Most meetings waste time because they lack intentional design. Learn how to plan with purpose by starting with empathy, clarifying success, creating a realistic flow, and using a facilitator guide.
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Meetings are the most expensive way organizations spend time together. When a meeting fails, few blame leadership or facilitation. Why? Facilitation is invisible when it works and ignored when it doesn’t. Which means leaders rarely improve at it, and teams keep bleeding time, energy, and morale. But a well-run meeting is one of the highest-leverage spends a leader can make. One well-facilitated strategy session can save months of misalignment, recouping its cost in weeks, if not days.
Read on for our meeting manifesto, to understand how we see meetings and the best ways to maximize their power.
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The world’s attention is getting shorter—especially when it comes to talks. From TED and DisruptHR to board meetings and team stand-ups, speaking formats are shrinking. Five to ten minutes is quickly becoming the new standard. And while that may sound like a relief to anyone who dreads long presentations, short talks are surprisingly difficult to get right.
In fact, we’d argue they’re harder. A lot harder.
Here’s why, and what to do about it…
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Most organizations don’t have a meeting problem so much as they have a thinking-about-meetings problem.
Too many meetings are:
Scheduled by default (“We always meet on Tuesdays.”)
Held without a clear purpose or plan
Dominated by a few voices while others check email
Drifting aimlessly without resolution or follow-up
And that’s if people show up in the first place.
In our work with leaders across industries, we’ve seen this over and over: intelligent, well-intentioned people wasting hours in meetings that feel more like performance art than productivity. It's not that they don’t care. It’s that no one ever taught them how to design and facilitate a great meeting.
But don’t worry! There is a solution to this madness. Here’s what you can do…
Read MoreBreakouts during an SKO are supposed to be where the rubber meets the road—where strategy becomes personal, where people actually talk, and where the event gets real. It’s during the breakouts that the organization has the opportunity to make the strategy actionable for each and every role represented at SKO. If done right, this leads to learning, reflection, and further conversation… a true testament to the power of a well-executed SKO. But in too many SKOs (and other types of internal conferences and retreats), breakouts fall flat.
Read on to understand why this keeps happening, the consequences, and what to do instead.
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Ah, the annual Sales Kick-Off (SKO)—a high-energy, high-stakes event where the entire sales team gathers to be motivated, inspired, and equipped for the year ahead. Or, at least, that’s the intention. Too often, SKOs devolve into an endless parade of slide decks, a blur of talking heads, and a slow descent into what we at Wolf & Heron like to call Death By Presentation.
Read on to understand why this keeps happening, the consequences, and what to do instead.
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A SKO investment should be justified by how well it achieves strategic organizational goals. Unfortunately, SKO goals are often so vague that it’s impossible to integrate them into the feedback mechanism. If that’s the case for an event you’re planning, you certainly won’t know if you’ve achieved those goals… which begs the question, why have a SKO at all?
If you want your event to achieve its objectives, it’s critical that you identify, clearly, what those outcomes should be, and then weave them through your event like a red thread. That is how you’ll produce a Sales Kick Off where the investment earns you a return.
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People don’t make decisions based on logic alone. They need to connect emotionally with your message —and use logic to justify it later. That’s where storytelling comes in. A good story doesn’t just inform; it makes people feel. And when they feel, they remember. More importantly, they act.
Read on to understand why stories work, what makes a story unique, and how to ensure your points land by wrapping them in stories.
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As speakers and speaker coaches, we spend a lot of time crafting talks—both for ourselves and with our clients. It’s an obvious exploration, therefore, for us to look into how we can leverage AI to craft these talks more quickly (and ideally, effectively). Recently, Stephanie started giving a talk entitled Stories That Sell. In the past several weeks, Stephanie has delivered this talk three times and here are the things she learned while leaning into AI as a tool to help her.
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