By: Aman Jalan
Lana Johnston is not your typical HR consultant. She does not arrive with a templated framework, a generic culture audit, or a one-size-fits-all program. She arrives with questions.
As the founder and CEO of Taking It Forward (TIF), a Brisbane-based people-led transformation advisory, Lana has spent more than 25 years in organizations, and a significant part of that time watching the same gap appear, again and again. The gap between what a business says about its people and what its people actually experience.
Closing that gap is the work she has built her business around.
A Career Forged in Real Accountability
Lana’s professional journey did not begin in a consulting room. It began on the floor of a bank branch, where she became one of the youngest female Business Banking Managers at NAB, leading a large, geographically dispersed team with up to 29 direct reports across mixed accountabilities.
That early experience was formative. She was not just learning about people management. She was doing it, in real time, with real consequences. She was topping results while managing the complexity that comes with leading people across different locations, different roles, and different pressures.
She carried that grounded, delivery-focused mindset through more than 15 years of executive roles across industries as varied as the arts, financial services, and major corporate brands.
Board and committee positions were a way to foster her deep commitment to community, shaped in part by her upbringing, by a father who coached, mentored, and served on committees, and by a childhood that instilled in her a belief that showing up for others is not optional. It is foundational.
The Five Qualities That Separate Good Leaders from Lasting Ones
Reflecting on her executive career, Lana identifies five qualities she has seen again and again in leaders who perform and also leave something behind worth keeping.
- Curiosity: The best leaders ask questions and genuinely listen. They seek to understand before they act, and the decisions they make are better for it.
- Courage: Leadership requires making difficult calls, clearly and with conviction, even when those calls are uncomfortable.
- Self-awareness: Understanding your own strengths and blind spots is what allows you to build teams that complement rather than replicate you.
- Adaptability: The business environment does not wait. Leaders who thrive are the ones who can read a shift and respond with intent, not panic.
- Accountability: Owning what goes wrong and genuinely celebrating what goes right builds the kind of trust that makes teams want to follow.
At the center of all of it, she says, is something simpler than any framework: a genuine care for the people in the room.
“When people feel that you actually care, they do not just do their jobs. They bring themselves to their jobs. And that changes everything.”
The Gap That Would Not Close
Taking It Forward was not born from theory. It was born from a pattern Lana could no longer ignore.
After years of watching organizations invest in sophisticated HR systems, carefully worded values statements, and well-intentioned initiatives, and still struggle with the same challenges, she started asking a different question.
Not: what are we doing?
But: what are people actually experiencing?
The clearest moment came during a major transformation project. The technical components were in place. The process was sound. But the outcomes only shifted when the team stopped focusing on the structure and started focusing on the people inside it, on their concerns, their uncertainty, and the stories they were telling themselves about what the change meant for them. That became the foundation of TIF.
What Taking It Forward Actually Does
TIF operates across two core areas: Organizational Design and People Practices.
On the organizational design side, TIF works alongside businesses managing significant structural change, including transformations, restructures, mergers, demergers, and acquisitions. The work is strategic. It is not about drawing a new org chart. It is about understanding what the organization needs its people to do and designing the conditions that make that possible.
On the people practices side, TIF provides high-value HR project work that organizations either lack the internal capacity or the specific capability to deliver themselves. This includes people planning, strategic workforce planning, capability frameworks, and people-centered program design.
TIF also offers leadership coaching for individuals, teams, and boards working through complexity or transition.
What runs through all of it is a consistent starting point: listen first, build what is needed.
“We do not work from a template. We listen first, and we build what’s needed.”
That positioning is deliberate. TIF is not designed to replace an organization’s HR function. It is designed to complement it. The clients that TIF works with already have people capability internally. What they need is strategic capacity at specific, high-stakes moments.
People Requirements Belong in Strategy From the Start
One of the ideas Lana returns to consistently is this: the people dimension of a business decision can be treated as secondary.
A restructure is designed, then HR is asked to manage the fallout. A new strategy is set, then workforce planning happens afterward. A change program launches, then communication planning begins.
She has watched this cost organizations dearly, in execution quality, in employee experience, and in the time it takes to recover from avoidable missteps.
TIF’s work is built on a different premise: people’s requirements need to be considered at the same time as the business strategy, not after it. When that happens, the outcomes are faster, cleaner, and more likely to hold.
The Messy Middle
There is a phrase Lana uses often when she talks about transitions: the messy middle.
It refers to the period between a decision being made and the change being embedded. It is the space where most transformation efforts quietly fall apart, not because the strategy was wrong, but because the human experience of getting there was underestimated.
People in the messy middle are processing. They are recalibrating. They are deciding, often without being asked, whether they are in or out.
TIF’s work in this space is not about keeping people comfortable. It is about keeping them informed, involved, and moving forward with purpose.
That requires leaders who can communicate clearly under pressure, who can hold the line on the direction while acknowledging what people are carrying, and who understand that their own visible steadiness during change is one of the most powerful tools they have.
It is also why Lana is currently developing a dedicated support program for people leaders facing exactly this, a program focused on emotional intelligence, communication, influence, and the practical skills required to sustain transformation outcomes beyond the initial announcement.
Connection with Lana: The Human Dimension
Alongside Taking It Forward, Lana runs a separate initiative called Connection with Lana, a project grounded in a different but deeply related belief: that meaningful connection is something people have to work at, at every stage of life.
Connection with Lana focuses on helping individuals build and maintain genuine relationships with their aging loved ones. Lana has written a book on this topic, not as a professional credential, but as a values statement. A reflection of who she is and what she believes about people, regardless of context.
She noticed that many people who deeply cared for their aging family members had drifted into surface-level contact, visits that felt dutiful rather than meaningful, conversations that stayed safely shallow.
The same skills she brings to organizational work (listening, bridging perspectives, and creating the conditions for honest conversation) apply here too.
It is not a coincidence. For Lana, the through-line between her professional work and Connection with Lana is the same: relationships, done well, require intention.
A Principle That Has Never Left
“People will forget what you said and what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.”
Lana returns to this idea across every context, in executive coaching, in restructuring work, in leadership development, and in her connection support when it comes to aging loved ones.
In a corporate environment where metrics, deliverables, and quarterly outcomes dominate the conversation, she holds a steady position: those things matter, and they are not enough on their own.
How people experience leadership, particularly during change, shapes whether they stay, whether they contribute, and whether they carry the organization’s goals as their own.
That is not a soft idea. That is a commercial reality. And it is one that Taking It Forward is built to address.
Moving Forward
Lana Johnston is asking a different question altogether, one that starts not with the structure, but with the people inside it.
Through Taking It Forward and Connection with Lana, she continues to work on the belief that when organizations get serious about the human side of their strategy, the outcomes take care of themselves.
Not because people are the softer priority.
Because they were never the secondary ones.
Connect with Lana:
