotes and what it reveals: a profession seeking external validation because it isn’t quite sure it believes in its own substance. The themed conferences are the same insecurity at local scale; big SHRM chases Oprah while chapters and state councils chase a Party City line of credit. Both are bets that the packaging will carry what, or so it’s feared, the content cannot.

But the content can carry it. The work HR does — navigating AI transformation, rebuilding trust in fractured workplaces, advising leaders through genuinely hard decisions — is substantive enough to fill a conference agenda without a single sequin. And the practitioners doing that work deserve professional gatherings that treat them like the professionals they are.

Attorneys convene. Accountants convene. Engineers convene. But HR professionals, somehow, get a Wild West-themed party with coffee service, breakout sessions and bandanas in the swag bags.

HR’s most well-worn cliché is “we want a seat at the table.” Perhaps we could start by not showing up to our own events in a costume.

*****

Time to Talk about “The Rizz”

I have, in the last week or so, participated in two separate conversations in which the phrase “the rizz” was deployed, unironically, by adults. Adults who are, every one of them, well past the age of forty. Adults with mortgages, aching knees, and a collective grasp of Gen Z slang so outdated that we were essentially LARPing as teenagers using a dialect that even the teenagers themselves abandoned roughly eighteen months ago. We knew this of course, and yet we used the phrase anyway – with the full-throated confidence of people who have long since stopped caring whether they sound current, so long as they still sound like they’re having fun.

But the LOLs got me thinking about the real thing underneath the slang, because “rizz” is just this decade’s word for something organizations have been trying, badly, to identify and hire for since long before TikTok existed: charisma. And charisma, unlike its meme-ified cousin, is not actually a joke. It’s one of the more consequential and least examined traits we attribute to leaders, yet most of what gets said about it in the business context is embarrassingly vague.

What Are We Even Describing?

Ask someone to define charisma in a leader and you’ll get a lot of blathering on about vibes and auras.

“They walk into the room, and people just feel it.”

“There’s a presence.”

“Everyone just wants to be around them.”

This is the corporate equivalent of describing a wine as “interesting;” technically an observation, but not one that tells you anything useful, and certainly not one you should act on.

So let’s try to be more precise, because precision is the entire point of this exercise/blog post. Charisma in a leader is not, no matter what the org chart implies, a magnetic field that makes people want to genuflect; nobody is dropping to their knees in the break room. Nor is it fear – although the two get confused constantly – largely because both produce compliance. (Important to note though that only one of them produces loyalty that can survive a brutal round of layoffs).

What charisma looks like, in my opinion, is closer to a kind of interpersonal fluency: the ability to make someone feel genuinely seen and understood, in real time, without the performative theater. The charismatic leader in a meeting doesn’t perform warmth so much as demonstrate that they were listening to the last three things you said. Then they fold that listening into what they say next and so on and so forth; a much rarer skill than most executive coaching programs suggest.

Charisma, then, is less “commands the room” and more “reads the room and adjusts accordingly.”

The Business Case for Not Being Boring

Here too is where the HR-adjacent argument comes in, because charisma isn’t a nice-to-have personality trait we’re discussing purely for entertainment. It’s operationally useful, in the specific sense that people take direction more willingly from someone they trust to be honest with them, and charisma, done properly, is primarily a trust delivery mechanism.

The leader with genuine rizz (and I recognize what I just wrote, and I regret nothing) isn’t the one who breezes into every room or is the most quotable person on the town hall stage. Rather, they’re the leader who participates in consistent and maybe-even-unglamorous interactions with all sorts of people day-in and day-out. They look people in the eye, seem genuinely pleased to be in whatever space they happen to be in, and make others feel welcome. They’re the person who can deliver bad news minus the spin. They’re trusted.

This is also, not incidentally, where charisma gets weaponized, because the same fluency that builds trust can be used to manufacture it artificially. The leader who charms a room and never delivers is not charismatic; they’re a confidence artist. Sadly, organizations that can’t tell the difference between the two tend to promote the wrong people for years before anyone notices the pattern.

It’s Not Just for the Leaders

And this is where I like to push back on the original premise a little, because we tend to reserve the charisma conversation for the C-suite, as though it’s a talent or trait that’s exclusive to the corner office. It isn’t. The most charismatic person in most organizations is not the CEO; it’s a mid-level manager, an admin, or a team lead nobody’s written a case study about, who somehow makes every person on their team feel like a valued collaborator. That’s the skill in its purest and most useful form; no stage and no audience.

Walking into a room and having people feel awe, or fear, or the urge to applaud isn’t what denotes “the rizz.” It’s shining the light on someone else and letting them keep it. That’s harder to come by than it sounds, and considerably more difficult to fake.

*****

Last Call for HR: One Diagnostic, Neat

For the better part of two decades, the conversation about technology and HR has run on a single anxious loop: the machines are coming, and they’re coming for us. Every new wave arrived wrapped in the language of disruption, from the applicant tracking systems that promised to fix hiring to the analytics dashboards that promised to predict everything to the generative models that can now draft a policy in the time it takes to refill your coffee. The framing was always the same, as though HR were a taxi medallion and AI the rideshare app circling the block, headlights on and meter running.

But disruption is the wrong word, and on reflection it was always the wrong word. AI isn’t the disruption for HR. It’s the diagnostic.

It’s the moment someone turns the lights on at closing time, and now you can finally see what the bar really looks like – the sticky floor, the duct tape on the third stool, and the patron who has been nursing the same flat drink (and the same grievance) since four o’clock.

Nothing has changed about the room; it’s just that the lights came up and what had been comfortable in the dark is suddenly – unflatteringly – visible.

Hiding in the Dark

For a very long time, HR’s professional identity rested on “volume”. We were the keepers of the information, the processors of the forms, the people who knew which policy was which, how folks enrolled in their benefits, and which employee was three documented incidents into a problem.

This gatekeeping, while decidedly unglamorous, wasn’t trivial; it was real work, and it made us necessary. But necessary is not the same as strategic, and the sheer mass of administrative throughput gave the profession a place to hide whenever someone asked the harder questions about our value and contributions.

AI can now remove that volume. It can do the transaction, the routing, the first-draft summarizing, and the predicting-attrition-with-colorful-graphs that we used to do by hand and call insight. And once the transactional layer is gone – once the machine has absorbed everything that was process pretending to be judgment – what remains is precisely the work we always claimed was the point…

… the strategy, discernment and the human judgment about people, power, and consequences. The stuff we have long said no machine can replicate on our behalf.

Transactions to the machine, and judgment to the human. Which sounds mighty fantastic as a slogan, but also sounds a bit brutal as a mirror. Because it leaves nowhere to stand for anyone who built a career on the transaction piece and quietly hoped the judgment bits would never be audited.

You Can’t Stay Here

The thing about closing time is that you don’t get to vote on whether the lights come on. They get flipped on regardless of your desires and the only real decision left is what you do once you can see. You can grumble about the glare and insist the place looked better in the dark – which is true but also beside the point. As the song goes, “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here…”

So with AI being the diagnostic for HR, it’s time, when those lights go on, to take an honest look at what the diagnostic is offering and decide what you want the HR function to look like in the morning.

The HR leaders I’d put money on are the ones treating this less as a threat to be managed and more as a long-overdue reckoning to be used; the ones moving toward something closer to a human capital consultant than an administrator. They’re the HR professionals advising on the issues that matter – because they refuse to be reduced to a workflow.

But they’re not waiting to see whether the lights are flattering. They already know they won’t be; the “function” the lights are illuminating has, perhaps, never been as strategic as we always insisted it was.

And that is why disruption was always the more comfortable story to tell. Disruption is something that happens to you – an external force with no opinion about your competence, and a convenient one to blame for the wreckage – while a diagnostic implicates you. It doesn’t ask whether the technology is coming; it asks what that technology finds when it arrives. And, more pointedly, it asks whether the function it illuminates was adding value all along, or was simply well-lit enough, until now, to never have to find out.

*****

Performative AI Takes the Stage

Somewhere this quarter, on a company earnings call you didn’t listen to, a CEO leaned toward the microphone and declared their company to be “AI-first.”

Analysts nodded and scribbled notes and the company stock ticked up a respectable amount. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, several thousand employees looked at the Copilot logo on their dashboard (the one they’ve been ignoring since the license rollout), and went on doing their jobs precisely the way they did them in 2023. This is the moment we’re in, and I’d like to give it the scrutiny it deserves.

In Real HR, I spent a fair number of pages skewering performative HR – the engagement surveys that go nowhere, the culture initiatives duct-taped together with cupcakes, the metrics we chase because they’re countable rather than because they’re meaningful, and the buzzwords that get road-tested on conference stages before being inflicted on unsuspecting workforces. Performative HR is activity dressed up as impact, and it has been the profession’s most reliable bad habit for decades.

Well, congratulations to all of us, because the 2026 sequel has arrived: performative AI adoption.

The Anatomy of the Performance

You’ll recognize the production when you see it, because the staging is remarkably consistent from one organization to the next. There’s an AI council (cross-functional, naturally), a steering committee, and at least one newly minted title containing the word “transformation.” There are enterprise licenses purchased at considerable expense and distributed with the enthusiasm of Wellness Committee members handing out gym memberships in January. There’s also an adoption dashboard tracking what percentage of employees have “engaged with” the tools this month; a number that gets reported upward with great ceremony and absolutely no curiosity about what anyone did once they “engaged” with the tools.

And there is, somewhere near the top of the house, an executive whose genuine objective is not better work but a better narrative. This leader’s primary ambition for 2026 is to stand in front of investors, a board, or a conference audience and say we are an AI-first organization and fervently hope that no one asks the obvious follow-up questions.

What there isn’t, in most of these productions, is any examination of the work itself. The approval chain that requires four signatures still requires four signatures; it just has a chatbot bolted to the front of it now. The meeting that should have been an email is still a meeting, though now the notes are AI-generated and read by no one. The processes, the workflows, the decision rights, and the org structure? All of them remain exactly where they were before except now there’s sexy new AI technology getting layered on top; a fresh coat of paint slapped on top of wallpaper that should have been stripped off years ago.

If this feels familiar, it should. It’s the same playbook as every performative HR initiative that came before it. We measured culture by counting pizza parties and now we measure transformation by counting tokens. Different measures, same hollowness.

Is it Strategy or Stagecraft?

Let me be clear about something, because this is the point where someone inevitably decides I’ve joined the resistance: I’m most assuredly not anti-tech. But I am anti-bullshit. Those are different positions, and the distinction matters.

There are organizations doing genuinely interesting things right now; they’re rethinking how work gets decomposed and reassembled, asking which tasks belong to humans and which don’t, redesigning roles around judgment and relationships rather than throughput, and accepting the uncomfortable structural questions that follow. That work can be slow, unglamorous, and largely invisible from the aforementioned earnings call. It’s also the most critical part.

So here’s the question I’d put to any C-suite presently congratulating itself on its AI posture: are you adopting AI to redesign work … or to be seen adopting AI?

One of those is strategy. The other is more akin to set design with subscription fees.

I think the question to ask yourself isn’t complicated at all … although it is clarifying. If every AI tool in your stack vanished tomorrow, would anything about how work flows through your organization need to be redesigned? Or would people simply go back to doing what they were doing anyway … just slightly slower? If the honest answer is the latter, then nothing was transformed. Something was installed – sure. But that’s a procurement achievement – not a strategic business achievement.

And HR, I’m sorry to report, is not an innocent bystander here. We’re frequently the stage managers of this production; rolling out the training, building the adoption dashboards, and drafting the “responsible AI usage” policies for tools nobody is meaningfully using. We’ve had decades of practice mistaking activity for impact, which makes us unusually well-qualified to help everyone else do the same thing! The profession that should be asking what does this change about the work and the people doing it is instead, in too many instances, simply asking how do we get the AI utilization numbers up before the QBR?

The Show Must Go On (and It Will)

Here’s what makes this particular brand of theater so durable, and I say this without much optimism about it changing: the performance works. Markets reward the announcement, investors are reassured, and the CEO who says “AI-first” gets a headline. The CEO who says “we’re twelve months into reexamining how work is structured and we’ve made real but modest progress” gets puzzled silence and a follow-up question from an investor about headcount. So yes; the stagecraft will continue – because the incentives all ensure that the razzle dazzle of the stage remains compelling.

What I keep thinking about is the gap that exists between performance (a sold-out opening night!) and endurance: initial reviews may reward the standing-room-only opening night spectacle, but only time will reveal if the organization truly redesigned work or merely covered it with sequins, feathers and great lighting design.

And the curtain call, as always, will come later.

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