A conversation with Susan Drumm, executive coach and author of The Leader’s Playlist, on the unconscious patterns that follow leaders into the boardroom, why staying in pretense destroys trust faster than honesty does, and what music has to do with rewiring your brain.
The Patterns Behind the Title
Susan Drumm has spent 20 years working with C-suite executives, and she’ll tell you the most revealing moment in any engagement rarely happens in a formal assessment or a structured interview. It happens when she sits quietly in a team meeting and watches who does most of the talking.
Her background is, by any measure, unusual for the leadership development space. Harvard Law, Carnegie Mellon, and a master’s in acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She practiced at four different law firms during law school, disliked all of them, pivoted to consulting at BCG, moved to NBC television, grew frustrated again, and eventually followed a gut instinct to London to study acting before returning to build a leadership development practice of her own. What looked like a chaotic career arc turned out to be a form of pattern recognition, each detour teaching her something about what effective leadership looks like up close and what poor leadership does to the people around it.
“You can have the best strategy in the world,” she told me, “but if the culture doesn’t support it, you’re dead in the water.” That observation, accumulated across law, consulting, and media, is what eventually pointed her toward the work she does now: helping leaders see the patterns they’re running, understand where those patterns came from, and decide whether those patterns are still worth keeping.
When the Old Playlist Still Plays
The central metaphor in Susan’s book is the playlist. Every leader, she argues, is operating from a set of deeply ingrained patterns, beliefs about themselves and the world that formed early and have been running more or less on autopilot ever since. Some of those patterns are genuinely useful. Others served a purpose once but have outlived their usefulness, particularly as leaders take on more senior roles where the stakes of those patterns get higher.
She doesn’t require leaders to excavate their entire childhoods to do this work, but she does help them trace the pattern back far enough to understand its origin. She shared an example from a past engagement, a leader she called Brandon, who prided himself on giving his team plenty of feedback. What he hadn’t noticed was that the feedback was almost always positive, softened to the point where the real message got lost. Deadlines were slipping, coordination with other departments was breaking down, and he couldn’t bring himself to have the direct conversations that might have fixed it.
When Susan introduced what she calls the truth serum exercise, asking him to say what he would say if there were no consequences, what came out was pointed and clear and not nearly as harsh as he’d feared. “In his mind, he thought it was so harsh,” she said. “It actually wasn’t.” The pattern, when they traced it, led back to his experience as a middle child who’d felt overlooked and had learned that keeping the peace was safer than speaking plainly.
Once he understood that, the work shifted from awareness to practice. Susan taught him a sentence stem she uses with many leaders: “A pattern I’m noticing is…” followed by an observation and a question. It opens a dialogue without putting the other person on the defensive. It allows the leader to name what they’re experiencing without making it an accusation. “That way it’s a dialogue,” she said. “You’re owning it as your experience, not saying you do that.”
Staying in Pretense Destroys More Than It Protects
One of the sharper points Susan makes is that the impulse to soften difficult feedback, to stay in pretense in order to preserve a relationship, tends to do the opposite of what leaders intend. “Subconsciously, humans can tell,” she said. “You’re actually destroying trust.” The relationship doesn’t get protected. It gets hollowed out slowly, while the real issues compound underneath.
She’s careful to distinguish this from the other failure mode, the leader who decides honesty means delivering hard truths without any consideration for how they land. That doesn’t work either. What she’s pointing toward is something more precise: the ability to say what’s true in a way that keeps the conversation open, that invites the other person in rather than shutting them down.
Knowing whether a pattern is serving you or harming your team, she says, usually comes down to results. Where are you producing what you want to produce, and where aren’t you? The places where things keep falling short, where delegation doesn’t stick, where key people keep leaving, where everything seems to come back to you no matter how many times you hand it off — those are the places worth examining.
What Music Actually Does to the Brain
The section of Susan’s book that tends to surprise people most is the one about music. Not music as metaphor, but music as a neurological tool for pattern disruption. The science behind it, she explains, is more straightforward than it might seem.
Music activates all four regions of the brain simultaneously and creates connectivity between them in a way that accelerates the formation of new neural pathways. Emotions, she points out, also carry vibration, which is measurable and distinct depending on what you’re feeling. “Your dog knows exactly how you’re feeling and you don’t even have to say a word,” she said. “Because your emotions actually have vibration and so does music.”
What this means practically is that music can interrupt a negative emotional loop and help redirect it. It can also accelerate the formation of new habits. Anything you’re trying to rewire behaviorally will happen faster if you pair it with the right music. The catch is that the right music is individual. It’s not a genre recommendation. It’s a practice of paying attention to what a piece of music does to you specifically, whether it pulls you toward the state you’re trying to build or reinforces the one you’re trying to leave behind.
She told me about a friend who had been single for years and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t meeting the right person. When Susan noticed that her background playlist was full of heartbroken love songs, she said so gently. Her friend hadn’t noticed. She shifted the playlist to music that felt hopeful and open, and the change that followed was real. “She did attract a wonderful man into her life,” Susan said. The music hadn’t made it happen, but it had helped shift the internal state that was making it harder.
The Four-Step Framework
For leaders who want a more structured entry point into this work, Susan walks through a four-step process she uses in her coaching. The first step is what she calls the powerful pause, which is stopping in a moment of friction or frustration to identify the emotion running the show. Is it anxiety? Anger? Shame? Getting specific matters.
The second step is to zoom out. Has this emotion shown up before? In what kinds of situations? What story or belief is fueling it? The goal here is to move from seeing an isolated incident to recognizing a pattern.
The third step is to name it. Give the pattern a label, something simple and honest. “I’m avoiding.” “I’m pleasing.” Or a belief statement: “I am treated unfairly.” “I am all alone.” Naming it makes it easier to catch the next time it surfaces.
The fourth step is to shift it. Susan asks leaders to connect to their best leadership self and consider what their true intention is in the moment. If they had responded from that intention instead of from autopilot, what would they have done differently? And what do they want to believe instead? The shift from “I am treated unfairly” to “I am empowered” is a new pattern to practice building.
The Enneagram as a Development Map
Susan uses the Enneagram as a primary tool in her coaching, and she’s clear about why she finds it more useful than assessments like DISC or MBTI. The distinction she draws is between a tool that describes you and a tool that maps your development. “It’s a systems model,” she said. “You can see the interrelationships between the nine types.”
What that means in practice is that the Enneagram doesn’t stop at identifying who you are. Instead, it shows you where you tend to focus your attention, what you’re likely to miss, and where someone with a different type sees things you don’t. “If I’m arguing it’s red, it’s red, it’s red,” she said, “the Enneagram shows you why someone else is saying it’s yellow and how that’s actually to your benefit.” That capacity to build genuine empathy for a different perspective is, in her experience, something no other assessment produces as reliably.
Her firm has built out what she calls the “so what” layer, which applies the Enneagram to specific leadership competencies. How to delegate by type. How to give and receive feedback by type. How to coach and influence others based on how they’re wired. The assessment, in her view, is only as valuable as the development work it makes possible. A profile that sits in a drawer is more of a label than a development tool.
Susan also offers a word of caution: the proliferation of free or cheap Enneagram assessments online has created a real problem of mistyping. Being typed incorrectly can actively mislead someone onto a development path that doesn’t fit them. That’s why she recommends going through a validated assessment if you’re going to use the tool seriously.
AI as a Mirror
Near the end of our conversation, Susan mentioned something that stopped me. She records team meetings, loads the transcripts into an AI tool, and asks it to give her feedback on her own leadership. What patterns does it notice in how she’s showing up? Where did she miss something? What might she have done differently?
She’s also built a virtual avatar of herself, loaded with 20 years of content, that allows people to continue working with her coaching frameworks after a workshop or speaking engagement ends. Both uses reflect the same underlying instinct she brings to leadership development more broadly: the tools matter less than the intention behind them. “Just get in the water and start playing,” she said. “There’s no wrong way to go here.” The leaders who are struggling most with AI, in her observation, are the ones who haven’t started yet, who feel the pressure to have a strategy before they have any experience.
The Bottom Line
What Susan keeps returning to, across pattern recognition and music neuroscience and Enneagram development, is a single underlying premise: most of what limits a leader is the invisible operating system they’ve been running since long before they had a leadership title. The patterns that once helped them survive or succeed have a way of following them into roles where those same patterns create friction, slow things down, or quietly erode the trust they’ve worked to build.
The good news, and Susan is genuinely optimistic about this, is that patterns can change. They just require seeing them clearly first, which is harder than it sounds and more possible than most leaders think.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.