Who is Josephine Simeone?
Josephine Simeone is a highly respected executive coach, Chief People and Culture leader, and board director with more than three decades of experience shaping high-performance organizations across Asia Pacific. Founder of Peopletential Consulting, she advises CEOs, boards, and senior leadership teams of multinational and ASX-listed companies on purpose-driven transformation, future-ready leadership, and sustainable growth. Having held senior people leadership roles at organizations including Aon, LexisNexis, Nokia, Campbell Arnott’s, Pfizer, and Westpac, Josephine brings deep commercial acumen combined with evidence-based coaching expertise. Widely recognized for her ability to align performance with human accountability, she is trusted for her pragmatic insight, strategic clarity, and impact at the highest levels of leadership.
The Moment That Redefined Leadership
In periods of intense transformation, leaders are often tempted to prioritize speed, structure, and cost above all else. For Josephine Simeone, one defining experience early in her Asia Pacific executive career reshaped how she views performance altogether. Working through a complex regional transformation, she witnessed firsthand that sustainable results did not come from restructuring alone. They emerged only when leaders aligned purpose with accountability and modeled the behaviors they expected from others.
That insight has since become a cornerstone of Josephine’s work. High performance, in her view, is not achieved in spite of purpose. It is built through it. This philosophy now underpins her advisory work with CEOs, boards, and senior leadership teams navigating growth, disruption, and cultural change across global and ASX-listed organizations.
Building Commercial Acumen with Human Insight
Josephine’s career foundation was shaped by breadth, scale, and complexity. Beginning her professional journey in the banking and financial services sector, she developed an early appreciation for how people systems influence commercial outcomes. These formative years established a dual discipline that would define her leadership style: rigorous business thinking combined with deep respect for the human dimension of work.
As her career progressed across technology, telecommunications, FMCG, pharmaceuticals, and professional services, Josephine’s remit expanded across Australia, New Zealand, and the wider Asia Pacific region. She became known for her ability to operate fluently within matrixed, multicultural environments, balancing regional nuance with enterprise-wide strategy.
Her academic grounding in human resources and organizational psychology, combined with executive education and advanced coaching accreditations, provided a strong evidence-based lens. Yet it was lived experience, leading teams through ambiguity, growth, and restructuring, that sharpened her ability to advise leaders facing similar pressures today.
Leading Transformation at Scale
Josephine’s ascent into senior executive leadership saw her entrusted with some of the region’s most complex People and Culture portfolios. In roles spanning HR Director, Vice President of HR Asia Pacific, and Director of People & Culture Pacific, she consistently operated at the intersection of strategy, execution, and leadership maturity.
At LexisNexis, she served as Vice President of HR Asia Pacific from previously as Human Resources Director for the Pacific. There, she helped realign a fast-growing organization for customer centricity and innovation, introducing contemporary talent and organizational development models with measurable commercial impact. It was during this period that she deepened her conviction that leadership behavior, not policy, ultimately determines transformation success.
Her tenure at Aon further cemented her reputation as a strategic People and Culture leader. As Director, People and Culture, Pacific, Josephine led enterprise-wide strategy for a workforce of more than 3,000 colleagues, while serving on the Australia United Management Board. She played a pivotal role in strengthening leadership capability, succession planning, diversity, and the employee value proposition, ensuring people strategy directly supported profitable growth and client outcomes.
Earlier executive roles at Nokia, Campbell Arnott’s, Pfizer, and Westpac Group broadened her exposure to mergers, acquisitions, and operational turnarounds. Each experience reinforced her belief that leadership capability is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Coaching Leaders Where Performance Meets Purpose
After more than two decades in senior corporate leadership, Josephine founded Peopletential Consulting to address a recurring gap she observed across organizations. Too often, ambitious business strategies were disconnected from the leadership behaviors required to bring them to life.
Through Peopletential, Josephine now works as an executive and team coach, interim Chief People Executive, and trusted advisor to boards and CEOs across Asia Pacific. Her work is intentionally pragmatic, grounded in data, diagnostics, and evidence-based tools such as Hogan Assessments, while remaining deeply human.
As one senior leader described her impact:
“Josephine is a world-class strategic coach with a unique and powerful toolbox, balancing core business needs with genuine care for the workforce.”
Another client reflected on her rare combination of experience and insight:
“The combination of Josephine’s C-suite experience and expert coaching skills gives her a unique perspective to help take her clients to another level.”
Josephine’s coaching philosophy emphasizes clarity and accountability. She helps leaders cut through noise, interpret complex data about themselves and their teams, and translate insight into action. This ensures they do not over-leverage strengths or underestimate blind spots during periods of change.
Navigating Complexity with Evidence and Maturity
What distinguishes Josephine’s approach is her ability to help leaders hold commercial performance and human accountability simultaneously. In transformation environments, she grounds conversations in evidence rather than assumption, enabling executives to make disciplined decisions under pressure while remaining conscious of cultural impact.
Her work frequently involves supporting leaders through ambiguity, helping them build trust, maintain momentum, and role-model transparency when certainty is unavailable. This leadership maturity, she believes, enables organizations not only to survive disruption, but to emerge stronger on the other side.
Alongside her advisory and coaching work, Josephine contributes at board level, chairs HR change and technology committees in the community sector, and mentors high-potential, diverse emerging leaders. This extends her impact beyond corporate boundaries.
Designing Leadership for What Comes Next
Looking ahead, Josephine is focused on preparing leaders for a future defined by ongoing disruption, technological acceleration, and increasingly diverse workforces. She believes future-ready leadership demands more than technical expertise. It requires adaptability, systems thinking, emotional intelligence, and continuous learning.
As organizations grapple with the coexistence of AI and human capability, Josephine continues to help leaders design cultures where accountability, inclusion, and purpose remain non-negotiable. In her experience, leaders who remain curious, coachable, and anchored in values are best positioned to build relevance and resilience over the long term.
Editorial Note
Josephine Simeone’s career reflects a rare integration of commercial acumen, cultural intelligence, and leadership depth. From boardrooms to coaching conversations, she continues to shape how organizations think about performance, not as a trade-off with humanity, but as its outcome.
Executives and boards seeking to lead meaningful, sustainable transformation are invited to reflect on her central lesson: when leaders align purpose with accountability, people do not just adapt. They perform.
