Khai Ngo: Leadership development that brings out the best in people and performance

Australia is entering a pivotal moment in leadership. Across the country, organisations are seeing the same challenge: rising burnout, hybrid-work tensions, and wellbeing initiatives failing to meaningfully shift engagement and culture. Research from Monash Business School highlights a growing leadership crisis with poor communication, low empathy, micromanagement, and inconsistent decision-making affecting organisational culture at every level.
 
For talent professionals, this presents a significant opportunity to support leaders and their teams with development solutions that clearly connect soft skills to business outcomes and bridge the gap between genuinely supporting people and driving performance.
 
As organisational challenges continuously grow and more organisations look for greater value from the psychometric solutions they invest in, Lumina Learning is delighted to announce our dedicated Australian Senior Associate and Global Faculty member, Khai Ngo.
 

 
As the Director of HR Think Tank and serial entrepreneur and business builder, Khai has practical insight into the challenges Australian leaders are facing today. We sat down with him to explore his approach and the behavioural development leaders need to bring out the best in their people and performance.

A people-centred approach to leadership forged through lived experience

Khai’s journey into leadership and team development is anything but conventional. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand to a Vietnamese mother and raised in Bankstown, one of Sydney’s most diverse areas, his first leadership role was building communities in the break-dancing scene as a teenager.
 
His professional career started in the not-for-profit sector, managing community centres and delivering youth and recreational programmes. This is where he first discovered his passion for building teams and developing people. It eventually led to co-founding the Australia-Vietnam Leadership Dialogue (AVLD), where he designed programmes to enhance the bilateral people-to-people links. This included designing selection processes for thousands of candidates which helped to sharpen his understanding of what makes exceptional leaders.
 

Then came his entrepreneurial chapter – initially in e-commerce before building and scaling VerifyNow (HR Technology) through years of growth to a successful acquisition. Through this journey, and across every venture since, one truth became crystal clear: getting the people side right is everything.
 

“Whether you’re building a social impact programme or a commercial enterprise, your success ultimately comes down to selecting, developing, and retaining the right people”

The leadership development gap

Early in his leadership career, Khai faced complex team dynamics. He saw miscommunication, strengths becoming ineffective under pressure, and conflicts arising from people’s work styles clashing. Like many leaders, he didn’t have the right tools or language to fully understand what was driving this behaviour. He recognised the gap but was at a loss at how to change it.
 
That changed in 2017 when he organised a Lumina Spark session with Chris Gardiner (then Australian Partner for Lumina Learning) for AVLD delegates and steering committee members. Participating in that session proved transformative for Khai. Though uncomfortable, he discovered blind spots he didn’t know he had and the depth of awareness he gained become invaluable to him.
 
Three years later, in 2020, Khai became a qualified practitioner in Lumina Spark and Lumina Select. Since then, he’s facilitated countless workshops and leadership programmes, using Lumina Learning’s tools not just for development but also for recruitment and selection across his own ventures and client organisations.

“I realised these tools weren’t just ‘nice to have’ – they were essential for anyone serious about leadership development”

Across his work with leaders and teams, Khai has seen one consistent outcome: when people, teams and leaders have a common language to understand their own and others behaviour, everything changes.
 
He describes the shift as both immediate and profound:
 

• Psychological safety and trust build quickly

 

• Communication flows and rapport develops

 

• Differences feel less like friction and start to complement each other

 

• Teams stop trying to change each other and start adapting to each other’s behavioural styles

“What I find most powerful is watching teams create a common language. Suddenly, people can discuss differences without it becoming personal. Instead of ‘you’re being difficult,’ it becomes ‘I’m leading with my Outcome Focused Qualities right now and need someone to help me see the People Focused perspective.”

 
Khai highlights that teams and leaders need a way to take the behavioural insight from development sessions from theoretical to practical. When a leader understands they naturally lean heavily into drive and delivery under pressure, they can consciously pause and bring in more People Focused, empathetic behaviour.
 

With a common language to understand behaviour together, people can move away from the generic advice of ‘improve communication’ to being more specific like, ‘for this meeting, I need to dial up my Measured and Practical Qualities to communicate better with my detail-oriented team member’. These small adjustments compound into significant cultural change over time.
 

The future of leadership development in Australia

As leadership in Australia steps away from more traditional management training, Khai sees enormous value in equipping organisations with tools that develop people’s behavioural awareness in real and sustainable ways.
 
He notes that Australian leaders, especially among emerging leaders, are increasingly rejecting one-size-fits-all leadership models and looking instead for development grounded in authenticity, adaptability, and psychological safety.
 

“We’re moving away from the outdated model of the command-and-control leader who has all the answers, toward something more sophisticated – leaders who can adapt their style to context, who value diverse perspectives, and who build genuine psychological safety in their teams.”

With Australia deepening economic ties with Southeast Asia, Khai also highlights the need for leaders to develop cultural agility alongside business acumen. His unique background – born in a refugee camp, raised in Sydney’s diverse community, and spending his career building business and cultural bridges between Australia and Asia – gives him particular insight into this challenge.

Leaders increasingly need to embrace the paradox in their behavioural style – the ability to be both Tough and Empathetic, Structured and Flexible, taking charge when needed and stepping back to observe before acting – so they can balance both people and performance in their leadership. This becomes essential when working across cultures and leading diverse teams.

“The most effective leaders I’ve encountered aren’t the ones who’ve perfected a textbook leadership style. They’re the ones who deeply understand themselves – their natural strengths, their blind spots, their overextensions under pressure – and who’ve learned to adapt without losing their authenticity”

Building the Lumina Learning community in Australia

This is the type of leadership development Khai is excited to support across Australia in collaboration with Lumina Learning. As a Senior Associate and Global Faculty member, his focus extends beyond individual client work to strengthening the entire Lumina Practitioner community across the country.
 
By leading training and qualifications on behalf of Lumina Learning, Khai hopes to create spaces where coaches, facilitators, and talent professionals can share ideas, learn together, and support people, teams and leaders with approaches grounded in authenticity and practical behavioural insight.
 
His vision is clear: democratise access to quality psychometric tools. Too often, behavioural development is reserved for senior executives or large corporate programmes. Through HR Think Tank and his work with Lumina Learning, Khai wants to make these tools accessible to emerging leaders, SME owners, and organisations that traditionally couldn’t afford sophisticated development solutions.

Khai Ngo

Khai Ngo is a leadership development specialist, serial entrepreneur, and Director of HR Think Tank. His career spans over a decade facilitating leadership programmes and workshops, community leadership roles across Australia and Asia-Pacific, and building multiple successful ventures including VerifyNow (scaled from startup to acquisition), e-commerce businesses, an Indigenous joint venture delivering cultural awareness training and employment programmes and a risk management consultancy.
 
Born in a refugee camp in Thailand and raised in one of Sydney’s most diverse communities), Khai co-founded the Australia-Vietnam Leadership Dialogue, served as Chair of Outloud, and created the HR Think Tank podcast exploring modern leadership challenges. He brings extensive hands-on experience as a certified Lumina Spark, Lumina Leader, and Lumina Select Practitioner, combined with deep appreciation for people, culture, and behavioural nuance. As Lumina Learning’s Australian Senior Associate and Global Faculty member, Khai is committed to supporting organisations across Australia and the region to develop effective behaviours in their people, teams, and leaders.
 
Connect with Khai on LinkedIn here