Stephanie Judd, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Wolf & Heron

Wolf & Heron helps leaders get people to act, not just agree. We teach communication skills, presentation skills and executive presence grounded in influence science and social psychology. Our clients are companies like Google, Pfizer, Uber, Deloitte and the University of Michigan whose leaders need their message to change what happens after the meeting ends.

Training. Our flagship is “Influential Storytelling,” a hands-on program in storytelling and presentation skills for leaders, sales teams and product managers. More than 5,000 professionals have earned the Influential Storyteller certificate. We also run OneHour Workshops, live virtual sessions on executive presence, data storytelling, coaching conversations, feedback and meeting design, and “Meetings That Work,” a program for teams that want to fix their meeting culture.

Coaching. One-on-one presentation and executive presence coaching for high-stakes moments: a board pitch, a keynote, a strategy rollout.

Consulting. We design the communication around moments of change, such as sales kickoffs, leadership off-sites and reorganizations, so they become real conversations instead of slide reviews.

Tools. Physical card decks for leaders and facilitators, including the Influential Storytelling decks and Inspired Check-Ins, plus Meeting-in-the-Mailbox kits teams can run on their own.

Keynote: My current talk is “Everyone Nodded. Nothing Changed.” It’s about why a convincing argument isn’t enough to get people to act. Details are at stephaniejudd.com.

We don’t use slides in our workshops. In corporate training, the slide deck is the product: it’s what gets approved, emailed around and filed away. Wolf & Heron workshops are deliberately slide-free, and in a four-hour session someone stands at the front teaching for about 40 minutes in total. The rest of the time, people are practicing on their own real work.

It has cost us clients. Many buyers come to Wolf & Heron looking for a presenter or speaker for a hybrid, virtual or in-person event, where the expectation is that the audience will sit, watch and be entertained or spoken to. That’s a format we’ve never leaned into. Our sessions are far too interactive for it. The reason we exist is behavior change, and nobody changes how they communicate by watching someone else do it. They have to do it themselves. Participants rate our programs “excellent” 97% of the time, and the comment we hear most is that they used what they learned the very next day.

I did eventually develop the keynote, “Everyone Nodded. Nothing Changed.”, to reach the audience that wants a more passive experience, but it’s not the core product that we offer.

COVID. When the pandemic hit in 2020, Wolf & Heron lost nearly 70% percent of our pipeline, including work that was already sold. Clients canceled event after event. It was horrific.

We had to pivot dramatically. We built a virtual delivery option for our flagship “Influential Storytelling” workshop, and we leaned hard into one-on-one executive coaching that we could deliver over Zoom. That kept us relevant while in-person events were on hold, and virtual delivery is still a core part of how we work today, from our live virtual OneHour Workshops to remote coaching.

I spend much more time designing what participants will DO rather than what I’ll say. A one-hour workshop can take days to build, because every few minutes needs an activity that makes people practice the skill instead of hearing about it. The other surprise is how much of my day goes into other people’s stories. In coaching, I might spend an hour helping a senior leader find the one moment in her career that makes a strategy feel real to her team. That moment is almost always there. The teller just hasn’t recognized it as a story yet.

Most presentation skills training teaches performance: posture, slides, vocal tips. Wolf & Heron teaches influence. Our approach comes from change management and social psychology, and the question behind every program is whether the audience will do something differently afterward, not whether the speaker sounded good.

Four things make that work:
1) A research-based framework, the Influential Communicator Framework, with four principles: Keep It Real, Engage Emotion, Invite Curiosity and Pick One Theme.
2) Experiential, slide-free sessions in which people practice on their own work.
3) Prework and content customized to each client.
4) Coaching and practice afterward, so the skills last beyond the workshop.

We also sit where professional services meet physical products. Our card decks keep the skills in people’s hands long after the training is over.

Talk less. New facilitators think their value lies in what they know, so they fill the room with content. The best workshops put the participants to work: “Here’s an activity, go do it, and have the aha yourself instead of hearing it from me.” My rule of thumb is no more than 40 minutes of anyone teaching from the front in a 4-hour session. If you’re the one doing most of the talking, the participants are learning the least.

A product manager at Google came to me before pitching his executives for budget and headcount for a new healthtech opportunity. He had interviewed nurses and found that outdated login protocols were costing them close to two hours of every eight-hour shift: about 100 logins a day at 60 seconds each. The finding was sitting on a slide as one data point among many, and the pitch wasn’t landing.

We rebuilt that data point as a story about one of the nurses he’d interviewed, and about his own reaction when he first understood what was happening inside those facilities. When he told it that way, his executives stopped taking notes and leaned in. They didn’t just understand the opportunity; they felt it. He got his budget.

That’s what Wolf & Heron does, scaled to whole teams. More than 5,000 professionals have earned our Influential Storyteller certificate, and 97% of participants rate our programs “excellent.”

That storytelling is soft, or that it’s about being entertaining. People assume we teach leaders to be more charismatic on stage. What we really work on is a costly gap: the distance between agreement and action. A strong argument gets you agreement. Everyone in the room nods. Then nothing changes, because people agreed with their heads and didn’t act on it. Stories close that gap because they carry the experience along with the conclusion. That’s not a soft skill, it’s a human one. It decides whether a strategy gets carried out or dies in the meeting where it was approved… and AI can’t replace it.

Bring us your highest-stakes moment. The best Wolf & Heron engagements start with something real: a sales kickoff, a strategy rollout, new managers who need to lead a team, or an executive who has to win over a skeptical board. We design the training around that moment, so your people practice on the work that matters to them.

If you lead L&D, sales enablement or HR and you’re looking for communication skills training, presentation skills training or executive presence coaching that changes what people do the next day, start at wolfandheron.com. If you’re looking for a keynote speaker on leadership communication and influence, visit stephaniejudd.com.

As AI takes over more of the written work, live communication is becoming the skill that sets leaders apart. Over the next three to five years, I want Wolf & Heron to become the name leaders and L&D teams turn to when they need people to act on a message, not just understand it.

That means three things:
1) Reaching more people than Kara and I can reach ourselves, by building a bench of facilitators trained in our methods.
2) Expanding our tools, from card decks to on-demand support, so the skills hold up between workshops.
3) Taking the message to larger stages through keynotes, because the companies that keep investing in human skills alongside AI are the ones that will get the most out of it.

Communication skills are a workforce risk that most organizations aren’t measuring. AI won’t run your board meeting or pitch your investors. The highest-stakes moments are still human, and teams need to practice for them.

Anyone who wants to practice is welcome at Story Hour, Wolf & Heron’s free monthly storytelling community. You can find it, along with our workshops and resources, at wolfandheron.com.