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September 2026 BAHREC Newsletter
BAHREC | Message from Leadership
Brad Margolis, President, 2026-2027
Hello BAHREC Members,
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Steins Beer Garden last month. The Summer Social was exactly what I'd hoped for: an easy evening, good conversation, and the kind of connections that don't happen through email. Several people mentioned afterward that they'd met someone facing a challenge they'd already worked through, or vice versa. That's the community working as it should.
September brings a shift in rhythm. Summer flexibility gives way to a compressed final stretch, and for most of us, the fourth quarter arrives with a familiar set of demands stacked on top of each other.
Planning season is underway. Headcount, budget, and organizational design decisions for next year are being shaped now, often with incomplete information about funding, pipeline, or market conditions. In our industry, that uncertainty isn't new, but the range of scenarios we're being asked to plan against has widened. The question many CHROs are wrestling with isn't just how many people we'll need, but what capabilities we'll need and whether our current structure can flex fast enough.
Open enrollment and the total rewards conversation. Benefits season is here, and cost pressures are real. Beyond the numbers, this is one of the few moments each year when every employee engages directly with what the organization provides. How we communicate during this window shapes perception well beyond benefits, especially in a climate where people are attentive to signals about stability.
Performance and compensation cycles are approaching. These processes consume enormous organizational energy. Worth asking now: are ours actually producing better decisions and clearer conversations, or are we running them because that's the calendar? Several members have been rethinking their approach, and it's a topic where peer experience is genuinely useful.
A note on capacity. Q4 tends to be when HR teams are most stretched. If your team has absorbed a difficult year, September is a reasonable time to consider what you're asking of them and where you can provide some relief. The same applies to you.
We're continuing to build programming that reflects what members tell us matters. If you have thoughts on topics or formats you'd find valuable, I'd welcome hearing them.
Warm regards,
Brad Margolis
President, BAHREC
Monthly Program & Networking Event
BAHREC Summer Social: Connecting, Laughing & Building Our Network
What a wonderful evening! Our BAHREC Summer Social brought together many of our executive members for a relaxed evening of networking, great conversations, refreshments, and plenty of laughs. The weather couldn’t have been better, making it the perfect setting to reconnect with longtime colleagues, welcome new members, and strengthen the relationships that make our BAHREC community so special.
A special thank you to our generous sponsors, Money Management Educators (MME) and SparkEffect, for supporting the event and providing our raffle prizes. And congratulations to all of our lucky raffle winners! 🎉
Events like this are a great reminder that networking matters, not just in the good times, but especially in the challenging ones. In a constantly changing employment market, who better to understand the ups, downs, opportunities, and challenges than our fellow HR leaders? The connections we build today can become an invaluable source of perspective, support, collaboration, and opportunity tomorrow.
Thank you to everyone who joined us and made the evening so enjoyable. We hope you left with new connections, renewed relationships, and a few great conversations to carry forward. Here’s to keeping our networks strong, through the good times and the challenging ones!
Inclusive Leadership
A message from BAHREC VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Porsche C. Williams:
A message from BAHREC VP of Inclusion, Porsche C. Williams:
Autumn does not announce itself. Slowly, light shifts, gently the air picks up speed, and summer is now in the distance, without ever having declared itself. Change in organizations works the same way. Some change arrives with fervor: a crisis, a moment that demands a response and gets one. But the change that lasts is usually the quieter kind. Small shifts and adjustments settle into how work actually gets done until the initiative becomes the standard way of operating. This is that season for DEIB.
By now, most leaders agree that inclusion matters for talent attraction and retention, for innovation and collaboration, and for decision quality. The argument has won. And then the meeting ends, and the same three people spoke. The same hiring process runs. And the same promotion demographics hold steady for another year. This isn’t the result of not believing in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. The gap is in capability.
Organizations have invested heavily in awareness: training that explained bias, wrote values that were declared publicly, dashboards that tracked representation. Collectively, we learned, became aware, added new words to our vocabulary, and learned to sit in the discomfort of growth. That chapter is one to be celebrated. This new season asks something different - the new work is learning DEIB as a skill.
Treating DEIB as a leadership capability means moving from the values a leader holds into competencies a leader practices - alongside giving feedback, making difficult decisions, and adjusting strategies when priorities change. It is the difference between believing in fairness and knowing how to design a hiring debrief that produces it.
If you are ready to move from conviction to practice, from knowing that inclusion matters to knowing how to build it into the decisions you make every week, these books are a place to begin.
What Works: Gender Equality by Design, Iris Bohnet: When you are in the decision seat on hiring, promotion, resource allocation, and you find yourself asking, how do I make my leaders less biased? Iris Bohnet, makes a compelling case that this is the wrong question. Efforts to de-bias people largely fail. Efforts to redesign the environments in which decisions get made reliably succeed. She offers practical, evidence-backed changes to the processes by which organizations identify, develop, and promote talent.
Inclusion Nudges by Lisa Kepinski & Tinna C. Nielsen: Why do we fail at being fair and inclusive despite genuinely valuing both? Kepinski and Nielsen explain the gap between what we know rationally and what we do unconsciously, offering practical techniques to mitigate bias, improve judgement, and build more inclusive ways of working and collaborating. Their central insight is worth carrying into every meeting: when inclusion requires a conscious choice, it competes with time pressure and fatigue, and often loses.
The Conversation by Robert Livingston: For leaders who already identify as inclusive and want to understand how to become part of the solution. Livingston moves from the social unrest of 2020 to a practical framework for turning difficult conversations into productive opportunities for real change.
Cultural Observances: September 2026
- 9/1: National Guide Dog Month and Suicide Prevention Month begins
- 9/7: Labor Day
- 9/21: International Day of Peace
- 9/22: American Business Women’s Day
Member Spotlight
David Flanders, Former VP, HR, Lovelace Biomedical
“I joined BAHREC for networking opportunities and I’ve enjoyed getting to meet several members since joining earlier in the Spring. Over the long haul, however, my hope in being a member is to be able to collaborate more with other HR leaders, as I really enjoy the camaraderie of our profession. With all of the chaos we have to deal with, it’s always helpful to know that others are facing the same challenges and that we can all bounce ideas and best practices off of each other. I really value other perspectives and look forward to hearing how other members approach the challenges they face in their organizations.“
~David
Upcoming Monthly Event
Overview of Upcoming 2026 Programs: Save the dates!!!
Wednesday, Sept. 2nd - VIRTUAL Lunch and Learn with NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors): Insights into CHRO & Board relationships. Register Now!!!
Wednesday, Sept. 16th - CHRO Dinner, facilitated and limited to the first 25 BAHREC members only who register, to keep the conversations intimate, at Mistral in Redwood City.
Wednesday, Oct. 21st - Program with Edie Goldberg, Future of Work expert on Enabling Performance, based upon her latest book: Performance Enablement.
Tuesday, Nov. 10th - Our Annual Compensation Strategies Program, featuring Linda Amuso of AON/Radford and David Knopping of Alpine Rewards.
