By Kirsten Goodwin
Organisations host events constantly: away days, inductions, panels, awards evenings, client dinners. Each one means weeks of planning by the organisers, a day or more out of the business for everyone who attends, whether that’s a graduate cohort or the senior team, on top of the financial cost.
Many of them never return full value on that investment. The agenda ran to time and nothing went wrong, but nothing changed either: the senior team leaves an away day with the same unresolved issues it arrived with, or a graduate cohort goes home unsure whether they chose the right firm.
So, is your event investment being wasted, and what do you do about it?
What a professional host delivers
The return on an event doesn’t come from the venue, or the running order – it comes from what happens in the room. A highly skilled professional event host shapes that in specific ways:
- Senior time pays back. A leadership away day takes your most expensive people out of the business for a day, and aligned executive teams are almost twice as likely to achieve above-median financial performance (McKinsey Centre for CEO Excellence). A host aims the day at that alignment so it’s more than just a pleasant day out.
- Real issues are said out loud. An outsider isn’t part of the politics, so a team can finally say who it thinks should own what, or admit it disagrees with a decision, and the problem is dealt with in the room instead of surfacing destructively afterwards.
- Leaders and organisers can take part. The team leader contributes as a participant instead of chairing a session they have a stake in, and the organiser can watch the room instead of the clock.
- People remember how it felt. After a week, people retain only about 10% of what they heard. A host shapes how the event feels, which is what people really take away.
- Decisions get made. By the end of the day the team has agreed who owns what and the goals it will be held to, and the difficult topics are resolved instead of being carried over to the next meeting.
- The audience believes what they hear. People trust a leader less when a message feels scripted or AI-written: in one university study, sincerity ratings for a manager fell from 83% to between 40% and 52% when their message was heavily AI-assisted. A conversation is visibly unscripted, so the room believes the leader, and belief is what a senior appearance is there to build.
The Hosting Impact Scale
These benefits don’t come from just any host. I’ve defined The Hosting Impact Scale to illustrate the difference:
Level 1: Competence. The event runs to plan. The agenda holds, the timings are kept and the transitions are smooth. All of this matters, but it is the basics.
Level 2: Presence. The host is confident and engaging, and responds to the room as it actually is, not as the agenda assumed. That might mean bringing a break forward when energy drops, letting a conversation run on because it’s working, or cutting one short because it isn’t – but it still isn’t delivering real impact.
Level 3: Resonance. The host does everything above and goes beyond the agenda. They are brave enough to name what the room is avoiding, such as the disagreement everyone has been stepping round, willing to challenge and be challenged, and skilled enough to keep people feeling safe when the difficult thing surfaces. The event changes something: a decision gets made that wouldn’t otherwise have been, or people leave seeing the organisation differently. The full impact of the event is realised.
Plus, the host’s impact doesn’t start when the event does. For a senior team, Level 3 means bringing experience and expertise to help shape the event’s objectives and agenda in advance; plus meeting every key attendees in advance. Then it continues beyond the event, working with organisers to define lessons learned, and ensure follow through on actions, decisions or issues raised, so that what happened in the room becomes something that lasts.
If you’d like a Level 3 host for your next event, that’s what an Event Hosting Discovery Call is for – get in touch through my Expert Services Directory listing.
Events where a Level 3 host makes the biggest difference
- Senior leadership away day. The team says what it wouldn’t say with its own leader in the room, so ownership gets settled and the day ends in goals people will be held to. As one of my SLT away day participants put it: “I’ll help convince [the CEO] that spending money on you is worth it more often :)”
- Panel. Senior people hold a conversation instead of trading monologues, so the audience hears something they couldn’t have got from a press release. That matters most when the panel is very senior, as it was when I chaired HSBC’s CFO, Head of HSBC UK and Head of Strategy.
- Fireside chat or CEO slot. The leader comes across as themselves, so the room believes them instead of discounting a polished performance. When I chaired a fireside chat on Imposter Syndrome with two very senior partners at an international law firm, broadcast across its global offices, it created a space where trust was built and communicated to the audience – people said it was inspiring to know that leaders so senior had experienced it too.
- Graduate or new joiner induction. A room of strangers becomes a cohort with a shared experience, so new joiners feel they belong and are more likely to stay: Brandon Hall Group suggests firms that get onboarding right have 82% higher retention. A year later, one HSBC graduate said, “It was inspiring to see the passion and how much they value emerging talent.”
- Awards ceremony. Each winner gets a moment of their own rather than being a name on a list, so winners feel valued and the room feels celebratory, not merely corporate – such as at the ceremonies I hosted for MetLife.
- Global virtual session. The host delivers a session designed specifically to engage and inspire an online audience, balancing use of technology tools with human connection, so online sessions don’t feel like a poor relation to in-person – as with the multiple events I ran for Novo Nordisk.
- Podcast or recorded series. The host quickly builds rapport and draws out a natural conversation, so the guest sounds like themselves, the points land, and the listener stays with it – as with the sustainability series of podcasts I hosted for HSBC.
If your event is client-facing
The stakes are higher when the audience is the people who pay you.
- Client panel: the host asks the question your own people would find awkward in front of a client, such as what the firm could do better, so clients hear something candid.
- Client seminar: the host carries the format, so your partners spend the evening talking to the clients they invited instead of checking the running order.
- Client round table: quieter voices get drawn out and the loudest doesn’t dominate, so you hear what clients really think, and it doesn’t drift into a pitch.
- Client hospitality: someone else looks after the room and the timings, so you can spend the evening talking to your guests.
If you can see your own event in this list, talk it through on an Event Hosting Discovery Call – get in touch through my Expert Services Directory listing.
The wrong question most organisers ask
When organisers plan an event, the question they usually ask is:
- will this run smoothly?
That’s Level 1 thinking. A better question is:
- is this really going to be worth the money?
A good venue and a tight running order can answer the first. The second depends on who is holding the room, and on what has changed in it by the time people leave.
Conclusion
Every event you host takes weeks of planning and a day or more of your people’s time. A Level 3 host makes sure that investment comes back as decisions that get made and people who feel they belong, whatever the format.
If you have an event coming up and want a corporate event host who will help it land, start with an Event Hosting Discovery Call – get in touch through my Expert Services Directory listing.
Here’s to events that land,
Kirsten
ps to read more about why a conversation builds more belief in a leader than a speech does, read my blog on “The surprising reason your CEO should never give another speech”.
