Making Leadership Meetings Truly Count

Many organisations spend significant money on their leadership meetings—venue, external event organiser, production, giveaways, travel, and more. Feedback is often collected from participants, yet organisations still wonder: what are the real benefits and impact? Here are a few areas I always focus on with my clients to make their leadership events truly meaningful.

Grow, Connect, Create—Before the Event

The pre-event period is more than logistics—it’s an opportunity for everyone to learn, connect, and experiment.

Personally, I prefer a hybrid model, using external support to assist the internal team, which retains final ownership of the event. This team guides and drives the organisation alongside their day-to-day roles, enabling non-linear interactions between senior executives and the organisers.

It’s also a chance for the team to be bold and creative—trying new ideas, being agile and flexible, and taking small risks without jeopardising their careers. They can get to know each other beyond their usual functional remit, often forming new friendships and connections.

Before the event, using an event-specific identity, sharing regular and friendly communications, and sending short surveys to understand participants’ expectations, communicate preparation, and build anticipation are all effective ways to start creating a sense of community among participants.

Make it Personal

In many pre‑event surveys, especially for organisations with distributed locations, connecting with colleagues is consistently the most important purpose of these meetings.

A major part of my planning is encouraging interactions during and beyond the event. At the event, this includes mixing seating during sessions and dinners, mixing teams for activities, giving individuals at different levels opportunities to sit near senior executives, and creating free time for genuine social interaction (not checking emails!).

Exercises and prompts on how to introduce themselves—not just professionally but personally—help colleagues see each other as people. These small touches transform experiences from superficial to genuinely personal. After the event, we also use photos and videos to recap the experience (sensitively, for those who were not there), showing how leaders came together to collaborate and work on topics that truly matter to employees and the organisation. These recaps also set the expectation that leaders should debrief their teams and cascade key messages after the event.

Make the Presenters the Stars and “Influencers”

It may sound odd coming from a management consultant who has had a lot of fun producing and presenting slides, but for a leadership event, I always advocate that slides are secondary.

Don’t make the audience read or do maths in their heads—help them focus on the speakers. Slides are useful for structure and timing, but the real focus should always be on what the speakers say and how they say it. The goal is to create a genuine connection, be authentic, and show real care for the topic—well beyond the event itself. The most passionate speaker can make the most serious topic come to life and inspire the audience to do something.

That’s why, in the preparation phase, I often work with individual speakers—to ensure clarity on key messages, calls to action, ideas to engage the audience, consistency in messaging between different speakers, and ways to make the message ‘land.’ None of this is about impressing the audience—it’s about helping them focus and cascade the messages after the event.

Leadership events are a great chance to stretch communication skills. Most leaders are used to presenting to inform—but here, the goal is also to inspire and mobilise. It’s not about faking enthusiasm; it’s about showing genuine commitment and deliberately connecting with the audience. I often have one-on-one sessions beforehand to help speakers fine-tune their story and delivery. Sometimes, they’re encouraged to reveal different sides of themselves, letting colleagues see a more relatable, less formal side. That authenticity and creativity not only makes messages stick long after the event ends, but also puts a smile on the faces in the room. I’ve witnessed a few of those ‘Oscar-level magical’ moments—ones you simply can’t plan without the true commitment of the speakers

Create a Genuinely Safe and Encouraging Space

At most leadership events, the “chief” opening the session will usually say it’s a safe space. But what does that really mean, and how do you make it feel real? It’s not always consistently understood—or easy to apply—especially when the agenda is packed and leaves little room for genuine dialogue.

A psychologically (and physically) safe space is more than candid conversations under confidentiality. It’s about intentional listening, leaning on learning and reflection rather than blame, and creating a space where people feel okay sharing vulnerability and concerns.

A leadership event isn’t only about airing challenges—it’s also about celebrating credible progress. Leaders often carry many responsibilities, and leadership can sometimes feel lonely. Seeing peers recognise one another in front of senior stakeholders—for the right reasons—can be more motivating and energising than most realise.

It’s also a chance to role-model the behaviours and attitudes the organisation wants to embed, so that when leaders return to their day-to-day roles, they can cascade messages and culture with credibility and consistency—because they’ve experienced it themselves, not just heard or read about it.

Create a Shared Experience by Bringing Employee and Customer Voices into the Room

While the activities and discussions at the event are themselves a shared experience, this sense of “shared” can fade once the event ends and new experiences take over.

Bringing the voices of employees and customers into the room—allowing the leadership team to watch or listen to that feedback together—can create a very powerful shared experience. There’s no filtering or candy-coating, just raw (yet relevant and appropriate) feedback. This provides a common basis for reflection on challenges and for sharing recognition through positive feedback.

Final Thoughts

In the spirit of continuous learning, and being mindful of where the client is in their journey of change, I never rely on a cookie-cutter approach. Every leadership event—from preparation and production to post-event follow-up—is full of opportunities to stretch and strengthen the team, both individually and together.

I also never forget that beyond the financial cost, these events ask a lot of senior leaders—their time away from family, from their day-to-day work, and the effort to travel and come together. It’s both a duty and a privilege to make that time not just worthwhile, but genuinely enjoyable and meaningful.