Last updated on June 9th, 2026
Close Up Radio · Empowering Women Series
I recently had the pleasure of joining Jim Masters on Close Up Radio for a two-part conversation about the work I love most — helping leaders and teams do their best work together. In this first episode, we talk about what a “workplace psychologist” actually does, how I made the move from clinical practice into executive and team coaching, and why the health of an organization so often comes down to the people side of the business. We get into team coaching, emotional intelligence, why personality matters as much as skill, and the Positive Intelligence program our team offers. 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 first conversation, Close Up Radio spotlights Dr. Allen and the work of Insight Business Works — her path from clinical psychology into executive and organizational coaching, what a “workplace psychologist” actually does, and how her developmental, systems-oriented approach helps leaders and teams perform at their best.
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, Jim Masters.
Jim Masters: Welcome to Close Up Radio. Jim Masters here, your host. Thanks very much for joining us as we celebrate a very special guest joining us from Syracuse, New York: Dr. Christine Allen, president of Insight Business Works, a coaching and consulting firm based in Syracuse. She calls herself a workplace psychologist, using her psychological training and a developmental, systems orientation to help organizations be more successful — creating happier environments, happier people, more effective teamwork, aligned leadership, and a truly collaborative culture. She creates a better and healthier workplace for all.
Jim: Dr. Allen notes that at one time leadership was a matter of command and control, but today we understand those models aren’t productive. The focus now is on collective leadership — how to harness the strengths of everyone on the team. She helps leaders develop their emotional intelligence and executive presence so they can bring out the best in their employees and teams. She coaches them on how to capitalize on individual team members’ strengths and build a highly functioning, inclusive workforce. With a long-standing interest in positive psychology and lifespan development, she has much more in her toolbox than most coaches, and she’s able to tackle well-being issues in the workplace while developing confident, effective leadership.
Jim: After earning her doctorate at Penn State, Dr. Allen did her clinical internship in Syracuse, later worked as a psychologist in an ambulatory clinic for Dartmouth College, and then headed the psychological trauma team at the Women’s Program at the Benjamin Rush Center, a private psychiatric hospital in Syracuse. She started a private practice, and after years of success as a clinician decided to devote her skills to creating healthy and effective leaders and teams. Today she focuses on leadership development; individual, executive and team coaching; talent selection; and organizational coaching.
She maintains an adjunct position at both Syracuse University and Upstate Medical University, where she used to supervise psychiatric residents. Combining her background as a clinician with acute listening skills and her training, plus the last 15 years in leadership and team coaching, she has truly made an impact on workplaces — resolving many of the underlying issues that affect leaders and the organizations they work in. She’s also received many honors, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Central New York Psychological Association, and was recently featured in the leadership column in the Syracuse Post-Standard and on Syracuse.com — and that’s just the short list. Dr. Allen, welcome to the show. It’s a pleasure to have you with us today.
Dr. Christine Allen: Thanks, Jim. It’s an honor to be here — excited to be here.
Jim: Me too. I love topics that have to do with psychology, emotional intelligence and leadership — we’re in good company here. You have a really long, exemplary work history in psychology and organizational development. In addition to what I just listed for our audience, set the stage with a little background on you. What career highlights stand out, and what inspired you to go into this work? At what point did you head in the direction of doing this incredible work?
Dr. Allen: I think growing up outside of Washington, D.C., with a father who was really involved in government, I was always concerned about both the specifics of individual well-being and bigger impacts. So I grew up thinking about big impact. Even though I pursued the PhD in clinical psychology and really enjoyed helping individuals with their life trajectory — I always say I wanted to help people live rich, fulfilling lives — I found along the way that many people who came to me for therapy had already been impacted by their workplaces, or by other groups in society including their family. They arrived already carrying those problems. So when you think about how you might prevent some of them — how you can go into organizations and coach leaders and teams to create healthier workplaces, to drive results that are purpose-driven and mission-driven and help all of us — I just got excited about having a bigger impact.
Jim: That’s very important, and that impact has been long-lasting. You’ve been in your consulting and coaching business about 15 years now, and for the last five you’ve been the sole owner and a fully woman-owned small business owner. How has that changed the kind of impact you can make?
Dr. Allen: That’s a great question. I started out with a couple of other psychologist partners, but they went in different directions, and I became the sole owner — and it became a woman-owned small business, a federally certified woman-owned business. That gives us opportunities, because some federal contracts are set aside for women-owned businesses, and women-owned small businesses are one of the fastest-growing areas of the economy. So being a woman-owned small business myself means I’m walking the talk, practicing what I preach, aligning with my own values. It’s also sharpened my sense of my own identity. I rely a lot on other people because I believe in teamwork — I have other wonderful coaches, one of whom is a psychologist, and they’re all women with diverse backgrounds.
We’re a team. But having a woman-owned small business really helps me feel I can deliver on a lot of the work I do. It’s not the only work I do, but I work with a lot of women in leadership to elevate women in leadership. We know that when there are more women leaders at the executive-team level and on the board level, companies are more successful — more financially successful, with better reputations, and less likely to have an ethical derailment. More diversity in terms of women in leadership is so important, and embodying that myself the last five years — both the challenges and the opportunities — has really helped me feel I can deliver on my goals and on the value I carry.
Jim: Walking the walk and talking the talk — that’s what it’s all about. As I sprinkled into the introduction, you’ve achieved many awards and honors for transforming workplaces. Would you share some more of those? Not why you do the work, but the response to it, which is a beautiful thing.
Dr. Allen: I will. There are honors that mean a lot. The Lifetime Achievement Award from my psychological association in Central New York — my own backyard — is very meaningful, because these are colleagues who have known me over the years and chose to value me. It’s very relationship-driven and feels personal, and I appreciate it. A couple of years ago I was also on the cover of Syracuse Woman magazine, which was an honor because it’s recognition in my own community. I’ll also share something personal that I’m quite open about: right after the pandemic I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I got treated and I’m fine, and I was able to be a spokesperson for early detection — I went through all my procedures and tests, even masked, before there were vaccines. So I could use that recognition to influence women in our community in a positive way, to take care of themselves and their own well-being.
Women are notorious for helping everyone else — that’s why you put the oxygen mask on first before helping others. Many women and moms have been raised to look after others, so being able to use that recognition to help was important to me. One other honor: in 2024 the New York State Psychological Association gave me its highest recognition, the Allen V. Williams Award, named for a psychologist renowned in NYSPA. I was president of that association during the pandemic — when I agreed to run in 2019, I had no idea we’d have a global pandemic and that I’d be president through it — so that was very meaningful too. I’m not a big accolade person; I appreciate why an honor is given and the people who give it, but the real reward for me is the work and the people I work with every day — the clients, the coaches, the team members. It sounds trite, but it’s absolutely true: the reward is in the work for me.
Jim: That’s amazing — well earned, well deserved. And this is why the folks who work with you feel so responsive to you: they know you’re authentic and real. You even share your own stories of triumph and of toil, and people connect with that. So glad to hear you’re doing well. Has it been challenging over the years to lead your own business, and who are some of the professionals you’ve aligned with to make sure your accounting, marketing and training are handled effectively?
Dr. Allen: They’re related, and they’re great questions. The challenge is that I didn’t go to school for business — I don’t have an MBA — and my background isn’t as an I/O psychologist. There are many people doing the work I do who are trained clinically like myself, and that’s partly what makes us good at reading the room, having empathy, and developing a greater level of trust. But I needed to bring other people on board for the things that didn’t come naturally to me. Every coach says to have a coach, and I’ve had several; I’ve had one in particular for about the last ten years. I started meeting with her roughly once a week and now talk with her about once a month.
She lives in Arizona, has an MBA, and is a certified coach — I needed someone who complements my background with skills in areas I don’t have. I’ve also been a long-time, strong member of a group here in Syracuse called the Women’s Business Opportunities Connection, and through it I’ve found people to help with my bookkeeping and marketing. I have a CPA who is a man — and I know he’s a big supporter, because as women in business we need men to be allies — and a young woman attorney I go to for all the things I need to make sure I’m doing by the book. That stuff isn’t my forte or my passion, Jim. If I had to do the accounting or legal work day in, day out, I can feel myself yawning right now.
Jim: Drudgery, right?
Dr. Allen: Right — but somebody loves doing it, and these people love doing it, so they’re really good at it.
Jim: That’s their calling. To you, it’s the equivalent of loading the dishwasher; to them it’s challenging, they love it and they sink their teeth into it. We all have our own unique skill set, and everybody should be applauded and appreciated, because it takes a village.
Dr. Allen: Right. And that’s the nature of a team, whether informal or formal — we all bring different skill sets and different personalities and styles. How do we recognize, honor and collaborate with people who think differently than us, and benefit from that difference rather than get defensive or protective of our turf? That’s a team.
Jim: Exactly. Speaking of that — how do you define team coaching? How do you work with a whole team, and what does systemic team coaching look like? It’s important for organizations that want to be successful.
Dr. Allen: I think it’s the direction the coaching field is going. I started doing team development work close to 15 years ago, but back then a leader — a CEO or CFO — would hire me to coach them, then ask me to work with their team, and it was all standalone, siloed pieces. Team coaching is really about working with the team as a whole, both when they’re together and apart. It might involve an off-site retreat where you build trust and something called psychological safety — there’s been hard research on it for almost 30 years — so people can say “I’m sorry,” or “I made a mistake,” or “Can you help me with this? You’re better at it than me.” The difference is continuity.
In team coaching you strategize with the leadership team on how to build an engagement over time, maybe six months, coming in strategically to see how they’re working together. It might involve an off-site or two, and what I call a “business as usual” meeting, where I watch the team work together. We’ll have already agreed on ground rules, and I’ll have permission to call a timeout: “Here’s what you said you wanted to be doing; here’s what I see you doing. What would you like to do about it?” At the beginning they usually want me to intervene; later I’m coaching people live in the meeting to deal with it themselves; and eventually the coach steps away and comes back periodically for refreshers.
Often it’s around something specific — a merger, a new CEO, a new culture, or a decision that has to be made. One leadership team we worked with had a couple of very loud, strong personalities, and other people wouldn’t speak up, so the division chief was making decisions alone even though she didn’t want to, because the team wasn’t functioning effectively. We worked with them over about a year and gradually helped them have more constructive conflict, healthy debate, and the ability to make decisions together — and they were happier at work. There’s a ripple effect: if the boss is happier, that spills over to direct reports. The other thing about systemic team coaching is that you think about stakeholders. If your primary customer were in the room, what would she think the team should be working on? What about a board member, a vendor, or — in a university setting — a student or family member? Systemic team coaching looks at that broader stakeholder world, not just “are we happy and accountable as a team,” but “are we accountable to our stakeholders?”
Jim: Very important. How does personality fit into the workplace? You mentioned the loud person in the room and the quiet observers. Sometimes people assume the loudest one has all the knowledge, but sometimes it’s the person in the corner taking notes who, when something crucial needs to be said, becomes the rock that gets everybody through. Tell us about personalities fitting into the workplace.
Dr. Allen: I root for the underdog. Introverts — someone who needs more time to reflect and does a lot of observing — have been tremendously undervalued historically in the workplace and overlooked for leadership. They’re often viewed as indecisive when really they’re thinking things through, and then they come out with a powerful insight everyone needs to hear. So personality is really important. It’s not the only thing, but it’s a real thing. I could learn skills all day — I could get an A in calculus — but that doesn’t mean I love to do math. Personality is very persistent across the lifespan. We can fix things around the edges, but I’m a people person; I’m not going to turn into someone who only likes to crunch numbers. I can miss details — that’s my style — but I can correct for my Achilles’ heel.
One business coach, Dan Sullivan, once said that if you spend ten years working on your weaknesses, at the end you’ll have a bunch of strong weaknesses. So you want to work on what comes naturally, what you do well, and be chosen for things that are a good fit. Being authentic at work doesn’t mean letting everything hang out — that’s where emotional intelligence comes in, because emotional intelligence is how I use my personality. I like to be chatty, which works fine on a podcast or giving a talk, but in a meeting I’ll literally look at the clock and say, “Okay, Chris, you just said something — wait five or ten minutes, or wait until five others speak before you do.” I need to practice that self-regulation, which is part of emotional intelligence. So personality matters, but it doesn’t mean letting everything hang out — we have to be ourselves in an emotionally intelligent, intentional, mindful way.
Jim: Exactly. Why do you assess leaders’ personalities as well as their leadership skills, and how do you develop leaders in that coaching process?
Dr. Allen: I love doing this — it’s one of my favorite things in coaching: helping a leader do a deep dive into themselves. I give them a questionnaire for reflection, then use empirically validated assessments of normal personality. The science here has been strong for 70-some years — we know the “Big Five” of personality — and there are good instruments that assess emotional intelligence and values too, because our values aren’t all the same.
Then I help someone look at that Venn diagram of “here’s this about me, and here’s this about me,” and put it together: these are my strengths, this is the core of who I am and what I’m good at, here are my clear opportunities, here’s where I could derail if I’m not paying attention, here are my growing edges. As I mentioned with lifespan development — development doesn’t stop when we turn 18 — so where are my opportunities to learn and grow as a person, to become a better human and a better leader? Skills matter too; I had skills deficits in certain business and finance areas that I had to learn. But skills aren’t the whole thing by any stretch.
Jim: So true. Tell us how you actually help leaders make decisions with more value — how do you define that?
Dr. Allen: We’re all making decisions super fast these days. Many people follow Brené Brown; her recent book talks about a concept she borrows from football — “pocket presence,” where the quarterback has awareness of everything on the field, even things outside their line of vision. Everything’s moving and changing rapidly; it’s more than complex, sometimes chaotic. A leader can’t see everything, so they need that sense of pocket presence: looking at the field, asking what I need to know and when I’m going to make a decision, who I can rely on, and how I can be agile in my thinking.
Emotional intelligence is part of this — sometimes I have to speed up, and sometimes slow down and pause to ask, “Whose interests are affected by this decision? What are my own blind spots? What could I be missing?” A lot of leaders in executive coaching say they want to work on their decision-making process. We also help teams with it: who makes the decision, are we all giving input, do we talk it through until we reach agreement, or does the majority decide even if there’s a minority view? And I try to make decisions aligned with our organizational culture and values — I do this myself: is this decision aligned with my core values? If it isn’t, maybe it’s not the best decision.
Jim: Before we go, tell us about a program your organization offers known as Positive Intelligence. We hear a lot about emotional intelligence — tell us about positive intelligence and whose teaching drives it.
Dr. Allen: There’s a gentleman, Shirzad Chamine — I think he’s from Stanford — who started this around 2012. I got one of his first books, and a couple of our coaches have done his certification as he’s expanded the concepts. Basically it’s a positive approach to well-being — I like “well-being” much better than “wellness” — and he calls it mental fitness. Rather than a deficit model of psychopathology or problems, it’s a model of how we can be mentally fit and strong. Just like in personality assessment, we all have our derailers; he calls them saboteurs — like the victim (“this always happens to me”) or the judge (the harsh critic of yourself and others). He’s also developed the concept of the sage, the wise part of ourselves that’s intentional, mindful and empathic.
His concepts aren’t entirely unique — they align with other ideas related to emotional intelligence — but it’s a helpful, simple-but-not-simplistic program people can use. I’m a big fan of therapy, and some people really need that depending on what their lives have dealt them, but there’s nobody who couldn’t benefit from coaching or from positive intelligence. As I say all the time, it doesn’t matter whether you’re the New York Yankees or the Little League — no team is so good that it says, “We don’t need a coach.” And they don’t just get coached in practice; you don’t see the Yankees saying, “Don’t bother coaching us during the game.” So positive intelligence fits that notion that we all need growth, development and support. On our team, Dr. Tanya Williamson and Diane Rizzo are certified in it, and Dr. Tanya Williamson is particularly certified to run that program.
Jim: We’ve been speaking with Christine Allen, PhD, president of Insight Business Works, a coaching and consulting firm based in Syracuse, New York. She calls herself a workplace psychologist, using her psychological training and developmental and systems orientation to help organizations be more successful — by creating happier people, more effective teamwork, aligned leadership and a collaborative culture, building a better and healthier workplace for all. To learn more, go to InsightBusinessWorks.com — that’s i-n-s-i-g-h-t, InsightBusinessWorks.com. Dr. Allen, a real pleasure chatting with you; the time goes by so quickly. This is part one of a two-part series, so we look forward to your return. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and for making that positive impact on the lives of so many.
Dr. Allen: Thank you, Jim. Thank you for being a great interviewer and making it easy for me to be here and talk about the things I love to do.
Jim: It’s our pleasure, and a real pleasure getting to learn more about what you do, how well you do it, and why people are so comfortable with you — because of the positivity you exude, which we can always use more of in this world. Thanks so much, Dr. Allen; enjoy the rest of your day. And to all our listeners, thank you for listening. This is part one of a two-part series here on Close Up Radio with Dr. Christine Allen. Jim Masters here, your host — thank you for your time, and I invite you to join us for the next episode. For all of us, have a great day. Thanks for listening, and bye for now.
Announcer: You have been listening to a broadcast from Close Up Radio, a division of Close Up Television, Inc. For more information about our show and to be considered for future broadcasts, please visit CloseUpTelevision.com. You may also learn about us on social media and listen to us on podcast and internet radio. Thank you for joining us, and we hope that you have an empowered and productive day.
Next in this series → Part 2: Welcoming Back Dr. Christine Allen
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