Bring Susan in to Speak

Why Choose Susan?

Expertise in Career and Leadership Development: I specialize in designing and delivering customized talks, workshops, and courses tailored to your organization’s unique needs.
Proven Track Record: I’ve worked with diverse audiences, from academic leaders to healthcare professionals, providing actionable insights and transformative strategies.
Engaging and Practical Approach: My presentations combine evidence-based methods with real-world applications, ensuring your team leaves with tools they can implement immediately.
Trusted by Leading Organizations: I have been the go-to speaker for esteemed institutions and associations across the globe.

Bring Susan in to empower your team with leadership insights that inspire action, foster collaboration, and drive meaningful change.

Get in Touch

Possible Speaking Topics

Authentic Leadership

The Authentic Leadership program empowers academic and health professional leaders to uncover and leverage their unique leadership stories. Participants connect personal experiences to their leadership vision and values through guided exploration, ensuring alignment between principles and actions.

Key Benefits:

Develop your leadership narrative and understand its influence
Align your attitudes and actions with core values
Integrate your vision into your leadership practice

This transformative program helps leaders foster greater self-awareness, enabling them to lead with genuine purpose, integrity, and meaningful connection in academic and healthcare environments.

The Power of Networks in Leadership

Academic and health professional leaders often overlook a crucial element of success: deliberate networking. Research shows that strong networks—both formal and informal—deliver significant benefits.

Key Benefits:

Enhanced information flow
Reciprocal support
Strategic connections
Improved collective performance

Leaders with strong network acuity consistently demonstrate better individual performance, greater well-being, and more successful change initiatives. Our findings reveal that while health science academics network to support their roles, enhance projects, and inform strategy, many remain reluctant to initiate networking behaviors or reflect purposefully on their professional relationships.

To truly excel in leadership positions, health professionals must recognize networking not as an optional social activity but as a core leadership competency deserving strategic attention.

Paradigms and Practices of Academic Leadership in the Health Sciences

and interpersonal skills needed in today’s complex academic healthcare landscape. Participants explore traditional and innovative leadership frameworks specifically tailored to academic health environments.

Key Benefits:

Define effective academic health sciences leadership
Identify current leadership paradigms and their applications
Apply emerging leadership approaches to real challenges
Develop leadership adaptability for diverse situations

Through evidence-informed models and practical examples, you’ll enhance your ability to drive innovation, foster collaboration, and lead meaningful organizational change in academic health settings.

Navigating Your Career Journey

This interactive workshop empowers professionals to find clarity and purpose in their career path. Based on Dr. Susan Lieff’s professional fulfillment model, participants evaluate their current position while examining how workplace dynamics and external factors influence their professional choices.

Key Benefits:

Map your current career position and trajectory
Understand the components of professional fulfillment
Analyze how workplace and contextual factors impact your career decisions
Create actionable steps to advance your professional journey

Through guided reflection and strategic planning, you’ll develop personalized goals aligned with your values, enabling confident and purposeful career advancement, whether facing a crossroads or simply seeking a fresh perspective.

From Group to Great: Leading Teams with Intention

This interactive workshop equips leaders with essential skills to build high-performing teams in academic and professional environments. Participants learn to identify when team-based approaches are necessary versus when individual or distributed work is more appropriate.

Key Benefits:

Determine when a team-based approach is needed
Understand the core elements of generative teams
Develop strategies to optimize team performance

Through engaging discussions and practical examples, you’ll explore the anatomy of exceptional teams, examining critical factors like shared purpose, psychological safety, and group emotional intelligence. The workshop provides actionable planning tools to help you design effective team structures or revitalize existing ones, enabling outcomes that exceed the sum of individual contributions.

Whether forming new teams or enhancing established ones, you’ll gain practical strategies tailored to your specific context, empowering you to lead with intention and maximize collective potential.

Better Meetings, Better Results

This hands-on workshop transforms how leaders approach meetings in academic and professional settings. Learn to replace unproductive gatherings with focused, purposeful conversations that deliver tangible outcomes.

Key Benefits:

Design meetings with clear objectives and effective agendas
Facilitate discussions that maximize participation and decision-making
Implement strategies for efficient time management and follow-through

Through interactive exercises and practical applications, you’ll identify common meeting pitfalls while developing techniques to enhance collaboration and productivity. Participants create personalized meeting preparation checklists, which are practical tools to streamline the planning and execution of future gatherings.

Whether you lead small team check-ins or large strategic sessions, this workshop provides actionable strategies to make every meeting more engaging, efficient, and results-driven. It is ideal for leaders at all levels who want to transform meetings from necessary obligations into valuable drivers of progress.

Managing Oneself

This interactive workshop empowers professionals to manage their time, energy, and priorities in today’s demanding work environment. Through structured reflection and practical exercises, participants discover how to effectively balance competing demands and optimize their professional performance.

Key Benefits:

Gain clarity on personal priorities and focus areas
Master strategies for workload management and time optimization
Develop techniques to maintain focus in high-pressure situations

Participants will explore proven self-management approaches that reduce inefficiencies and align daily activities with broader career goals. You’ll leave with personalized strategies to work more intelligently, enhance productivity, and achieve better work-life integration—essential skills for professionals facing increasing responsibilities and complex workloads.

Addressing Unprofessional Behavior

This practical workshop equips academic and healthcare leaders with essential tools to tackle unprofessional conduct, which can undermine team effectiveness and compromise educational and patient care outcomes.

Key Benefits:

Develop a structured framework for recognizing and understanding problematic behaviors
Build confidence in facilitating difficult conversations
Create balanced responses that promote accountability and growth

Through case discussions, interactive exercises, and role-play scenarios, you’ll enhance your ability to address challenging situations while maintaining professional standards. The workshop provides strategies that balance fairness, collegiality, and institutional expectations in a supportive learning environment.

This session is ideal for leaders committed to fostering respectful, high-performing academic and clinical cultures. It delivers practical approaches to effectively managing unprofessional behavior.

These speaking topics and others can be customized to your unique needs.

My Experience Includes Collaborations With

Academic Settings

Schulich Executive Education at York University
Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine
University of British Columbia Certificate Program in Organizational Coaching
Temerty Faculty of Medicine’s Centre for Faculty Development at the University of Toronto
Divison of Developmental Paediatrics, Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Medical Education Associations

The Association of Medical Education of Europe
Canadian Association of Medical Education
The Association of Academic Psychiatry
The Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada
The American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry
Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada

Healthcare Organizations

Guyana Ministry of Health in partnership with Schulich Executive Education
Canadian Medical Association
Ontario Medical Association
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital
Princess Margaret Hospital
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Executive Leadership Team
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Department of Medicine
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Testimonials

We sought a session from Susan to address the challenges our leadership dyads have in communicating and co-creating the way we would like, due to time and competing demands. Susan’s workshop resulted in us pausing to reconsider how we view conflict and communicate in challenging times. The exercise was a great way to experience and try to work through the different ways in which we prioritize mutual issues as an academic and clinical multidisciplinary team.

If you are looking to strengthen communication and foster collaborative problem-solving, consider Susan. She will help you identify creative approaches to common leadership team opportunities and challenges.

Mariam Abdurrahman MD, Chief of Psychiatry, St. Joseph’s Health Centre, Toronto

I would like to thank you for your excellent learning session with our clinical chairs yesterday. From the pre-session exercise through to the elegant management of our hybrid format, this was a masterclass in education and coaching.

Lynn Wilson MD, CCFP, FCFP, Vice Dean, Clinical and Faculty Affairs, Associate Vice Provost, Relations with Healthcare Institutions, University of Toronto

I decided to get coaching when I took on a new academic leadership position. My initial motivation was to devise strategies for dealing with difficult conversations. Over time, I grew in confidence in my new position. Susan helped me define my values and, in tethering myself to these values in the context of my new job, my confidence in executing strategic decisions grew. While not every day is wonderful, I am truly enjoying my new position and am excited for what is to come

Jennifer Gommerman PhD, Chair, Dept of Immunology, University of Toronto

I first reached out to Susan after reading one of her articles that fundamentally changed how I thought about leadership models in complex organizations. I invited her to speak at a leadership program at our hospital, and her session not only exceeded my already high expectations but also left a lasting impact on everyone who attended. The feedback from participants was universally enthusiastic.

When Susan shared that she was expanding her coaching practice, I was thrilled to be able to work with her one-on-one. Her coaching was transformative and gave me the clarity and confidence to pursue an exciting new career journey. I recommend Susan without hesitation to anyone seeking to elevate their leadership effectiveness and unlock new possibilities for personal and professional growth.

Jessica Kahn MD MPH, Senior Associate Dean, Clinical and Translation Research, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

At the time I met Susan, I had just undertaken a new step in my career. I was selected to be the Head of a District Hospital. I had never undertaken such a task and was having difficulty connecting with the staff. With Susan’s coaching I was able to connect with them, form working relationships with all the staff and get things done. Susan is easy to talk to and will help you help yourself by coming up with your own ways of getting things done. She is awesome, over all an amazing person to work with. So happy I was able to meet her.

Michael Veerasammy MD, Georgetown, Guyana

Your recent workshop session on Navigating Your Career was extremely well received! The evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of respondents awarding the highest possible score of 5 out of 5. Below are a few representative comments: “Amazing talk”, “This helped me reflect on my career trajectory and what my priorities are for the future”, “I found the workbook so helpful”, “I appreciated the breadth of what was covered and the applicability to all career stages”.

Anne Kawamura MD, Head of Developmental Paediatrics, University of Toronto

Head, Division of Developmental Pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics, University of Toronto

When I first contacted Susan, I wanted to plan my next career move. At the time, I was feeling confused and responsible for outcomes at work regardless of whether they were within my control. I was afraid of making mistakes and anticipated moving on. Susan helped me step back from the situation, see the big picture and better understand it. Once I understood what was holding me back, I was able to very rapidly let go of my previous concerns. As a result, I became more productive, creative and happier at work. I highly recommend Susan as a leadership coach. She is a kind and gentle person who genuinely appreciates your uniqueness and wants to help you bring out your best.

Anne-Julie Houle PhD, Research Advisor, a U15 University

a U15 University, Canada

I had been feeling directionless in my career for some time and trying to determine how to move forward with intention, to plan for the final phase of my career. Susan’s coaching was pivotal in allowing me to see patterns and understand what I valued most about my work. Over the course of our sessions together, I was able to make important decisions about where to invest my energy going forward. Susan was very thoughtful, professional, and created a safe space for reflection about balance, leadership and academic pursuits. I found her coaching to be highly effective in clarifying my career-related issues and would return for further sessions without hesitation.

Cindy Grief MD, Medical Director of Mental Health Services, Baycrest

Baycrest Health Sciences, Toronto

Dr. Susan Lieff is an incredibly helpful and insightful coach. When I met with Susan I was facing a significant challenge in my leadership position. I felt overwhelmed with the sheer number of operational tasks I had to confront and manage, and I felt that many of these were impeding my focus and ability to move forward on larger more visionary projects. Susan helped me work through an organized and structured way to look at all my different tasks and projects, so that I could create more time for the important and impactful projects I felt I was neglecting. Susan never does “the work” for you or tells you what to do, rather she is an amazing sounding board who listens and supportively challenges your approach, and helps you land on your own specific, actionable path forward to effect change. Her coaching me through this made a huge impact on my time management, and on how I still conceptualize tasks going forward. I would highly recommend anyone working through leadership challenges to connect with Susan for support!

LB MD, Division Head, Teaching Hospital

Teaching Hospital, Canada

Dr Susan Lieff has been affiliated with Schulich ExecEd for over a decade and is ranked among the top healthcare experts in this field. In her capacity of Program Director for several programs in our Healthcare practice, Susan has left an indelible mark on all those who came in contact with her. The programs that she led were complex in nature and were targeted to healthcare professionals such as physicians, senior hospital administrators, nurses, practitioners, and other administrative staff. These were innovative, relevant as well as impactful to both clients and participants. Susan brings her deep knowledge and experience in the industry in terms of design, coaching and facilitation as well as a vast network of practitioners that she embeds into her programs to ensure relevancy and ‘real world experience’. Susan takes a hands-on approach with her programs and deeply cares for her students. Through these programs she was able to upskill many individuals and get them ready to the next phase in their respective careers as well as transform various aspect of the healthcare industry.

Rami Mayer, Executive Director, Schulich Executive Education, York University

Schulich ExecEd, Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

Bring Susan in to Speak

Why Choose Susan?

Possible Speaking Topics

My Experience Includes Collaborations With

Academic Settings

Medical Education Associations

Healthcare Organizations

Testimonials

Mariam Abdurrahman MD, Chief of Psychiatry, St. Joseph’s Health Centre, Toronto

Lynn Wilson MD, CCFP, FCFP, Vice Dean, Clinical and Faculty Affairs, Associate Vice Provost, Relations with Healthcare Institutions, University of Toronto

Jennifer Gommerman PhD, Chair, Dept of Immunology, University of Toronto

Jessica Kahn MD MPH, Senior Associate Dean, Clinical and Translation Research, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

Michael Veerasammy MD, Georgetown, Guyana

Anne Kawamura MD, Head of Developmental Paediatrics, University of Toronto

Anne-Julie Houle PhD, Research Advisor, a U15 University

Cindy Grief MD, Medical Director of Mental Health Services, Baycrest

LB MD, Division Head, Teaching Hospital

Rami Mayer, Executive Director, Schulich Executive Education, York University

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