Leadership speaker, interviewer and professional emcee
Firing up audiences with the energy, insights and action for change

Holly Ransom is a dynamo: unusually knowledgeable, engaging, and thought-provoking. She has a real gift for bringing insights to life and drawing out the best ideas in the room.

Most popular keynote topics
Bridging the knowing-to-doing gap
High performance workplace cultures empower people to know better, and do better. At a time when companies are struggling to engage younger generations, retain women, and secure the skills that will drive the future, building a vibrant learning culture is critical.
With a set of powerful leadership tools gleaned from interviewing hundreds of the world’s top leaders, Holly will share a relevant set of micro-learnings to help people bridge what she terms ‘the implementation chasm’ in order to catalyze change.
Covering:
- peak performance
- managing energy not time
- holding ourselves accountable
- values that stick
- high-performance habits

Feet to the fire: asking the burning questions
Getting DEI right requires asking, and answering, the right questions. Psychological safety underpins inclusion, innovation, and problem solving. Yet homogenised and hierarchical workplace cultures continue. Holly has been working in gender equality and LGBTQIA+ inclusion collectively for over a decade, from microfinance projects in Kenya to systemic change within Fortune 100 companies.
Learn the leaders toolkit of DEI actions we all need to embed in our systems, structures and mindsets, in order to benefit from diverse perspectives in our world.
Covers:
- critical curiosity
- systems thinking
- creativity is serious business
- diversify our dice
- psychological safety

Getting comfortable being uncomfortable
Holly spent one full year challenging herself to do something that scared her every single day. She calls this the Year of Fear. Leaders benefit from bringing into consciousness the daily subliminal dance with fear, and shining a light on achieving tasks outside their comfort zone.
Holly teaches people how to navigate uncertainty and prepare for the unknown, our organizations benefit from thinking outside the box in order to see around corners. Holly teaches simple, actionable, micro-lessons that everyone can harness to face fear and lead more bravely.
Covering:
- chunking down the change journey
- comfort zone to courage zone
- building trust
- developing a growth mindset

Leadership development for the collective
Emergent leadership harnesses the power of the collective to anticipate, understand and action new information.
Every person on earth was born to lead change. Yet we continue to over-invest in a few individuals and under-invest in the many. Holly breaks open the power of the roles we play in our teams, our communities, and our families to catalyze change. She teaches not only the leadership lessons but also ways to share them and pay forward a bigger movement for change.
I want to break open the notion that leadership is exclusive. It’s not. And in today’s world, more than ever, we simply cannot afford for it to be.
Covering:
- communicating for impact
- building influence
- leading others
- feedback, feedforward
- critical conversations

Watch my short pitch on why we should work together…
Holly’s ability to weave an organization’s purpose, event themes and insights from global thought leaders together to tell transformational stories is unmatched. Putting her in front of our industry on PCMA’s biggest stage elevates the caliber of our general sessions and our audience looks forward to seeing her each year.