Clare Kenny
Most organisations have a wellbeing strategy. Fewer have a culture where people feel safe enough to use it. The barrier is rarely policy or resource: it is leader behaviour. When leaders cannot or will not name their own stress, anxiety, or neurodivergence, no amount of programme investment changes that reality.
Clare Kenny addresses the gap between wellbeing policy and lived workplace culture, drawing on her experience as Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry to help organisations build environments where psychological safety is a leadership habit, not a HR initiative.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Clare Kenny
- Her role as Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry, responsible for a strategy covering 9,000 employees globally, gives her credibility with CHROs and operational leaders alike. She built the business case for wellbeing investment at scale, not just the human one.
- Prior career at YSC Consulting (part of Accenture) and MindGym grounds her frameworks in leadership psychology and behavioural science, not wellness trends or personal experience alone.
- Her TEDx talk reframes addiction as a spectrum behaviour present in most high-performance cultures, shifting the conversation from individual stigma to a risk organisations are actively creating through their own culture.
- Her work on ADHD and neuroinclusion moves beyond awareness. She helps organisations identify the specific leadership and structural conditions that enable neurodivergent talent to perform, and the ones that quietly prevent it.
- She moves wellbeing from a programme organisations fund to a behaviour leaders practise. That shift is what determines whether culture actually changes.
Biography highlights
- BSc in Psychology, University of Manchester
- Former Global Wellbeing Lead, Burberry: led the global wellbeing strategy for a 9,000-person workforce
- Former Head of Client Operations (Europe), YSC Consulting (part of Accenture), leadership advisory
- Former Client Executive, MindGym, behavioural science learning and development consultancy
- TEDx speaker on rethinking addiction as a spectrum issue present in high-performance environments
- Clients include Warner Bros Discovery, KPMG, Ministry of Justice, Channel 4, Specsavers, Fidelity International, Avanade, and HSBC
Biography
At Burberry, the global wellbeing strategy covered 9,000 employees across multiple continents. Building that infrastructure required a specific kind of credibility; part organisational psychology, part leadership consultancy experience, and a willingness to name what most organisations actively avoid.
Clare Kenny holds a BSc in Psychology from the University of Manchester and built her professional foundations at MindGym, a behavioural science learning and development consultancy. She moved into leadership advisory at YSC Consulting (part of Accenture), running client operations across Europe. That sequence; psychology, behavioural science, leadership consulting, shapes how she approaches wellbeing as an organisational systems problem, not a personal one.
Her most defining role was Global Wellbeing Lead at Burberry, where she designed and ran the company’s wellbeing strategy across its global workforce. That experience directly informs her current work with organisations including KPMG, Warner Bros Discovery, Channel 4, and the Ministry of Justice, where her focus is on psychological safety, neuroinclusion, and the leadership behaviours that create or undermine mentally healthy cultures.
Clare also speaks from personal experience of ADHD, addiction, anxiety, and grief. Her TEDx talk reframes addiction as a spectrum behaviour recognisable in most high-performance environments: not a personal failing confined to a few. That willingness to name what organisations routinely avoid is what makes her work function as more than awareness-raising. It becomes a credible basis for sustained culture change.
Key speaking topics
- Psychological safety and workplace mental health
- Neuroinclusion and ADHD at work
- Sustainable leadership under pressure
- Addiction and numbing behaviours in high-performance cultures
- Wellbeing strategy and culture transformation
- Leadership resilience
Ideal for
- CHROs and people directors designing or resetting a wellbeing strategy
- Senior leaders and executive teams navigating burnout or culture health
- HR and organisational development teams in professional services, media, financial services, and retail
- Organisations building neuroinclusive cultures or addressing gaps in psychological safety
Audience outcomes
- A clearer understanding of why wellbeing strategies fail to shift culture – and what actually changes leader behaviour
- Practical tools for recognising and responding to psychological safety issues at team level
- A reframed understanding of neurodivergence and addiction as organisational conditions, not individual ones
- Confidence to have honest leadership conversations about mental health in high-performance settings
- Specific practices for sustaining performance without burning people out
Talks
Examines how sustained operational pressure quietly degrades the performance of capable teams – and what leaders can do differently to build cultures of sustainable high performance rather than chronic firefighting.
Key takeaways:
- How chronic stress erodes decision-making, focus, and team dynamics – often invisibly, and most severely in the people organisations most rely on
- The neurological mechanisms that keep teams stuck in reactive mode, and why conventional resilience programmes rarely address them
- Practical shifts in leadership behaviour and team design that create the conditions for sustained, rather than depleted, performance
Drawing on the findings of Google’s Project Aristotle, this talk examines what psychological safety actually demands of leaders – and why most organisations are inadvertently undermining it.
Key takeaways:
- What distinguishes psychological safety from comfort or low challenge – and why most organisations conflate them
- The specific leader behaviours that build psychological safety, and the common ones that quietly erode it
- How to make psychological safety a consistent leadership habit rather than a culture aspiration that never reaches team level
Explores how a leader’s own emotional regulation directly shapes the psychological state of their team – translating neuroscience into practical insight for how leaders show up under pressure.
Key takeaways:
- Why a leader’s stress state is physiologically contagious, and how the nervous system of a team reflects its leadership
- The mechanisms behind co-regulation, and why calm leadership is a performance variable, not a personality trait
- Practical tools for leaders to manage their own regulation under pressure – and the measurable effect this has on team performance
Reframes burnout prevention as a commercial performance issue rather than a welfare obligation – and equips leaders with the tools to address root causes rather than manage symptoms.
Key takeaways:
- Why burnout is an organisational design problem, not a personal resilience failure – and why treating it as the latter makes outcomes worse
- The specific cultural and leadership conditions that generate burnout, and how to identify them before the cost becomes visible in attrition or output
- A practical framework for leaders to treat workload, autonomy, and psychological safety as performance variables, not HR responsibilities
Examines the gap between neurodiversity awareness and the structural and cultural conditions that actually enable neurodivergent employees to contribute at their best – and makes the commercial case for closing it.
Key takeaways:
- Why most workplace environments are designed around a narrow cognitive norm, and the performance cost of that design for organisations and individuals alike
- Why cognitive diversity is a source of competitive differentiation, and the specific conditions required to capture it
- Practical steps for leaders to identify and address the environments, processes, and norms that inadvertently limit neurodivergent contribution
Videos
Testimonials
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Asia Pacific | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Europe | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |
| Middle East & Africa | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| South America | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| United Kingdom | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US East Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US West Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |