Susan David
Senior leaders are running on suppressed emotion and rigid scripts at exactly the moment their organisations need adaptive judgement. Pressure, restructure and fatigue have made composure scarce, and the conventional response is more positivity training. The deeper problem is that leaders have no reliable way to work with difficult emotions as data, rather than treat them as something to push down or perform around.
Susan David is the Harvard Medical School psychologist who originated Emotional Agility, the framework that helps senior leaders treat difficult emotions as data and make better decisions under pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Susan David
- She is the named originator of Emotional Agility, a peer-reviewed psychological framework that Harvard Business Review designated a Management Idea of the Year and Thinkers50 awarded its Breakthrough Idea Award.
- Her authority sits at Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, which means leadership teams get clinical psychology, not motivational content dressed as science.
- She gives senior leaders a usable method for operating under pressure: working with hard emotions as signal rather than noise, and translating values into decisions when stakes are high.
- Her research base spans more than two decades of work on emotion, resilience and change, and her writing in HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal puts her in front of the same readership a board does.
- She is South African, trained at Yale, and brings a register that travels across global executive audiences without the wellness-industry tone that often blunts this material.
Biography highlights
- Faculty psychologist, Harvard Medical School.
- Cofounder and co-director, Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate.
- CEO, Evidence Based Psychology.
- Author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Agility, translated into more than 30 languages.
- Winner of the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award; named to the Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s most influential management thinkers.
- TED Talk “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage” delivered at TEDWomen 2017, with more than 11 million views on TED.com.
Biography
Most leadership advice asks senior people to stay positive under pressure. The clinical evidence says the opposite. Suppressing difficult emotion narrows judgement, erodes decision quality and corrodes trust over time. That gap, between the slogan and the science, is where Susan David built her work.
She is a faculty psychologist at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School affiliate. Her framework, Emotional Agility, was named a Management Idea of the Year by Harvard Business Review and won the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. The book of the same title was a #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
The framework treats emotions as data on values, not as performance problems. It gives leaders a way to notice what they are feeling, label it accurately, separate the feeling from the impulse to act on it, and then make a values-based choice. It is a discipline, not a mood, and it scales from individual executive judgement to how cultures handle hard conversations, conflict and change.
Her work has reached management readers through HBR, the New York Times, Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, and a wider audience through her TEDWomen 2017 talk. The audiences that book her are usually executive teams under sustained pressure: leadership groups mid-restructure, partner cohorts in professional services, and senior teams trying to rebuild trust after shock. They leave with a method, not a mood-lift.
Key speaking topics
- Emotional agility
- Self-leadership under pressure
- Resilience and change
- Decision-making under stress
- Values-based leadership
- Workplace mental health and wellbeing
- Culture and emotional honesty at work
Ideal for
- CEOs, C-suite teams and boards leading through restructure, integration or sustained pressure.
- CHROs and senior people leaders rebuilding engagement and trust after change.
- Partner groups and senior cohorts in professional services, finance and law.
- Executive development and high-potential leadership programmes.
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of emotional agility, with the four steps that turn it from idea into practice.
- A way to read difficult emotions as data on values rather than as problems to suppress.
- Language to lead hard conversations without retreating into positivity or performance.
- A method for staying decisive under pressure, including in moments of public scrutiny or internal conflict.
- A clearer link between personal values and the day-to-day choices a leadership role demands.
Talks
A keynote on how leaders move through change, stress and uncertainty by working with their emotions rather than around them.
Key takeaways:
- The four practical moves that turn emotional agility from concept into leadership behaviour.
- How emotional “hooks” distort senior decision-making, and how to spot them in real time.
- A way to align day-to-day choices with stated values when the pressure is highest.