Hey, it's Dr. Bailey

I've been sorting through conference invites lately and thinking about how hard it is to tell which ones are worth the time. Every inbox pitch promises the one conversation you cannot miss, but most end up being a day out of the office and a handful of business cards you never follow up on. I am leaning toward something smaller: one focused hour, no exhibition hall required.

How do you sift through conference invites to find the ones that actually deliver? Hit reply and tell me. I get back to everyone.

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People Managing People published a piece this week. It covers two head-to-head AI coaching studies with results that directly contradict each other. In 2022, a trial found that chatbots helped clients hit goals as effectively as human coaches. By 2026, a second study flipped: the AI coach didn't outperform the control group on any primary outcome, while human coaches moved every needle.

The gap is a map. The 2022 study gave the AI a structured goal-attainment protocol with clear frameworks and consistent nudging, a machine's sweet spot. The 2026 study sat the bot in the coach's chair with senior leaders, asking open-ended development questions that depend on co-regulation, the mutual, real-time adjustment between two people. The AI never generated it, and the numbers showed what was missing.

The piece quotes Kuber Sharma, a senior director at UiPath, on the signal that actually matters: whether people initiate interactions on their own. A tool only used when assigned isn't coaching anyone.

Where AI earns its place: rehearsal for a hard conversation, structured reflection, commitment reinforcement between sessions. These tasks extend coaching reach to frontline managers who'd never get it otherwise. Anant Sood, co-founder of Worxogo, found this directly when his team saw that in judgment-heavy work like fraud investigation, most managers skipped the tool entirely and fed the signal upward to human leaders. That decision mattered because it recognized the limits.

One important finding: success was strongly predicted by the coachee's starting self-efficacy and hope. Employees who most need development support are the ones least served by an unsupervised bot. Deciding who gets a human coach is a leadership call.

What it means for us as people leaders:

AI can handle structure, but co-regulation needs a human. When coaching depends on mutual adjustment, the bot falls short. We need to protect those roles for people.

Voluntary engagement is the only metric that counts. If people only use the AI when assigned, it is not coaching. Pay attention to who seeks it out on their own.

Read the full piece

A reader writes: "I've been told I should schedule skip-level meetings with my team, but I'm not sure how to make them productive without undermining managers. What's the right way to approach them?"

A skip-level meeting is a conversation between a leader and an employee who reports to one of their direct reports. In other words, you're meeting with someone "two levels down," though I'm not a fan of that hierarchical phrasing. 

The core advice is refreshingly simple: listen more than you talk, share an agenda ahead of time, and never use the meeting to evaluate their manager (your direct report). Start by explaining why you're meeting and what you hope to learn. Then send a shared agenda with questions in advance. It gives people time to prepare and helps put them at ease. The right questions explore team dynamics, career growth, and what's getting in the way of great work. A few I recommend are, "What's a recent project you're particularly proud of?" and "How comfortable do you feel sharing a different opinion with your manager?"

Follow-through matters more than asking the perfect questions. If you commit to finding an answer or taking action, close the loop. That single act builds more trust than any polished facilitation technique.

One caution that too many leaders overlook: schedule skip-level meetings with everyone, not just your high performers or the most vocal employees. Skip-level conversations are a listening channel for your entire team, and some of the most valuable insights come from people you hear from the least.

Leapsome released its annual list of HR conferences this week, and this year it covers 106 events across six continents. It's a useful planning resource, and I've been sitting with it because going through it surfaced something I keep coming back to: the volume of options doesn't make it easier to figure out which ones are worth your time.

I've been to enough of these events to recognize the pattern. A full day out, a keynote about disruption, a few good conversations in the hallway, and then two weeks pass and nothing changed. The value is real when you find the right room. The ROI of attending out of obligation or FOMO is close to zero.

What I'm leaning toward now, for myself and for the programmes I build: smaller rooms, tighter focus, people who want to work something out together. One focused hour with the right people moves faster than three days in a convention centre.

What it means for us as people leaders:

Choosing fewer conferences well is a strategy. Before you add something to the calendar, ask what specific question you're trying to answer. If you cannot name it, the conference probably isn't the place to find it.

Protect the time between events. Conference value lives in what you do in the six weeks after you leave, whether that's applying something, sharing it with your team, or building on a connection. The event is the spark. What happens next is the actual work.

Browse Leapsome's 2026 HR conferences guide

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