About
Meet Lance Retief.
Founder of NovaTerra Consulting Group. A seasoned organisational development practitioner, executive coach and operator who has spent his career at the intersection of strategy, leadership and human capability.
Background
A career built inside the businesses he now advises.
Lance has spent more than 25 years inside South African corporates — leading people, learning and organisational development functions in complex, multi-business-unit environments. From Associate Director of Performance & Development inside a large corporate, to Director of Learning running enterprise-wide capability programmes, he has stood in the boardrooms, sat with the executives, and felt the weight of decisions that shape thousands of livelihoods.
What sets him apart is an unusually deep academic foundation paired with that operator's lens. Four qualifications — a BA in Social Science, a B-Tech in Vocational Learning, BA Honours in Human Resource Development and an MPhil in Leadership — give him the theoretical rigour to design interventions that hold up to scrutiny, and the practical fluency to land them inside real businesses with real constraints.
He has operated across financial services, energy, mining and professional services — sectors where the cost of getting people strategy wrong is measured in safety, regulation and shareholder value. That breadth is why executive teams trust him to move comfortably between a boardroom strategy session, a frontline leadership workshop and a one-to-one coaching conversation with a CEO.
NovaTerra was founded to bring that operator's perspective to organisations tired of glossy decks. As a B-BBEE Level 1 Contributor, the practice also offers clients maximum procurement recognition under the South African codes — without compromise on the quality, candour or senior-level attention every engagement receives.
Qualifications
Academically grounded. Commercially fluent.
A research-level master's in Leadership, anchored on three earlier qualifications spanning social science, vocational learning and human resource development.
MPhil
Leadership
BA Hons
Human Resource Development
B-Tech
Vocational Learning
BA
Social Science
Career arc
Where Lance has done the work.
Twenty-five-plus years across in-house corporate leadership and independent advisory — moving from operator to architect to coach.
Today
Founder & Principal Consultant
NovaTerra Consulting Group
Independent advisory practice serving executive teams across organisational development, leadership coaching, capability building and employee wellness.
Prior
Director of Learning
Independent practice
Designed and delivered enterprise-wide learning architectures, leadership academies and accredited skills programmes for corporate clients.
Earlier
Associate Director — Performance & Development
Corporate (multi-sector)
Led the performance, talent and development agenda inside a complex, multi-business-unit corporate environment — partnering executive teams on culture, capability and succession.
Foundational years
Senior HR, OD & L&D leadership roles
Johannesburg-based corporates
More than two decades spent inside South African corporates — building learning functions from the ground up, sitting on transformation and skills committees, and operating in the rhythm of large, regulated businesses.
A fuller employment history is available on request, or via Lance's LinkedIn profile.
Principles
How we work.
Honesty over theatre
We tell clients what we actually see — even when it's uncomfortable. That's where the real work begins.
Designed for execution
Every recommendation is built to be implemented by your people, in your context, with your constraints.
Human at the centre
Strategy lands through people. We design for the humans who will live with the change long after we leave.
On the stage, in the room, at the table.
Lance regularly facilitates leadership summits, town halls and capability programmes for corporate clients across South Africa and the broader continent — translating complex strategy into language that lands.
Invite Lance to speak