Jenae Turner

Jenae’s career began in hospitality, where she held senior management roles from a young age and led operations for some of Vancouver’s most recognised restaurant groups. After moving to New Zealand, she created and scaled the HR function at Jarden, a fast-growing financial services firm, from 180 to 350+ employees through organic growth and acquisitions. For the past six years, Jenae has been part of Humankind, working with ambitious organisations across financial services, technology, government, and manufacturing — helping leaders navigate high growth, complexity, and transformation.

Jenae is recognised for her “creative pragmatism” — blending commercial acumen, systems thinking, and a future-focused mindset. She’s a natural relationship builder and connector, adept at navigating tricky stakeholder dynamics and influencing outcomes at board and executive levels. Jenae is known for designing scalable, repeatable frameworks and for her ability to make the complex simple, always pushing for mutual value for both people and business. She’s the go-to for leadership performance, stakeholder management, and developing new ways of working that set teams apart.

Jenae is especially proud of her work with Ideally, where she helped align and develop the leadership team, working closely with the board to embed frameworks that enabled rapid growth, doubled the team size, and maintained a high-performance culture as the company accelerated towards $10M ARR within two years. This gave Ideally the clarity, structure, and people processes needed to scale quickly without losing their competitive and desriable culture, ensuring both commercial success and a thriving, energised team.

Jenae is motivated by unlocking potential — in organisations, teams, and individuals. She believes in finding the “mutual value” where business performance and people performance reinforce one another. For her, success means solving hard problems, enabling ambitious organisations to grow with pace, and ensuring that people flourish while delivering exceptional results.

Jenae’s style is best described as calm confidence with straight-talking energy. She brings humour and fun to her work, and isn’t afraid of tough conversations or challenges. Clients and colleagues value her ability to read the room, tailor her approach, and move at pace — always learning, improving, and finding better ways to do things. She excels at making the complex simple and is known for her strategic, commercial thinking.