In-person Pass

Benjamin McCall is a Consultant, Speaker and practitioner in HR, DEI, Learning, Business and Organizational Performance serving organizations nationally. With FOCUS Consulting, he has partnered with Fortune 500’s from Financial Services, Education, Healthcare, Startup, Military Defense, Manufacturing across the nonprofit, private and public sectors.

Benjamin’s work focuses on 4 areas: People Development, Strategic Planning and Execution, HR Practices, and Coaching.  With his partners, he builds better processes and mindsets to address the changing landscape individuals, executives, and organizations face when delivering initiatives to their stakeholders. As a practitioner and coach his style balances guiding individuals to honestly clarify needs while being firm around the real work that needs to be addressed and to "Be BETTER" in their work and relationships.

Jennifer Currence is a Senior Partner of HR Soul consultancy firm in Tampa, Florida, where she delivers results through strategic HR solutions, customized training, and coaching programs for organizational and HR leaders. She is the creator of The SOTO Approach to Leadership and the content architect for the Society for Human Resource Management’s (SHRM) international People Manager Qualification (PMQ).

Jennifer is regularly published and featured in industry magazines, webinars, and podcasts, and is the author of three HR books on behavioral business competencies.

Jennifer was named one of the top 100 Influential HR professionals in Leadership and Development in 2023 and Tampa Bay’s HR Consultant of the Year in 2017.  She is a faculty member for SHRM and a former management professor at the University of Tampa.

LeAnne Lagasse is an HR consultant and keynote speaker who helps leaders and organizations improve their employee engagement and retention and develop their people managers. LeAnne is a SHRM-SCP, a Gallup-Certified CliftonStrengths© Coach, and also serves as Adjunct Faculty at Missouri State University, where she teaches professional communication courses to MBA students. Prior to launching her consulting business, LeAnne was a faculty member and the Director of Public Speaking in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University, where she served for 14 years. Alongside her husband, Ben, she is a proud mom to three children and two pet prairie dogs.

Tomer is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto. He is responsible for the development and execution of the product vision — reimagining how modern payroll, benefits, and compliance should operate.

Deborah Hanus is the CEO and co-founder of Sparrow, the first high-tech, high-touch leave management solution to help employers care for their people. By managing federal, state, and local leave compliance, Sparrow ensures employee leave is stress-free for human resources, payroll, compliance, managers, and employees. Before founding Sparrow, Deborah earned multiple engineering degrees from MIT, worked in Cambodia as a Fulbright Scholar, and started a Ph.D. in AI at Harvard. Under her leadership, Sparrow has quickly grown to impact hundreds of thousands of lives.  

Jocelyn Samuels is Vice Chair of the Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), appointed by President Biden in 2021 and confirmed for a second term ending in 2026. Prior to joining the Commission, she served as the Executive Director of the Williams Institute, the leading research center on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy. During the Obama administration, she served as the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and as the Acting Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice where she supervised enforcement of civil rights laws through litigation, rulemaking, policy development, and public education across a range of civil rights issues and was an architect of numerous government policies applying federal law to remedy discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. She previously served as a Vice President of the National Women’s Law Center, Labor Counsel to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and a senior attorney at the EEOC in the Office of Legal Counsel. She received a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a B.A. from Middlebury College. 

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Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., SHRM-SCP, is President and Chief Executive Officer of SHRM. With nearly 340,000 members in 180 countries, SHRM impacts the lives of more than 362 million workers and their families globally.

As a global leader on the future of employment, culture and leadership, Mr. Taylor is a sought-after voice on all matters affecting work, workers and the workplace. Recognized as one of the “300 Most Influential Executives in Corporate America” for 2024 by Savoy Magazine and one of the “Most Influential People Shaping Public Policy” in our nation’s capital by Washingtonian Magazine, Mr. Taylor is frequently asked to testify before Congress on critical workforce issues and authors the weekly USA Today column, "Ask HR."

Mr. Taylor's career spans more than 20 years as a lawyer, human resources executive and CEO in both the not-for-profit and for-profit spaces. He has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/InteractiveCorp, Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm and Compass Group USA. Most recently, Mr. Taylor was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.

He is the author of the national bestseller, RESET: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, which immediately upon its release in September 2021, was in the top three of The Wall Street Journal’s list of best-selling hardcover business books.

Mr. Taylor is a member of the United Way Worldwide Board of Trustees and serves on the corporate boards of XPO Logistics (NYSE: XPO), Flores & Associates, and Guild Education. He previously served on the White House American Workforce Policy Advisory Board and as chairman of the President's Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Trump Administration.

The Women Business Collaborative (WBC) named Mr. Taylor as one of its 2023 Trailblazers in Gender Equity and Diversity for his work to achieve equal position, pay and power for all women in business. In 2020, he received the Distinguished Executive of the Year Award from the Academy of Management, and he was named 2021 ALA Professional Society CEO of the Year by CEO Update.

He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources and is licensed to practice law in Florida, Illinois and Washington, D.C.

Tucker Bryant is a nationally renowned poet and keynote speaker. After nurturing his craft at Stanford University, Tucker worked as a Product Marketing Manager at Google where he discovered that the tools used by poets to innovate through language and introspection can be leveraged to drive creative thinking and innovative leadership in a professional context. After spending nearly a decade in Silicon Valley, Tucker left Google to challenge leaders to unlock innovation using The Poet's Keys™. His performances, which have garnered millions of views online, have been featured by TEDx, The New York Times, and dozens of other organizations across the globe. He has had the privilege of sharing on stages alongside Mark Cuban, Bill Belichick, Gary Vaynerchuk, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and Mel Robbins as well as founders and executives from scores of Fortune 500 companies.