Joanne Newborn is a certified executive coach and MBA with two decades of experience leading sales, marketing, and strategy for organizations ranging from startups to publicly traded companies. She now brings that same corporate fluency to her work with CSR clients, helping executives and teams understand what’s really driving performance gaps, alignment challenges, and the friction that keeps good strategies from landing. Our Director of Marketing and Communications, Erin McNulty, sat down with her to talk about her background, her approach to DISC® and behavioral psychology, and what it costs organizations when team alignment is overlooked.
Erin: You bring a pretty distinct background to this work. You were in the corporate trenches for decades before moving into coaching and consulting. How does that shape the way you show up for leaders?
Joanne: I think it’s a real differentiator, because I always say to people: I was in your seat. I have a full understanding of what it feels like to be under pressure for hitting revenue goals, for bringing in business, for increasing business, for ROI, for using data and measuring results. I was actually doing it, rather than looking at it conceptually. And also understanding cross-functional teams, and how to work across them to achieve your goals. Because many times that’s where we hit the challenges. We’re not always in control of every single thing that we’re trying to affect.
Erin: You’re one of many consultants and coaches who are DiSC® certified, but one of the things that sets your approach apart is that you also layer in Jungian psychology. What does that add that DiSC® alone doesn’t offer?
Joanne: DiSC® gives us self-awareness, and it helps us have awareness of others. When we bring in Jungian psychology piece, we start to understand how our minds actually work. Our minds are hardwired to resist change. They’re supposed to. The mind is trying to keep us safe.
So, when we hear in the workplace that we have to move through the change curve as quickly as possible, yes, that’s true. But you also need to give people permission to have that initial resistance. Knowing that your mind views a new initiative the same way it views a life-or-death situation?. That becomes really powerful. Because you can give yourself and others permission to resist initially, and then realize this isn’t actually about survival. It’s about what’s coming next. And suddenly it becomes a lot easier to move through change.
“The mind does not like to be in the space of the unknown. It can’t keep you safe there. So,
when people feel like they can’t have predictability and routine, a lot of fears arise.”
Erin: At CSR, we talk a lot about that moment where a team’s reaction to change could go either way. It could tip into resistance, or it could move toward acceptance We call it the “magical moment of change curiosity.” What can senior leaders do to keep their teams moving toward acceptance and, eventually, change harmony?
Joanne: The number one thing is to think about being curious about your team. What is coming up for them? Create that safe space to listen, to actually hear the fears they have. Because when we want to shut people down and push past it, those fears don’t go anywhere. They’re like a balloon filled with air in the water. We try to push it down, and it pops right back up.
Make space for people to air those fears. Sometimes when they just let it out and talk about it, that’s all they need to move forward. If a leader can be curious about what their team is actually going through, rather than pushing through and forcing them in a direction, they will move through it more quickly.
Erin: Can you walk us through a real scenario where you’ve seen senior team misalignment and how you used DiSC® plus Jungian psychology to diagnose what was actually happening underneath the surface?
Joanne: When we have misalignment, it’s really helpful to start with DiSC® styles, because a lot of conflict comes from there. Let’s say we have pushback on a change or a new strategy. When we start looking at people’s behavioral styles, it becomes a lot easier to understand why they have fears.
Here’s a concrete example: someone who is a high C style might have this underlying, unconscious fear — and that’s where the Jungian piece comes in, because a lot of this is truly unconscious — that they’re not going to have enough time to do all the research, pull together all the information the organization is asking for, before the train has already left the station. And they feel like they’re in a space of the unknown. The mind can’t keep you safe there. So, fears arise.
Recently, we were working with a team around business development and networking skills. Going into a networking event is an unknown. Most people feel like they’re going to be in a room with a hundred people they don’t know and they’d rather crawl under a rock. Knowing this from both the Jungian and the DiSC® perspective, the approach is to help them prepare as much as possible based on their DISC® style. Because the way a high D prepares looks completely different from the way a high C prepares. I even tell people they should rehearse talking to people ahead of time. Out loud. Whether you’re alone, or with your spouse, or with a colleague. The more prepared you are, the more confident you’ll feel when you walk into that room.
Erin: If you were talking to an executive right now who thinks they know their team well, but they’re still seeing missed goals and misalignment, what would you say is their first step?
Joanne: I would say: if all of that is going on, they don’t know their team as well as they think they know their team.
One of the first things I do with leaders is make sure they really know the strengths and motivations of the people on their team. I usually ask them to sit down one-on-one with each person and ask: what gets you most excited to come to work? What are you most passionate about? Where do your strengths actually lie?
When we start to peel back the onion on that, leaders realize they’re not maximizing their teams as much as they can be. There are strengths hidden and underutilized. And those strengths aren’t being connected to the day-to-day work or the strategy. When you’re speaking to the wrong areas, that’s when you get resistance.
I’ll give you a personal example. Years ago, I had a manager who was a very high D style. He just wanted the top line. He would ask my team for detailed PowerPoint presentations, and we’d put them together, and he’d never read them. He’d just ask me what was in it. I thought it was the silliest thing. And then I realized: if I just sent him an email with three to five bullets, he could tell me if that’s what he wanted or not, and we could course-correct from there. That shift made everything so much easier for me and my entire team.
“The strongest teams are the most diverse teams. But when they don’t understand how each DiSC style works and how it all fits together, you’re not going to get that productivity.”
Erin: What are the concrete costs for organizations that don’t do this work?
Joanne: Constant friction. The kind that you as a leader have to mitigate over and over and over again. That alone exhausts and burns out leaders, and they don’t understand why people can’t just get along.
Then there’s turnover. If you’re having conflict on your team, you’re going to have turnover. And you may lose some of your rock stars because of it. And then there’s lost productivity. The strongest teams are actually the most diverse teams, including diverse in DiSC®. Those teams are incredibly strong, productive, effective. But when they don’t understand how each DiSC® style works and how it all fits together, you’re not going to get that productivity.
All of those costs eventually become revenue costs.
If any of this sounds familiar, it may be time to look beneath the surface. Joanne works with executives and leadership teams through CSR to get to the root of what’s driving misalignment, and to build the kind of self-awareness that makes high-performing teams possible. Reach out to CSR to learn more about working with Joanne or one of our other talented consultants.
About Joanne Newborn
Joanne Newborn is a certified executive coach, MBA, and ACC-credentialed coach with two decades of corporate experience in sales, marketing, and strategy. She is an Everything DiSC® Certified practitioner and a Certified Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Coach who works with executives and leadership teams inside mission-driven organizations to align behavior, accelerate performance, and reduce the friction that keeps good strategies from taking hold. She is a senior consultant with CSR.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
