Available to book
Zena Everett
Eliminate productivity drag and boost team performance with Zena Everett, leadership and workplace productivity speaker. Zena works with executives and HR leaders on focus, decision-making, and delegation, delivering award-winning insights for organisations including Vistage, Henley Business School, and London Business Forum.
Zena Everett is an organisational psychologist and leadership expert who helps leaders and teams cut through overload, sharpen priorities, and improve performance in an increasingly distracted, AI-driven workplace.
She is the author of Mind Flip, The Crazy Busy Cure, and Badly Behaved People, and works globally as a leadership coach and workshop facilitator. A former recruitment entrepreneur, she holds an MSc in Organisational Psychology and Career Management, with further postgraduate qualifications in psychological coaching and leadership from MIT Sloan Business School.
Zena has coached at Oxford Saïd Business School’s Executive MBA and is Associate Faculty at Henley Business School. Her work focuses on the gap between strategic priorities and how organisations actually spend time. She helps leaders reduce productivity drag caused by poor communication, inefficient meetings, digital overload, and unclear decision-making.
Drawing on research, coaching psychology, and commercial experience, Zena gives audiences practical ways to improve focus, delegation, feedback, accountability, and leadership confidence without adding unnecessary complexity or jargon. Audiences leave with realistic tools to reclaim time, strengthen team ownership, and create healthier performance cultures. Her sessions combine evidence-based insight with relatable examples, helping leaders think more clearly, communicate more effectively, and protect time for strategic work in demanding environments.
Book Zena Everett for practical leadership insight that helps organisations focus, simplify, and perform better under pressure.
Topics, sessions and talks
Zena Everett opens with a challenge most leaders recognise immediately: the team is working hard, yet strategy keeps losing to the urgent. In a world where AI accelerates the pace of work without clarifying its direction, she argues that clear thinking — not more effort — is the real competitive edge. Drawing on research showing that up to 40% of working time is lost to productivity drag, Zena gives audiences practical tools to strip out inefficient meetings, decision bottlenecks, and digital noise, and reclaim the time that belongs to judgement, creativity, and leadership.
Zena Everett explores why people do their most focused, decisive work in the hours before a holiday — and how to replicate that clarity every day. She unpacks the productivity illusion: the habit of treating effort and time spent as proxies for value, when neither guarantees that the right work is getting done. Audiences leave with a practical framework for choosing priorities over distractions, pushing back professionally on low-value demands, and compressing tasks to the time they actually deserve.
In a session designed for teams facing sustained pressure and competing demands, Zena Everett draws on her background in organisational psychology to help participants reconnect with their own priorities and energy. The format is deliberately interactive and psychologically safe: attendees name what they are carrying, explore how it is affecting their focus and performance, and work through practical tools for staying grounded. Participants leave with immediate, personal actions and a clearer sense of where their attention should go.
What if teams could win back 40% of their week, not by working harder, but by removing the blockers that slow them down, fragment focus, and keep people in silos? Zena Everett helps organisations identify and eliminate productivity drag: the unclear outcomes, inefficient meetings, poor communication, lengthy decision-making, and endless digital interruptions that quietly consume days of talent and energy. This fast-paced, interactive masterclass uses live polling to surface each team's top blockers, then works through them in-session, with every participant leaving having removed at least one live blocker before the day is done.
Zena brings together the commercial insight of a former recruitment entrepreneur, years of executive coaching experience, and a strong academic grounding in organisational psychology and leadership. Audiences consistently rate her content highly because it is evidence-based, immediately usable, and delivered without jargon.
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frequently asked questions
Something we've not covered here?
To book Zena Everett, email zena.everett@getapeptalk.com or call PepTalk on +44 20 3835 2929 (UK) or +1 737 888 5112 (US), and one of our speaker agents will contact you within hours to confirm Zena's availability and speaking fee. If you can, please include your budget upfront – it helps us fast-track your request. It’s also helpful to know the date, format (virtual or in-person), location, and about your audience.
Zena Everett structures her sessions around a practical framework built on organisational psychology research, using the statistic that up to 40% of working time is lost to productivity drag as an anchor for audience reflection before moving into tools for cutting inefficient meetings, decision bottlenecks, and digital noise. Her format is deliberately interactive, inviting participants to name what they are carrying and work through personal actions in a psychologically safe environment.
Zena Everett speaks on productivity and priority management in AI-driven workplaces, leadership clarity and focus under pressure, and organisational psychology applied to team performance. She is the author of The Crazy Busy Cure and Associate Faculty at Henley Business School, with an MSc in Organisational Psychology and postgraduate qualifications from MIT Sloan Business School.
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Three to six months ahead is comfortable for most events, and 12 months is better for large conferences, peak-season dates or one specific in-demand speaker. Shorter timelines are workable, and PepTalk regularly fills last-minute and replacement bookings within days. Availability is the constraint, so get in touch as soon as you have a date.
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