- Expert on focus, prioritisation, and productivity drag
- Award-winning author of The Crazy Busy Cure and Badly Behaved People
- Executive coach at Oxford and Henley Business Schools
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. Zena 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. She has coached at Oxford Saïd Business School’s Executive MBA and is Associate Faculty at Henley Business School. Zena's 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, she 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.
Zena's showreel and videos
Topics, sessions and talks
Crazy Busy: Find Time For Priorities In An AI world
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.
Bringing Pre-Holiday Clarity To Every Day
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.
Controlling The Controllables
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.
Masterclass: Working Smarter Together
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.
Why we recommend booking Zena
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.
We wrapped up the Emerald programme last week, and I wanted to let you know that your session was highlighted as a real standout. The team not only valued the content but also appreciated your style and approach—they felt you truly focused on what they needed. Thank you for that!
Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer
We asked colleagues to rate the event overall (we normally score 4-4.3) – the rating for the event this time was 4.68 – our highest ever! Feel free to take whatever credit you like for that!
95% of colleagues felt that they were clear or very clear on action they needed to take as a result of what they had learned.
Content satisfaction score was 98.2% Very happy with this score. Average score for our events is 97.5%
Executive Forum Ireland
Executive Forum Ireland
Executive Forum Ireland
