Our Meeting Manifesto: Reclaiming the Power of Gathering at Work

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.

The Sources of Influence Power

REFERENCE

Here’s a quick reference that lists the sources of influence power, in order of their relevance and effectiveness.

We’ve designed breakouts for sales kickoffs, leadership off-sites, and enterprise-wide strategy rollouts—and we’ve seen what works (and what doesn’t). This guide shares the exact principles we use to make sessions that are engaging, purpose-driven, and actually move people.

ResourcesStephanie JuddSeptember 30, 2025meeting design and facilitation, meeting design, tool, conference, breakouts, breakout, engagement, sko, sales kickoff, salesComment

The Surprising Challenge of a Short Talk: Why less time means more pressure—and how to rise to the occasion.

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…

Attack Your Meeting Problem With a Set of Questions

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…

From Boring to Brilliant: Designing Breakouts That Actually Work

Breakouts 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.

ArticleStephanie JuddJuly 21, 2025sales, presentations, communication, sales kickoff, SKO, interactive session, engagementComment

Why Your Sales Kick-Off is a Big-Budget Snoozefest (And How to Fix It)

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.

ArticleStephanie JuddJune 30, 2025sales, presentations, communication, sales kickoff, SKO, interactive session, engagementComment

Case Study: Strategic Change at TierPoint

CASE STUDY

Download the case study to learn how Wolf & Heron worked hand-in-hand with the revenue enablement team at TierPoint to build buy-in, upskill the team, and accelerate execution.

ResourcesStephanie JuddJune 17, 2025case study, leadership, SKO, consulting, engagement, strategy, change managementComment

Does Your SKO Actually Achieve the Strategic Outcomes that Justify the Investment?

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.

ArticleKara DavidsonJune 9, 2025sales, presentations, communication, sales kickoff, SKO, engagement, strategy, effective communicationComment

Design Breakouts That Actually Break Through

REFERENCE

Breakouts are where your attendees explore, discuss, and internalize the message you most want them to remember. They’re where concepts are made real and tangible. But too often, they turn into just another slide-driven presentation.

We’ve designed breakouts for sales kickoffs, leadership off-sites, and enterprise-wide strategy rollouts—and we’ve seen what works (and what doesn’t). This guide shares the exact principles we use to make sessions that are engaging, purpose-driven, and actually move people.

A Provocative Recommendation: Stop Presenting!

Presentations aren’t always the best idea. Unless a presenter is phenomenally dynamic and engaging in her own right, audience members are going to have to consciously choose to pay attention and process the information. This takes effort, and it’s almost guaranteed that more interesting distractions will find their way into the space. If the presenter is presenting information that is remotely complex, dry, or worse, poorly organized, the audience is surely checked out.

Most of the time, when working with clients, the belief is that “net new” information needs to be presented first, and the only opportunity for interactivity is in the application of that knowledge. This is simply not true.

ArticleStephanie JuddJuly 8, 2024workshop, breakout, presentation, engagement, inspireComment

Unlocking The Power of Process Conversations

Process Conversations focus on alignment around HOW work gets accomplished. This is different from the typical conversations at work about WHAT needs doing. Often, HOW work will get done is rarely discussed. And if it is considered with any kind of intention, it’s usually considered by a leader in isolation, who believes that how the work is done should be a decision they make unilaterally.

Process Conversations are great opportunities for leaders to inspire others, generate buy-in, and drive engagement. AND they’re an access point through which to engage and inspire UP the chain of command as well.

ArticleStephanie JuddNovember 13, 2023meetings, leadership, alignment, engagementComment

4 Things that Go Wrong with One-on-One Check-ins (and How to Avoid Them)

Manager check-ins, one-on-ones, touchpoints… Whatever you may call them, they are the foundation of a strong manager-employee relationship and the lynchpin for supporting your employees in many ways. This 30-minute-or-so recurring meeting between manager and employee seems so simple that it’s often taken for granted and therefore underutilized. They are used as opportunities to get project updates or chat about anything, when they could be so much more supportive of the employee’s professional growth and development. More often than not, we hear about employees or managers who simply put them off, postpone them indefinitely, or end up using the time as status report opportunities rather than truly leveraging their power.

It’s time to go back to the basics. Here are 4 things that go wrong with your manager check-ins and how to avoid them.

ArticleStephanie JuddOctober 16, 2023meetings, leadership, alignment, engagementComment

Make People Feel Seen, Heard and Understood - Part 1: Common Mistakes

Making people feel seen, heard, and understood is one of the most fundamental and important skills of a coach. In our work over the past decade, we’ve come to believe that it’s also one of the most important, yet underdeveloped, skills of a leader.

ArticleKara DavidsonFebruary 27, 2023coaching, leadership, manager, engagement, influenceComment

Three Common Mistakes when Designing for Engagement

“Employee engagement” has been a hot-button issue for more than a decade, and remains central to organizational strategy. But engagement is even more important now as companies experiment with hybrid work, or a permanent virtual workforce, and the Great Resignation exists as an ever-present backdrop. And yet, “engagement” remains a big-picture, intangible, and somewhat esoteric idea that has lots of impact on the people within an organization without anyone really understanding what to do about it.

The truth of the matter is that truly engaging your team happens long before the actual moment of reckoning. It’s thinking through details, and finding ways to activate interest and ownership with your employees in every interaction. Here are three common myths about employee engagement and what you can do instead.

ArticleStephanie JuddJune 13, 2022leadership, Meetings, facilitation, engagementComment