This interview is part of Workology’s HR spotlight series, where we highlight influential HR leaders who are shaping the future of work through bold ideas and real-world impact. For this post, we’re talking to Jackie Johnston, Learning, Engagement and Performance Consultant for the City of Austin.
Jackie Johnston is a Learning, Engagement and Performance Consultant for the City of Austin, bringing a strategic, systems-oriented perspective to organizational development, human resources, and leadership. Throughout her career, she has worked across healthcare, higher education, private industry, and local government, serving as a recruiter, HR business partner, trainer, leadership and learning development director, and advisor to executives. That range of experience has given Jackie a broad view of how talent, leadership, culture, and performance intersect, and a habit of looking beyond individual programs to understand how the broader system is working.
At the heart of Jackie’s work is a curiosity about how decisions, behaviors, structures, and relationships shape people’s experience of work and the results they produce. As a coach, she helps leaders recognize the patterns behind how work gets done and navigate the space between where an organization has been and where it wants to go. Jackie holds a master’s degree in organizational leadership and communication from Gonzaga University and is an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC), SHRM-CP, and certified practitioner in TTI and MHS behavioral and emotional intelligence assessments.
5 Questions With Jackie Johnston
You’ve worked across recruiting, HRBP, learning and development, leadership, and executive advising. What do HR professionals understand differently when they’ve seen the employee experience from multiple sides?
You learn that the employee experience is not a collection of HR functions. It is one continuous story, and each role lets you see a different chapter. In recruiting, I shared the mission, values, and what joining an organization could feel like, essentially setting expectations. As an HRBP, I saw where those expectations held and where they began to fray. In learning and development, I learned that many “training needs” actually stem from unclear expectations, competing priorities, workload demands, or leadership practices.
In executive advising, I saw constraints and tradeoffs employees may never see.
Working across those perspectives also taught me translation. Operations may speak in cost, capacity, and risk. People work may speak in trust, capability, and growth. The language changes, but the underlying reality does not: the work and the people doing it are inseparable.
What I now understand is how much of the employee experience lives in the handoffs. Recruiting to onboarding. Learning to application. Strategy to execution. Leader intent to employee experience. No single function owns those spaces completely, yet they are often where the story of work is actually shaped.
What are leaders often missing when they look at employee engagement data?
Engagement data tells us something important, but it does not interpret itself. Whether the signal comes from a survey, turnover patterns, participation, absenteeism, internal movement, or something leaders are noticing in the day-to-day, the number or trend is only a starting point. I am as curious about where engagement appears strong as I am about where it seems to be slipping. What is different there? What are people experiencing, and what conditions may be contributing to it?
I also become curious about the distance between what the data suggests and how work is actually being experienced. Do people believe speaking candidly is useful? Are teams operating under very different conditions even when they sit inside the same organization? What are people volunteering, withholding, working around, or quietly accepting? Those patterns often tell us as much as the formal measures do.
That is where self-awareness and social awareness matter. Leaders are not standing outside engagement looking in. Their behaviors, decisions, communication, consistency, and relationships are part of the environment employees are responding to. The more useful question is not only, What is the data telling us? but also, What might we be contributing to this experience, intentionally or unintentionally?
We talk a lot about culture, but culture can feel difficult to define or change. What do you think HR leaders should actually be paying attention to when they want to understand their organization’s culture?
Culture is not only what an organization says about itself. It is what people teach each other, every day, about what it takes to belong, succeed, speak up, or get work done. Everyone shapes it, though leaders cast the longest shadow. In simple terms, culture lives in what gets rewarded, tolerated, and repeated.
There is what you can see, what the organization says it values, and then what people have learned about how things really work. That last layer often shapes behavior more than any formal statement ever could. And there is rarely just one culture. Teams, functions, and worksites develop their own patterns, so the lived experience in one part of an organization may look very different from another.
The real culture becomes especially visible when values collide. Say open communication is a stated value. Ask a team, “What happens here when someone disagrees with leadership in a meeting?” If the answer is, “You learn not to do it twice,” the value says speak up. The culture says stay quiet.
So as an HR leader, I would look closely at decisions, not just sentiment. Take a handful of recent decisions made under pressure and ask what each one taught people about what really matters here. That is your culture, or at least one of them. It is also where culture change begins.
You describe coaching as helping leaders “read the terrain between what was and what isn’t yet.” What does that look like in practice, especially during organizational change?
Organizational change is often described as movement from a current state to a future state. Structurally, that makes sense. Humanly, there is an entire chapter between those points. The org chart may change overnight. Identity, relationships, and role clarity rarely catch up as quickly.
The old way may no longer fit, while the new way is not yet familiar enough to trust. A leader may discover that the instincts that built success under one set of conditions are not the ones the next chapter requires.
That space can look like resistance, uncertainty, or loss of confidence when it may actually be adaptation in progress. Coaching creates space to ask: What still serves you? What are you holding because it is familiar? What are the people around you experiencing that you may not yet see?
Reading the terrain well is not a solitary act. When certainty decreases, communication and listening need to increase. Teams can surface where friction is emerging, what resources are needed, and what the next useful step might be. The original vision may provide direction, but the route, and sometimes the destination, can change as the organization learns. Leadership in that moment is less about having the whole map and more about creating enough shared awareness to keep adapting together.
That is where coaching can extend beyond the individual leader to the team itself, creating space for shared sensemaking, clearer communication, and a collective understanding of what the change is asking of them.
If you could change one thing about how organizations think about people, performance, or leadership today, what would it be?
I would want organizations to become more curious about the talent already in the room. We spend a lot of time identifying gaps, solving problems, and asking what people need to improve. Those questions matter, but they can become the dominant lens. People also bring strengths, knowledge, lived experience, relationships, and perspectives that organizations may not yet know how to see or use well.
One of the privileges of working across so many parts of HR is getting to witness just how much capability exists inside an organization. The recruiter sees potential entering the door. The learning professional sees it developing. The HR partner sees it tested in real situations. Leaders see what happens when that talent is trusted, stretched, connected, or sometimes overlooked. There is real joy in watching people discover what they are capable of and in seeing teams become more than the sum of individual roles.
So I would shift the question from only, “What do our people need from us?” to also, “What is already here that we have not fully recognized?” The possibilities ahead often begin with seeing the talent, perspective, and capacity that are already present.
RESOURCES
Disclaimer: The perspectives and insights shared in this interview reflect my individual professional experience, expertise, and leadership philosophy. They are my own and do not represent the official views, positions, or policies of my employer or any affiliated organization.
