Susan Drumm—Igniting Performance Through Pattern Transformation
The Secret to Leadership Success?
Breaking the Patterns that Hold You Back.
Susan’s inspiring keynotes offer executives and teams practical tools to uncover destructive patterns and build new pathways to exponential results.
“Susan’s enthusiastic style, coupled with her expertise in leadership, creates a thought-provoking and impactful experience.”
Tara Collison
PhD, PCC, CISCO
The Neuroscience of Leadership:
Harnessing Pattern-Recognition to Unlock Leadership Development
The brain operates on a powerhouse of patterns, constantly shaping how executives think, lead, and connect.
But not all patterns are allies.
Some drive leaders’ greatest successes; others quietly undermine their leadership potential.
As leaders navigate exponential complexity and change in the marketplace, building the skills to recognize and shift patterns that inhibit performance is vital to long-term success.
Susan Drumm helps audiences uncover and rewire these patterns.
By tapping into the brain’s incredible ability to adapt, she equips executives with practical, science-backed tools to:
Recognize and disrupt limiting behaviors for themselves and their team.
Build new neural pathways that fuel bold, confident leadership.
Create ripple effects that inspire teams and transform organizations.
Her keynote blends cutting-edge neuroscience with decades of experience guiding high-performing leaders to think and lead differently.
Leadership Change Agent & Pattern-Recognition Expert
Susan Drumm works with billionaire CEOs, high-profile political figures, Fortune 100 teams, successful entrepreneurs, and rising star executives, along with brands like Cisco, ICONIQ, L’Oreal, and Microsoft.
Over the past two decades, she has been instrumental in building high-performance teams to lead in today’s disruptive environment, enabling them to unlock their leadership potential, resulting in multi-million-dollar growth.
Susan’s unique blend of expertise, derived from her MA in acting, J.D. from Harvard Law School, and strategy consulting at The Boston Consulting Group, sets her apart as “the real deal” and an outstanding speaker.
She has spoken at companies such as:
“Susan’s enthusiastic style, coupled with her expertise in leadership, creates a thought-provoking and impactful experience.”
TARA COLLISON
Ph.D., PCC, Cisco
“Susan’s expertise with individual and team dynamics was extremely helpful in getting our teams to work together more effectively.”
BRIA MARTIN
Vice President, Organizational Strategy and Leadership Development,
Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical
“Susan helped us approach our challenges, roles, and clients with the right mindset. She made a lasting impact on our team, resulting in better communication tools and trust across the team.”
SUMITA BANJEREE
Senior Vice President Talent Acquisition, L’Oreal Americas
“Susan’s keynote on effective communication was the highlight of our retreat.”
KRISTINE CAMPBELL
Assistant General Counsel, U-Haul International
“Susan took music, and showed how it is a purposeful tool to align, motivate and guide leaders through the challenges we all face.”
Member
Entrepreneurs Organization Silicon Valley
Ignite Your Audience’s Leadership Performance by Unlocking the Skill of Pattern Recognition and Disruption.
Tailored for Every Leadership Audience
Susan’s keynotes inspire action, no matter who is in the room.
Executive Leaders
Cut through complexity with strategies that drive impact at the top.
High-Performing Teams
Build trust, spark collaboration, and fuel innovation.
Rising Stars
Equip future leaders with the confidence to make their mark.
Deliver insights that address today’s biggest leadership challenges – from navigating disruption to developing team cohesion to driving business results.
Susan connects with audiences at every level, leaving them ready to lead with clarity, purpose, and bold action.
Susan Drumm’s keynote topics
Break Old Patterns, Create New Worlds
How the Best Leaders Disrupt What’s Familiar to Build What’s Next
Read the full description
For anyone ready to move past what was and build what’s next.
Most of the biggest changes we want to make aren’t blocked by strategy or skill. They’re blocked by the patterns keeping us stuck in what was.
The reaction that comes out before you can catch it. The tightness in your chest before a hard conversation. The frustration that keeps showing up at the same person or situation, over and over.
Those emotions aren’t the problem. They’re the signal. Underneath every one of them is a pattern trying to keep you safe, and until you can see the pattern the emotion is protecting, no amount of insight or discipline will shift it.
This keynote gives you a new lens on those patterns and a four-step method for disrupting them. Not another change-management framework, but a way of using what you’re already feeling as the map to what’s actually holding you back. Once you can see it, the change you’ve been trying to force starts to become possible.
You’ll leave with:
- A framework for using your emotions as the map to the patterns keeping you stuck. The frustrations, fears, and reactions you’ve been trying to manage are the exact clues to what needs to shift.
- A four-step method for disrupting what’s familiar without blowing up what works. Moves that shift the pattern at the source, not just its symptoms.
- A practice for building what’s next. Not just insight into what’s stuck, but a repeatable path for building the new pattern that replaces it
The Leader’s Playlist
How Music Rewires the Way You Show Up
Read the full description
For anyone ready to close the gap between who they intend to be and who actually shows up under pressure.
Most of us know exactly what we need to change. Knowing hasn’t changed it.
That’s not a willpower problem. It’s a wiring problem. You can’t out-think wiring, but you can rewire it. And neuroscience shows that music rewires patterns faster than almost anything else.
The response that comes out before you can catch it. The old story that plays on repeat when the stakes go up. The habit that survived every performance review. All of it is rewireable, but not through more effort or discipline.
Drawing on Susan Drumm’s USA Today bestselling book, The Leader’s Playlist, this keynote reveals how music primes the brain to form new pathways in a fraction of the time it takes through willpower alone. Once you understand how to use it, you can close the gap between the person you intend to be and the person who actually shows up when the pressure is on.
You’ll leave with:
- A framework for spotting the patterns quietly running how you show up. The habits and reactions no one taught you and no one asked for.
- The neuroscience of why music does what discipline can’t. What actually happens in the brain when a song moves you, and why that response is the fastest known route to new neural pathways.
- A method for rewiring what feels stuck using the neuroscience of music. How a playlist, chosen deliberately, can shift how you show up under pressure.
- A practice for taking aligned action toward who you’re becoming. Not just insight, but a repeatable rhythm for change.
The Pattern Problem
Why Great Teams Get Stuck and How the Enneagram Gets Them Moving Again
Read the full description
For teams ready to turn friction between different people into performance.
Most teams don’t have a talent problem. They have a pattern problem.
The teammate who turns into the devil’s advocate the moment stakes rise. The colleague chasing the next idea before the last one lands. The one who nods in the meeting and quietly stalls after it ends.
These aren’t personality flaws, and they aren’t the whole person either. They’re predictable patterns with a name. Different people are wired to notice different things, protect different things, and react differently under pressure. And when a team can’t decode those differences, cognitive diversity feels like friction instead of leverage, meeting after meeting.
This keynote gives you a way to decode what’s actually happening between the people on your team. Not another personality quiz, but a proven map for reading the motivations and fears driving behavior in the first place. Once you have it, the differences that used to feel like conflict become the reason your decisions get sharper, your trust gets faster, and your team stops relitigating the same arguments.
Your team will leave with:
- A framework for what’s really driving the behavior on your team. The nine patterns underneath what people say and do.
- A way to decode friction between different people instead of managing its symptoms. Read team dynamics at the level of motivation, not just behavior.
- A playbook for turning cognitive diversity into leverage. Faster trust, sharper delegation, conflict that resolves instead of repeats.
- A path for bringing this into your organization and building on it long after the keynote ends.
Resilience In Chaos: Lead With Clarity, Strength, And Calm
Enhance emotional intelligence, increase self-awareness, and cultivate resilience in the face of exponential change.
Read the full description
In a world that demands constant agility, resilience isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s a leadership superpower. The most effective leaders know how to unlock ineffective patterns, think clearly under pressure, and turn challenges into opportunities.
As a certified HeartMath® trainer, Susan Drumm equips leaders with tools to enhance emotional intelligence, increase self-awareness, and build resilience.
Drawing on the latest research, she shares how leaders can access the highest functioning parts of their brains to make better decisions and inspire their teams—even in the most chaotic environments.
Key Takeaways:
- Understand how coherence and resilience improve decision-making and problem-solving.
- Learn techniques to manage stress and maintain emotional balance under pressure.
- Build a personal framework for cultivating resilience and empowering your team.
Effective Delegation: Freedom To Lead
Discover game-changing secrets to scale your business and leverage your team like a pro.
Read the full description
The secret to scaling your business? It’s not about doing more—it’s about doing less. The best leaders know how to delegate effectively, freeing up their time for strategy, innovation, and growth.
With over two decades of experience advising top CEOs and senior executives, Susan Drumm has perfected the art of delegation and knows how to teach it. Based on her research of ineffective and effective delegators, she reveals the game-changing strategies elite leaders use to build high-performing teams and achieve exponential results.
Key Takeaways:
- Discover why delegation is the ultimate leadership skill for growth and efficiency.
- Learn a step-by-step process to identify tasks ripe for delegation.
- Master a foolproof framework to ensure delegated tasks are completed flawlessly.
How to Build High-Performing Teams
The Proven Blueprint for Turning Talent into Unstoppable Results.
Read the full description
The difference between a good team and a high-performing one isn’t just talent. It’s trust.
It’s clarity.
It’s the ability to navigate conflict and complexity without losing momentum.
Too many leaders think high performance comes from hiring “A players” or setting ambitious targets. But without the right dynamics, even the most skilled teams can stall — weighed down by silos, second-guessing, or burnout.
In this keynote, Susan Drumm draws on over two decades advising Fortune 100 executives, political leaders, and hypergrowth founders to reveal the essential moves for building teams that consistently deliver — even under pressure. You’ll learn the critical shifts that turn talented individuals into a unified, resilient, and self-correcting force.
In this session, leaders will discover how to:
- Build trust that accelerates execution — so collaboration moves at the speed of commitment
- Create role clarity to eliminate overlaps, gaps, and the turf wars that drain energy
- Resolve conflict productively — turning tension into creative breakthroughs instead of team fractures
- Sustain peak performance without burning people out or losing top talent
Unlike team-building talks that focus on surface-level bonding exercises, this session equips leaders with a repeatable blueprint to hardwire the habits, systems, and culture that make high performance the norm — not the exception.
Perfect for executive retreats, leadership development programs, culture transformation initiatives, and strategy offsites where collaboration and results are mission-critical.
“By blending a background in acting with top-tier business expertise, Susan engages an audience like few others can.”
Kaihan Krippendorf
Founder, Outthinker