Last updated on June 10th, 2026
Close Up Radio · Empowering Women Series
I was glad to be welcomed back to Close Up Radio for the second half of my conversation with Doug Llewellyn, as part of their Empowering Women Series. In this episode we dig into something close to my heart: what it takes to support women as leaders. We talk about confidence and self-doubt, the double standards women still navigate at work, the difference between a mentor and a sponsor, preventing burnout through what I call “work-life harmony,” and what genuinely holds women back from leadership and ownership — along with what all of us, women and men, can do about it. I hope you enjoy the listen.
Dr. Christine Allen, PhD, is the president of Insight Business Works, a coaching and consulting firm based in Syracuse, New York. A self-described “workplace psychologist,” she uses her psychological training and a developmental, systems-oriented approach to help organizations build happier people, stronger teamwork, aligned leadership, and a collaborative culture.
About this episode
In this second conversation, part of Close Up Radio’s Empowering Women Series, Dr. Allen explores what she does differently when coaching women leaders — confidence and self-doubt, the double standards women face when they speak up, the difference between a mentor and a sponsor, preventing burnout through “work-life harmony,” and what still holds women back on the path to leadership and ownership.
Full transcript
A clean-read transcript: spoken filler and repetitions are smoothed for readability, with the full content preserved.
Announcer: Welcome to Close Up Radio, where our hosts, Doug Llewellyn and Jim Masters, bring you the amazing stories of people who answered the call to unlock their potential and take control of their own success with authenticity, creativity, persistence and resilience. Close Up Radio special guests share their knowledge and wisdom so you, the listener, can live the most empowered life possible. And now, here’s today’s host, Doug Llewellyn.
Doug Llewellyn: Well, hello everybody. Welcome back to Close Up Talk Radio — nice to have you back with us. I’m Doug Llewellyn, and we’re happy to welcome Dr. Christine Allen back with us today. She’s the head of Insight Business Works, which is headquartered in Syracuse, New York. Dr. Allen was with us a week or so ago in an amazing discussion about her company and what it’s all about. Let me give you just a little brief description.
Doug: She’s the president of this company, a coaching and consulting firm based in Syracuse. She calls herself a workplace psychologist, using her psychological training and developmental and systems orientation to help organizations be much more successful — by helping create happier people, much more effective teamwork, aligned leadership and a collaborative culture. She creates a much better and healthier workplace. Her company is really remarkable; it does many things. They specialize in team coaching, team building, executive coaching, individual coaching, talent selection and assessments, and the doctor also speaks publicly — and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. She has a remarkable background.
After she earned her doctorate from Penn State, she did her clinical internship in Syracuse, then later worked as a psychologist in an ambulatory clinic for Dartmouth College, and was head of the Psychological Trauma Program and the Women’s Program at the Benjamin Rush Center, a private psychiatric hospital in Syracuse. Then she opened her own private practice, and later her business. She still maintains an adjunct position at both Syracuse and Upstate Medical University, where she used to supervise psychiatric residents. That’s a little bit of her story. Dr. Allen, welcome back to Close Up Talk Radio. Nice to have you here — how are you today?
Dr. Christine Allen: I’m good. Thanks, Doug. How are you?
Doug: You’re very welcome. You were invited to join us on this podcast as part of our Empowering Women Series, so that leads to the logical question: what are some of the things you do differently with female clients than with men? How would you answer that?
Dr. Allen: Well, it’s a really good question, and a complex question, but I would say the underlying psychology does have what I consider gendered dimensions. In other words, there’s just tons of data that women are frequently self-doubting. They underestimate their abilities, and lots of research shows that men will tend to overestimate their abilities. If they have 60% of the qualifications for a job, they’ll put their hat in the ring — they’ll say, “I can do that” — whereas a woman will feel she has to have 100% of those qualifications.
There are also really hard experiments showing the data that, though women and men often perform exactly the same, women think they’re going to perform way lower than they actually do, and men think they’re going to perform better. So understanding that psychology really helps me to help women think about how they can recognize that they’re legitimate, that they own their expertise and stop waiting for permission to lead. I do tailor it to each individual, because not every human is the same, and I’ve dealt with men with confidence issues. But I would say every single woman executive I’ve ever coached — when we’re looking at what they want to improve or get better at — becoming more confident is typically on that list.
Doug: That’s interesting. In your own practice you earned women-owned business certification. I was wondering, is the criteria to earn that very rigorous?
Dr. Allen: Well, it is rigorous, and you have to do a lot of things to show the federal government that you are the person who does all the day-to-day operations, that you financially have the primary ownership. There are a lot of set-asides in the federal government to try to help women have a better chance of being able to get contracts. Women-owned small businesses are like the fastest-growing sector of the economy, so you really want to propel that engine. However, there are a lot of companies that will do something like, “Well, we’ll be 51% woman, 49% male-owned,” and really and truly they’re not 100% women-owned.
Technically that would be a woman-owned small business if you can prove and document that the woman is really doing all of the things I just mentioned. They want to make sure there aren’t companies cheating the system, so it’s not a rubber stamp by any means. I’m currently applying in New York State — and of course New York State is a highly regulated state, as we know — for the Women’s Business Enterprise, WBE status. I have to submit even more documentation in New York State than I had to submit to the federal government to prove that I am a woman in a small business.
Doug: Wow, that is interesting. Let me ask you — I know you work primarily with organizations. Do you also work privately with individuals?
Dr. Allen: I do. A couple of years ago I started working with an interim CEO at a statewide health care company. They’d had a male CEO for like 20 years; he took another job in another state, and so this woman became interim CEO. Rather than asking her organization and the board to pay for her executive coaching, she reached out and asked to hire me privately. At that stage of the game she did not want to share that she was getting coaching, because she did not want it to be viewed as weakness or incompetence.
She worried that the board, which was made up of many men, would somehow view it that way. So our coaching focused on what she needed to do to lead this organization — which had expanded greatly under the previous CEO — and how to gain the confidence of the board. Once she was made permanent CEO, she brought me into the organization, and I continue to work with various leaders on the C-suite team. I work with the executive leadership team, both at their off-sites and sometimes in their actual business meetings. But she hired me herself at the beginning because she really wanted her coaching to be private.
That’s the reason a lot of people do that, Doug: if the organization hires me, then the company has some right to know the return on investment — are they getting the bang for the buck? You’d have a couple of meetings with their boss to say, “Here’s what we’re working on,” with the client in the room — I don’t share without the client there — and the manager might say, “Oh, that’s great,” or, “Maybe you should also do X, Y or Z.” But sometimes people want their coaching to be completely private, especially if they’re dealing with an abusive or unreasonable boss — there are lots of books on that. They just don’t want the organization involved. So I hope that answers it a little bit.
Doug: No, it does — definitely. You work extensively with women. Can you mention a case study, for example, that involved the coaching and development of a female executive?
Dr. Allen: Well, other than the one I just mentioned, I’m actually meeting tomorrow with a client who’s about three-quarters of the way through the engagement. We’re having what I call a stakeholder meeting. The coachee is a woman executive who’s new to the VP level — the cabinet level — at a university. We’re meeting with the president and her to go over the progress she’s made. She’ll share a kind of report that we prepared together about what she’s worked on so far and the progress she’s made, and then she’ll get his feedback.
One of her goals was to become more confident, and one of the action steps she picked — it wasn’t my idea — was to find other women, both at the university and outside it, that she could mentor, because the act of mentoring other women as a volunteer helps remind her of all the things she knows and of her own competence. So that was an action step she was taking toward the goal of improving her confidence. And that’s often how we become more confident. It’s like little kids when they start running or walking — “I did it myself!” They do it and they see that they can. So I thought it was brilliant that she came up with that idea. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow. I think it will go well, but obviously she’s a little nervous about meeting with the president, her boss.
Doug: I agree. It sounds kind of amazing to me that she and you would both go in to talk to the president of the company and explain how she’s done with her coaching.
Dr. Allen: Right. And I would say, Doug, a key piece is that he is a very big supporter of executive coaching. He talks openly about his own process of it and how it really helped his own leadership. So if you have a boss like that — a boss who supports their leaders getting developed and supports coaching — it’s easier to be open, to be vulnerable. And I think when executives can do that, they perform better.
Doug: I think you’re right. By the way, do you work with more men than women, or more women than men, or is it kind of equal?
Dr. Allen: Well, in the coaching arena, I work with probably a few more women than men. But as you know, the higher up you get in leadership — and this is the glass ceiling that still exists, that we need to kick down — there aren’t as many women at that C-suite, top-executive level, nor are there as many women on boards. We do know that companies with more women leaders are more financially successful and have better reputations; all the data support that. But somehow it’s really hard to break through that. Women are often in roles like marketing and HR, or the CFO role — ancillary or support roles more than the CEO role.
Back in the day, when I was a therapist for the first part of my career, it was mostly women, because women were more willing to ask for help, more willing to say, “I need help with this.” In executive coaching, the boss is often the one suggesting it. The best kind of executive coaching happens when you’re in a new role, a new leader, and they say, “We’re going to get you some support and help so you can be successful.” The worst kind — which I’ve sometimes done — is when a senior leader says, “You’ve been in this role for a year and a half or two years, and we don’t think you’re doing well, so we’re going to get you some coaching.” That doesn’t feel very good or very rewarding.
Doug: When you start coaching someone for an organization, how long does the coaching typically last? With an individual in private practice you could be working with them for weeks or even years. What about when a company assigns you to work with someone — how long are they willing to allow that coaching to go on?
Dr. Allen: It really depends. I try for a contract at the beginning of about a six- to nine-month engagement, which is roughly 12 to 14 sessions, because I want to do it long enough — we know people are capable of incredible change, but change doesn’t occur overnight. It really takes that long to build trust, to do these assessments, to really understand the person so they feel safe and develop a professional development plan they’re going to work on. If the coaching is going really well but they haven’t quite made all the progress they want, sometimes they’ll extend for another three to six months. So it might be 12 to 18 months, up to 24 months. But coaching doesn’t last forever; it does end.
We typically meet about every other week, and they’ve got their assignments — things they know they’re going to do so they can improve. For example, if they have a fear of public speaking — which you or I might be comfortable with, but most people are not — they have to have opportunities to practice, then get feedback, then come back and tell me how it went. Coming back to the question about women at the top: women can raise their hand, take risks, and show up when they understand that the system is a little bit rigged against them — that it’s not their own personal deficits holding them back. That helps them, especially if they have allies — men who are allies. And the best kind of ally is a sponsor, not just a mentor — someone who puts you up for something, who says, “You should hire this person.”
Doug: Do you generally notice a big difference in an individual after you’ve been working with them for a while?
Dr. Allen: Yes. It’s incredibly rewarding. It’s not that people change more in coaching than in therapy — a lot of times in therapy people need to do their personal work, maybe in a deeper way than in coaching. And in coaching, as I said, not as many men seek a therapist, but they’re more willing to take a coach. I mean, what team doesn’t need a coach? Whether you’re the Little League or the New York Yankees, you still need a coach. So it’s not seen quite the same way. I see tremendous progress, tremendous changes. Emotional intelligence is another area — that involves self-awareness and self-regulation, being aware of your own derailers, things that might get in your way if you’re not paying attention and not being mindful. Also empathy: learning how to connect and communicate with others, becoming a better listener, which is part of that emotional intelligence — particularly for men.
Doug: Do you find that most clients who are assigned to work with you are willing and excited about it, or somewhat reluctant? In general, how do they respond?
Dr. Allen: That is a really great question. I would say the majority of people are excited for the opportunity. They’ve come to learn that coaching is a perk, a benefit — maybe even, for some companies, a status thing: “I get to have a coach,” because your company is investing good dollars in you. However, there are some people who aren’t familiar with it and do have trepidation about being open and honest. Like anything in life, you have to be open to change and motivated. I have had some tough nuts to crack.
There are times when — even after the company has already paid me half — I’ve coached the person a few sessions and said, “No, we can’t do this anymore,” and ended the engagement, because the person just didn’t see that there was anything they needed to work on or improve. I haven’t had a woman who is like that, but I have had a couple of men. I’ve had to say it, because it’s not good for me or my business if I’m not successful in helping you. If I don’t feel like you’re open to it, willing to be vulnerable, willing to acknowledge what you want to work on and invest the time and effort, then I don’t want to do it. But you can’t know right up front; you have to do a little work with the person first.
Doug: How do you begin a session with a person for the first time, someone who’s been assigned to work with you?
Dr. Allen: I’m going to start working in a couple of weeks with a physicist for the government — a contract I have. We did one meeting; it’s called a chemistry interview. I send them some questions they could ask me — “here’s how you choose a coach” — so they can interview a different person if they want. I get them to tell me a little about themselves, what they think they want to get out of coaching, and why their boss may have recommended that they get a coach.
Then, ideally, before we start, I’d meet with them and their boss together to ask, “What is it that you want this executive — in this case, this scientist leader — to get out of it?” But I always ask the client, the coachee, first what they want. I send them a questionnaire, they fill it out, I review it, and we meet and expand on those things, so we can get to know each other a little and build trust. I ask, “What do you need to know about me for you to feel comfortable working with me? What kind of ground rules do we need to set? If we had a disagreement, how would you like us to handle that?” We set up the confidentiality — that I would never share anything about you with your boss without you being in the room and without your permission. And believe me, I’ve had a couple of bosses call me up and say, “So how’s so-and-so doing?” and I’ve had to say, “Remember, we agreed that’s not how this was going to work.”
Doug: You’re talking about women having self-doubt. How do you build up someone who really does suffer from much self-doubt? What’s a way to build them up?
Dr. Allen: That’s a really great question. The client I mentioned earlier had the brilliant idea herself to practice mentoring younger women, because she wants to build that step-ladder, and by doing, she built some confidence. Some of the ways you do it are really helping them understand the data — the research that shows they’re not alone, that on average women don’t think they have these confidence issues, but the data shows otherwise. There was a really great book written a few years ago by two broadcast people, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman — Katty Kay was from the BBC. As reporters, they interviewed lots of behavioral scientists and gathered this data.
It’s called The Confidence Code. Knowing you’re not alone, knowing this is part of a systemic bias that’s also internalized — you could call it internalized sexism, where maybe males haven’t been very confident in women, and women internalize that lack of self-confidence — helps. Then you really try to help them take risks. For example, if a woman has a confidence issue about speaking up in a meeting — “I’ll wait, I’ll be the last person, I’ll think about what everybody else said, and I’m not going to raise my hand” — you have them do the opposite, Doug.
It’s really hard, but you have them contract to take an action: when they have a thought in their head, they’re going to raise their hand or speak up. And what they find out is that the worst-case scenario doesn’t happen. Other people say, “That’s a great idea,” or, “Why don’t we expand on what Sue said.” So they feel like, okay, they didn’t die, they survived it. They might get feedback from an ally — a woman in the room who says, “You did great” — and then they’ll email me and say, “I did it,” and we talk about it next time. So it’s building those stepping stones to internalizing that self-confidence. It’s not easy, but it is really possible.
Doug: It’s not easy doing that, is it? On the other hand, what about working with women who speak out — are they viewed as aggressive?
Dr. Allen: Oh, yeah. Primarily they are. I think it’s a double-edged sword for women in the workplace. You’re told to stand up for yourself, to speak up, to take credit for things — but it’s kind of like some complicated martial art for women, where you have to figure out when to use the understanding card, the empathy card, the emotional intelligence that you’re really good at, and when to really push for something. A woman taking credit is going to be viewed much more negatively than a man. A woman asking for a raise or a promotion has to frame it around how it will help everybody — it’s not enough that it’s going to help her — whereas a man doesn’t have to do that. So they have to understand the context they’re in. A woman who is more outspoken is likely to be viewed with some of those negative words — “brazen” and other B-words. It’s not fair, but it is still the way it is.
Doug: There are so many areas to talk to you about. What about women who face burnout because of poor success strategies? Does that happen often?
Dr. Allen: I think it does happen. And what really worries me, Doug, is when women just take themselves out of the running — they take themselves out of the workplace. A lot of engineering firms have very low retention of women, especially at higher levels. People tend to say, “Oh, they want to raise their kids, they want to have a family,” but a lot of times it’s because the workplace is not rewarding for them — it doesn’t include them. Women tend to keep their heads down historically and feel like their competence will speak for itself, so they work and work and work and don’t get recognized, don’t feel part of the culture.
Honestly, early in my career, I was sitting at a doctors’ table at a hospital — I was the only female doctor at the table — and they were all talking about a poker game they were having at one of the doctors’ houses that week, that I wasn’t invited to. So there are cultures that don’t make women feel included, and that contributes to burnout in addition to the work. And we still know that women do 75 to 80% of the childcare and housework at home, even when they work full time. Now, that wasn’t me — I’m lucky. I’ve been married to an attorney for 38 years, and he has always done at least 50% of the cooking, cleaning and parenting. But not everybody has that, and so that contributes to burnout. It just really worries me when women take themselves out — they’ve studied engineering, they’ve gone to business school, and then they just don’t compete, they don’t stay.
Doug: For those who are willing to stay, how long does it take to turn them around and put them on a new path?
Dr. Allen: Like I said before about the confidence goal, I almost always have some kind of resilience goal. I don’t like the word “balance” — I call it work-life harmony rather than work-life balance, because I think it’s a complex dance, especially if you’re a parent, that you do with your work life. I used to say, when I would leave my office when my kids were still at home, “Well, I’m off to my other full-time job.” So it’s a dance. I call it work-life harmony, which doesn’t put so much pressure on you to make it perfect — balance implies perfection. So I almost always have, and this is true for male executives too, some kind of work-life harmony, resilience or stress-management goal.
If I’m privileged to work with a younger or newer executive, then you can build in how you set boundaries, how you speak up to your boss. You might say, “You tell me it’s okay if you email me on Saturday and I don’t reply until Monday, but that’s kind of a mixed message — you’re the boss, you’re the CEO, and you’re telling me it’s okay, but you’re working, so I feel like I should be.” So you can really help your coaching clients set boundaries that help prevent burnout. I think it’s much better to prevent burnout than to try to recover from it, and a lot of young people are getting burned out. But I will say the younger generations — Gen Z, Gen Alpha, even millennials — want work that has purpose, and they also want a life outside of work. They want time to ski, time to ride their bikes — the whole nine yards.
Doug: Bottom line — what do you think really holds women back today on the path toward leadership and ownership of businesses? Is there an answer for that?
Dr. Allen: Only a not-very-nice one: the pipeline isn’t broken. Women are talented, credentialed, ready. I think the culture still rewards masculine leadership norms. It’s changing, but it takes a long time. Men can do a lot — they can notice who’s being interrupted, whose voice is not being listened to, who’s not being promoted despite their performance, whose ideas are being credited to someone else. And women can claim their expertise and build their own allies. One of the things that helped me was thinking about my daughter and my son, and what kind of work world I want them to be in. But it’s shocking to me that in 2026 there isn’t as much progress as there could be.
Doug: We’ve been talking to Dr. Christine Allen, founder and head of Insight Business Works, based in Syracuse. When you work with companies, do you work with them in person, or can you do it virtually? I assume you work with companies all over the U.S. — am I right?
Dr. Allen: Yes, absolutely. Some of it’s in person and some of it’s virtual. Some engagements are completely virtual just because there’s no budget for travel, and the research really shows there’s not a significant difference. I’m kind of an in-person girl, so when I can, I will. For example, I’m going to see a client I coach at a university in Pennsylvania next month, and I’m going to combine it with a visit to see my daughter, who’s getting a PhD there. So when possible, it’s good to have at least one or two in-person visits, but some engagements are completely virtual and they’re still highly effective.
Doug: I think that’s remarkable. By the way, do you still do anything at Syracuse University and Upstate Medical University?
Dr. Allen: Periodically, I do. For example, a senior at SU in psychology who isn’t sure but might want to become a workplace psychologist, a consulting or organizational psychologist — there are not a lot of places for them to go — they’ll send them here, and they’ll do that as part of their coursework. And at Upstate, periodically, I will go in and do coaching. I don’t really supervise in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health where I used to anymore, although I’m still associate faculty.
Doug: It’s been delightful talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to help us. Anybody who wants to get in touch with you or learn more about what your company, Insight Business Works, does — you have a great website, and it’s very simple: InsightBusinessWorks.com. Dr. Allen, thank you so much for being with us. We’ll talk to you next time. Till then, take care, and bye for now.
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