Ronan is an acclaimed international keynote speaker who advises industry leaders on how to create sustainable, high-performance teams. His clients include Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Siemens Energy, Kellogg's, L’Oreal, Sky, IHG, Sage, TUI, the UK Treasury, and Oxford University.
His innovative approach boosts productivity and well-being, helping companies drive sustainable standards of excellence during times of demanding change. A former futurist to the British Foreign Office, he is at the forefront of workplace trends, and as a LinkedIn Top Voice on Public Speaking, he always has a memorable one-liners up his sleeve.
His hugely entertaining keynotes introduce audiences to a new way of working grounded in the cutting-edge science of resilience and productivity, with practical tools to apply when we return to our teams. What truly sets Ronan apart is his ability to inspire through his own story—a jaw-dropping cautionary tale about the pressures of senior leadership and the consequences when we get it wrong.
He navigated the corridors of power before being diagnosed with a lifetime chronic pain condition. It’s rare to hear a story of triumph from within an ongoing adversity. This is the lucidity, depth and wisdom we need to dig deeper during tough times.
How to hire Ronan Harrington
Contact the Champions Speakers Agency to provisionally enquire about hiring Ronan Harrington for your next event, today. To get in touch, simply call an official booking agent on 0207 1010 553 or email us at [email protected] for more information.
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Ronan Harrington's official speaking topics are listed below:
True Resilience: Ronan’s Jaw-Dropping Personal Story of Triumph from Adversity
In his most celebrated and award-winning keynote, Ronan shares his jaw-dropping insights into the pressures of senior leadership, the last consequences of getting it wrong, and how to transform when adversity strikes.
As a futurist to the British Foreign Office, he navigated the corridors of power before being later diagnosed with a lifetime chronic pain condition.
It’s rare to hear a story of triumph from within an ongoing adversity. This is precisely the lucidity, depth and wisdom we need to dig deeper during tough times.
How to Lead Resilient, High-Performance Teams
Ronan shows executives and people managers how to shift from overwhelmed task coordinators to composed performance conductors and caring people leaders.
His keynote is packed with tools for building surplus time and giving your team the emotional support and autonomy they need to operate at their best.
Leaders are shown the mindsets required to transition their team from basic psychological safety to psychological freedom. Equipped with the best collaborative tools, they learn how to make difficult conversations a daily habit, shift from blame to responsibility, and create a culture of masterful appreciation.
The result is a high-performance team where people feel energised to do the best work of their lives.
Become a High Performer with a Low Risk of Burnout
In our demanding work cultures, far too many of us are operating in an unsustainable state of burnout. But there's a better way - a path to resilience that unlocks your highest performance without sacrificing your wellbeing.
In this eye-opening and award-winning keynote, I reveal the secrets to achieving sustainable excellence grounded in the cutting-edge science of resilience and productivity.
You'll walk away with:
- A new understanding of what drains versus renews your energy
- Practical, science-backed tools to reset your work practices
- Rituals to prioritise rejuvenation and avoid depletion
- Techniques to inspire resilience as a team and organisational culture
Prepare to experience a profound mind-shift around how to thrive as a high performer in our overstressed world. You'll emerge with a revitalising new model of sustainable excellence to upgrade your team’s impact.
The Fearless Organization: Unleash Peak Performance through Psychological Safety
In today's world, psychological safety is the ultimate game-changer. When people feel safe speaking up and being candid, innovation and productivity explode.
Yet most workplaces inadvertently create cultures of fear that strangle honesty. In this eye-opening keynote and workshop, you'll discover:
- Psychological safety: What it is & why it’s critical for high-performing teams
- Relational excellence: Specific skills to build psychological safety over time
- Explore three common work scenarios where we can increase or undermine psychological safety
- Powerful tools to set new standards of excellence
Through powerful activities and a science-backed framework, you'll gain tools to make psychological safety second nature. You'll inspire your team to voice ideas, take risks, and push past fear.
Seize this opportunity to nurture a fearless, truth-telling culture that catapults success.
Take Back Control: How to Master Excessive Workload
Knowledge work is broken. We're drowning in a relentless digital avalanche of tasks, addicted to busyness and reactive "lawn mowing." Faced with punishing workloads and the tyranny of 24/7 availability, we end up burned out and delivering diluted impact.
There is a better way. In this eye-opening keynote, you'll master a radical new methodology to reclaim your focus, rejuvenation and ability to create "wow" experiences that drive fierce client loyalty.
Through powerful insights, interactive exercises and a comprehensive new framework, you'll learn to:
- Flip the script on toxic productivity norms holding you hostage
- Upgrade your personal energy management for fierce focus and renewal
- Rewrite the client engagement model for sustainable value creation
- Foster a culture of healthy excellence that doesn't sacrifice wellbeing
- Streamline chaos and upshift to higher-leverage, high-impact work
You'll emerge with a revitalising new blueprint for driving true excellence. No more settling for fragmented efforts and mediocre results.
Leadership Talk Show: Hard Won Wisdom from the Inside
Ronan hosts leadership talk shows with a panel of senior leaders from your company.
The theme is typically High Performance Leadership. Ronan asks them for their hard-won wisdom and then shares what the research on high performance says. Then, leaders, on the inside, interrogate whether the theory works in practice. This road-testing ideas with leaders at the coal face means people are more likely to apply the best insights and tools
Ronan showcases how to drive higher productivity, deepen renewal, change the client/customer dynamic so you both can work in a sustainable way and set new standards of excellence for your team.
If your company needs a leadership talk show that combines wisdom from the inside with expertise from the outside, this is the one for you.
Back in the Groove: Power Moves that Boost Our Mental Health
I share the surprising external adjustments that can make us feel more balanced and happy on the inside.
Together, we'll learn the power moves most effective in boosting our mental health:
- Taking back control of our work agenda so it becomes manageable
- Tending to the four pillars of our life: home, family, work, and health
- Feeding our brain and body for the most positive outlook
- Becoming your own coach when life pivots are needed
- Encouraging a culture of openness about our mental health
- The mindsets needed when the going gets tough
Candour Unleashed: Master the Art of Difficult Conversations
Tough talks at work can be minefields to navigate. Whether you're giving tough feedback, dealing with underperformance, or discussing sensitive issues like compensation, the stakes are high.
One wrong step can demolish trust and create relationships.
In this powerful keynote and hands-on workshop, you'll be equipped with a game-changing framework called Radical Candour.
You'll learn how to:
- Build trusting, honest relationships while avoiding brutality
- Say what needs to be said while still caring personally
- Eliminate fear and motivate people rather than hurt them
- Challenge directly while showing you care about each person
Through real-world examples, engaging activities, and proven tools, you'll walk away confident and skilled in tackling even the most difficult conversations. Stop walking on eggshells and start getting real in a way that unlocks peak performance.
Candid communication doesn't have to be a clash of egos or personal attacks. Master the Radical Candour approach to have caring, productive dialogues that clear the air and move everyone forward. You'll transform your ability to navigate life's toughest talks.
Boundless: Shatter the Success Ceiling with Growth Mindset
In the age of relentless disruption, organisations that achieve sustainable high performance aren't just talented - they're obsessed with getting better daily. They have an unstoppable growth mindset that powers ongoing adaptation, learning, and performance gains.
This mind-shifting keynote and immersive workshop will equip you with the strategies to activate a transformative, growth-obsessed culture across your teams. You'll discover:
- The powerful beliefs and behaviours that unleash perpetual growth
- Frameworks to embrace challenges as fuel instead of avoiding them
- How to reframe failure as data instead of something to fear or conceal
- Rituals to nurture proliferating feedback, curiosity and development
- Techniques to role model, motivate and coach a growth mindset daily
Through eye-opening insights, self-assessments, and hands-on tools, you'll transcend the fixed mindsets, competency traps, and mental ceilings sabotaging your organisation's true potential. You'll cultivate an environment where continuous renewal, upskilling, and raising standards are business as usual.
Stop hitting performance plateaus. Never settle for good enough. Whether you're an established market leader or an ambitious upstart, a limitless growth mindset will prove your ultimate competitive advantage.
Unleash Innovation by Mastering the Experiment Mindset
In this era of constant disruption, the companies that thrive are the ones that innovate relentlessly. But how do you build a culture of unstoppable innovation? By transforming your organisation into a living lab of experimentation.
This high-impact keynote and hands-on workshop will equip you with the strategies to drive a pervasive culture of curiosity, testing, and intelligent risk-taking. Discover:
- The game-changing mindsets that unleash breakthrough innovation
- Powerful frameworks for rapid experimentation and validated learning
- How to nurture an environment safe for failure, questions, and unconventional ideas
- Best practices for testing, measuring, and pivoting faster than competitors
- Proven techniques to make experimentation a habit across your organisation
Through immersive activities, real-world case studies, and an actionable toolbox, you'll learn to hardwire a bias toward action over inertia. You'll empower your people to explore new boundaries, embrace ambiguity, and find new solutions to your biggest challenges.
Future-Proof Your Company: Master the Human Skills for the AI Age
Artificial intelligence is redefining work as we know it. The jobs of tomorrow will be radically different than today. As AI automates routine tasks, the most valuable skills will be the uniquely human ones that machines can't replicate.
In this thought-provoking keynote and interactive workshop, you'll gain the essential mindsets and capabilities to future-proof your career in the age of intelligent technologies. Discover:
- The key human skills that will be in exponential demand as AI advances
- How to cultivate creativity, judgement, and high emotional intelligence
- Strategies to continuously reinvent yourself and acquire new abilities
- Techniques to maximise human-machine collaboration and teamwork
- Frameworks to thrive amid constant change and navigate career pivots
You'll build muscle memory through powerful exercises in skills like complex reasoning, empathy, influential communication, and coaching ability. You'll learn to pair your human ingenuity with technology for radically improved results.
AI is either the best or worst thing to happen to careers. Those who upskill and embrace hybrid human-machine roles will soar. Those who fail to evolve stagnate. Take charge of your future by mastering the durable skills to adapt and thrive.
How to Embed a Culture of Sustainable Performance
A new model of sustainable performance is emerging that is a win-win for productivity and wellbeing. It creates space through workplace design and cultural norms for deep focus and renewal.
But there is a major obstacle: How do you get leaders to role model new ways of working so they become the new norm for the whole organisation? They must let go of old working methods that have led to their career success.
Ronan shares a new method leading companies use to overcome old, engrained working methods. Audiences are introduced to the 3 M framework: Mindsets, Mechanisms, and Modelling, first articulated by leading researcher Nick Petrie. This method allows them to define, embed, and scale any desired leadership behaviour, from sustainable working practices to psychological safety.
This is a must-see keynote for leaders who want to embed a company-wide culture of sustainable high performance.
After Dinner Entertainment: Open Mic Night / Failure Fest
It’s party time! Often, the evening entertainment is fun but not impactful. We’re missing an opportunity to see more of each other and solidify professional relationships.
Employees take the stage, sharing a story, poem, song, or their hilarious story of failure. You will be surprised at their secret gifts and hidden depths!
At the surface level, it’s some light evening entertainment, but it again serves a deeper purpose: People feel seen and are celebrated by their peers. That deepening of belonging, the feeling of camaraderie, is the cornerstone of truly great companies.
Ronan is an experienced after-dinner host and makes for an entertaining MC on the night.
Official Feedback from In-Person & Virtual Events
Feedback from In-Person Events:
"Ronan is a world class resilience teacher. His ability to connect leaders with themselves and each other is rare." - John, Head of Strategic Relationships, KPMG
"Our Leadership Team is still talking about it and it has prompted a very healthy and open discussion about how we build resilience for ourselves and our people. Thank you Ronan – you were brilliant." - Scott, Head of Financial Consulting, Deloitte
"Insightful, authentic and engaging. His personal story is highly compelling and I would recommend anyone working in a high performance culture or role to spend time with Ronan." - Chris, VP Technology, IBM
"I left Ronan’s talk truly speechless and determined to take better care of myself. He tells his resilience story through sharing deeply moving lived experiences, anchoring it with compelling science, breathing it to life with humour and relatability – a rare, powerful alchemy that goes so far beyond a typical “keynote speaker” it seems a miss to even refer to it as that. Essential. Inspirational. Human." - Julia, Director, Employee Experience AKQA
"Ronan’s keynote was one of the stand out moments at our conference. A 500 person standing ovation and by all accounts, not a dry eye in the house." - Oliver, Managing Director, HR TechX
"I’ve told so many people about Ronan’s talk as it was one of the most thought provoking and poignant presentations I’ve ever had." - Face, Chief Information and Digital Transformation Officer, Simply Health
"We were really pleased with how the session went and had positive feedback from many of the 100+ attendees. Ronan’s style was engaging and he delivered some excellent points well. The structure of the session worked well with the right balance of breakout sessions and there were some helpful and practical takeaways that our leaders will be able to put into action immediately. We would happily book Ronan again and would recommend him to others." - Rachel, People Director, Travelopia
"The event with Ronan was a full success! He gave a very inspiring and engaging speech and touched everybody in the room – intellectually and emotionally. He organised a very good mix between presenting facts & figures, giving practical tips and initiating short breakout-sessions to ensure full engagement of all participants. Ronan fulfilled 100% of our expectations." - Thomas, CFO Siemens Energy
- 2023 - Highly Commended as Best Live Speaker and voted in the top 5 Best Story Tellers at the 2023 Speaker Awards.
- 2022 - Became a LinkedIn Top Voice on Public Speaking
- 2021 - Partnered with leading firms such as EY, KPMG, and Deloitte to develop and implement resilience programmes for high-performance teams.
- 2020 - Launched his consultancy focused on resilience and wellbeing
- 2019 - Introduced innovative frameworks for resilience training that were adopted by several Fortune 500 companies.
- 2018 - Appointed as a lecturer for the KPMG Executive Leadership Programme
- 2017 - Published articles and research on the importance of mental health and resilience in professional settings
- 2016 - Recognised for significant contributions to mental health and wellbeing in the workplace
- 2014 - Worked as a futurist for the British Foreign Office
- 2011 - Completed a major research project on the psychological impacts of leadership stress
- 2010 - Delivered a series of lectures at various universities on the future of work and the role of resilience in professional success
- 2009 - Started his career as a consultant focusing on leadership development and resilience, working with small businesses to improve their workplace culture
- 2008 - Co-authored a book on resilience and leadership, which became a reference point for professionals in the field
