Clare Kenny
Chronic pressure changes how people think. Judgement narrows and memory suffers, and capable people stop performing well before anyone would call it burnout. Another resilience programme will not fix that, because the drivers are leadership behaviour, unclear priorities, and always-on working norms.
Clare Kenny, who led global wellbeing strategy at Burberry, helps organisations move teams out of chronic survival mode and into sustained performance by changing the leadership behaviour and working norms that keep them there.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Clare Kenny
- Her material starts from nervous system science: what sustained activation does to decision quality, and which working norms are producing it.
- As Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry she owned a strategy covering 9,000 employees globally, so she argues the business case for wellbeing investment at scale, not only the human one.
- Her grounding is behavioural science and leadership psychology, from MindGym and from YSC Consulting, now part of Accenture.
- She has a TEDx talk on addiction and stigma, and lived experience of burnout, anxiety, addiction, and late-diagnosed ADHD, so the material on pressure is not delivered at a distance from it.
- On neuro-inclusion she starts from the arithmetic: around one in five people are neurodivergent, and most workplaces are designed for one type of brain.
Biography highlights
- Former Global Wellbeing Lead, Burberry: led global wellbeing strategy for a 9,000-person workforce
- Two decades in leadership and learning and development across Europe and Asia
- Former Head of Client Operations (Europe) at YSC Consulting, now part of Accenture, and Client Executive at MindGym, the behavioural science consultancy
- BSc in Psychology, University of Manchester
- TEDx speaker on addiction and stigma
- Clients include KPMG, Warner Bros Discovery, Channel 4, Novartis, Fidelity International, the Ministry of Justice, Specsavers, and the Harry Potter Studios
Biography
The ADHD diagnosis came at 40. The two decades before it involved extreme anxiety, emotional dysregulation, memory problems, addiction and overwhelm. Nobody suggested the obvious explanation, Clare Kenny included. She did not fit the picture most people carry of what ADHD looks like.
Living with an unregulated nervous system and no account of why is what pushed her towards the neuroscience of performance. The professional grounding came first. A BSc in Psychology from the University of Manchester, then MindGym, the behavioural science learning consultancy, then senior director roles in leadership consultancy across Europe and Asia. At YSC Consulting, now part of Accenture, she ran client operations for Europe.
As Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry she built and ran the wellbeing strategy for a 9,000-person global workforce. That in-house experience shapes where she puts the intervention: how leaders behave, how work is distributed, and when people are expected to be available. It is the starting point for her work with KPMG, Warner Bros Discovery, Channel 4, Novartis and the Ministry of Justice.
Her current material is translation work, taking the science of stress and behaviour and turning it into changes a senior team can make the following Monday. Her TEDx talk, “We Need to Change How We See Addiction”, sits behind the lived experience she brings to it. The keynotes lean on Google’s Project Aristotle, which found psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. She also works from a simpler fact: around one in five people are neurodivergent, and most workplaces are designed for one kind of brain.
Key speaking topics
- Neuroscience of stress and performance
- Nervous system regulation and leadership
- Psychological safety in high-performing teams
- Burnout prevention and sustainable performance
- Neuro-inclusion and diversity of thought
- Late-diagnosed ADHD in the workplace
Ideal for
- CHROs, people directors, and L&D leads resetting a wellbeing or performance strategy
- Executive teams and senior leadership offsites where burnout or sustained pressure is the presenting problem
- Leadership conferences and all-staff events on pressure, performance and workplace culture
- Culture change programmes, management development programmes, and inclusion events
Audience outcomes
- How to identify the working norms in their own organisation that are keeping people in a stress response
- What a leader’s own regulation does to a team, and how to change it deliberately
- How organisations undermine psychological safety without meaning to, and the leader behaviours that rebuild it
- Why neuro-inclusion is a question of how the environment is designed, and where to start changing it
- Language for having honest conversations about mental health inside a high-performance culture
Talks
How chronic stress degrades thinking and decision-making, and what teams can do to reverse it.
Key takeaways:
- What chronic pressure does to performance before anyone identifies a problem
- Why capable, high-performing people are not exempt from it
- What organisations can change to move teams out of reactive firefighting
How a leader’s nervous system ripples through their team, and the practical ways to regulate and role model it.
Key takeaways:
- How a leader’s own state transmits to the people they lead
- How to regulate deliberately under pressure, and what changes in a team when a leader does
- Why a regulated leader produces a regulated team, and what that looks like day to day
How to create environments where all brains can perform, drawn from her own experience of ADHD and two decades in leadership and organisational culture.
Key takeaways:
- Why most workplace design assumes a single type of brain, when around one in five people are neurodivergent
- What different minds contribute when the environment allows it
- Where diversity of thought creates commercial advantage
How to build a culture where people feel safe to speak up and challenge ideas, and what currently stops them.
Key takeaways:
- Google’s Project Aristotle finding that psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams
- The normalised behaviours that stop people speaking up and challenging ideas
- The specific leader behaviours that build it
Why burnout is a reflection of the environment people work in, and what teams can do to fix it.
Key takeaways:
- The organisational conditions that produce burnout
- The commercial case for prevention
- How to address root causes instead of managing symptoms