Achieve authentic alignment and drive sustainable change with Crystal Gibson‘s Authentic Alliance, your roadmap to self-awareness and holistic transformation. Juliet Clark sits down with Crystal as they dive deep into the challenges of creating lasting impact in today’s complex organizations, sharing practical frameworks you can use immediately. Learn how to understand your impact, navigate the maze of diverse communication styles, and analyze organizations holistically—mindset, culture, and structure. Discover how to center yourself with vision and empathy mapping, prioritize goals with the 12-Week Year approach, and ultimately speak your truth with confidence.
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Authentic Alignment With Crystal J. Gibson
We have one of our authors who you are going to find extraordinary. Before we get started, I want to remind you to go over to BAMagTraining.com. Our April trainer is Leisa Reid and she’s going to be talking about how to get speaking gigs now. If you have knowledge that other people need to hear, this is where you not only get yourself into speaking gigs, but also sell those books at the back of the room.
Leisa’s going to teach you the key to unlocking your speaking book ability, how to uncover the treasure sitting in your backyard, and the number one secret to a steady stream of speaking referrals. I’m pretty excited about it. I know so many of you have been asking like, “How do I make money with these books? How do I monetize these books?” This is one of the ways that you can do that and get more books in people’s hands and avoid the distributor fees.
For those of you who don’t know, when the books go out to the distributors and they sell them, they get 55% of that retail price. If you come up with a strategy like speaking, you keep that 55% in your pocketbook and sell the books at the back of the room. Get over BAMagTraining.com. That event is on the first Friday of April.
Our guest is Crystal Gibson. She’s an executive coach and an enterprise coach, a speaker and author who has dedicated her career to helping leaders and teams tackle challenges and create lasting change with experiences in industries such as hospitality, technology, human capital management and finance. She’s worked with individuals and groups at all levels guiding them to break down the silos, overcome resistance, and deliver meaningful results.
Her charm framework work is at the core of her work, a practical people-centered approach that helps teams and leaders align their strengths, foster trust, and create impact. Crystal’s coaching is deeply personal. She’s helped Scrum Masters find their voice, supported teams in delivering critical initiatives, and work with senior leaders to navigate cultural shifts confidently. Her work is about meeting people where they are at and helping them move forward with clarity and purpose. Stay tuned for my interview with Crystal Gibson.
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Crystal, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Making An Impact: Authentic Alliance For Organizational Change
Tell us a little bit about your book and the story of why you are doing what you are doing.
The book is called Authentic Alliances. It’s about complex organizations and how you could put sustainable change like the DNA of the organization. The reason why I did it was because I have been in multiple large organizations. Being in different roles and different levels of the organization, and it felt like no matter what I was doing, I wasn’t being seen. No one recognized the impact that I was making. I felt like they weren’t. Also, it felt like the things I was putting in place wasn’t staying past the time someone was watching or it wasn’t sticking.
I figured out a whole way of being able to create a system where I could get into these organizations, create alliances, and then get into the guts of an organization in a way where people trust me enough to take these frameworks, suggestions, and things that I have learned across the way to put them in an organization. When I got to a space where I was making a career transition, I thought about like, “If I was to have a little guide or practical book that could walk me through this, that would have accelerated this whole process.” I wrote the book to give it to anyone who feels the same way I did.
Overcoming Alienation At Work: Finding Your Authentic Leadership Voice
It’s hard when you consult. I was brought in to consult on a company many years ago that had been purchased. There were new people that came in and followed the program. The ones that had been there for a while were resistant like combatively resistant, which made it difficult to have an environment where people could thrive because they didn’t want to change. This is great. Your book discusses feeling like an alien at work. How can leaders overcome this sense of alienation and find their authentic voice inside the workplace?
It starts with self-awareness. Understanding how you are showing up to others and understanding what is the gap between how you are showing up to others and how you want to show up. All of us have good intentions. All of us want to feel safe in the way that we are in our workspace, but there’s different ways that people interpret the actions that you do. You want to be able to understand and take in that feedback and then assess, “Is that how I want to show up to people?” That’s how you impact leadership and the people who are on your team.
It starts with self-awareness, but then it continues into having that consistent adjustment period where you take in feedback, use it, and take it to heart to be continuously improving. Use data to understand like, “This approach and experiment didn’t work. I’m going to go ahead and shift gears and try this.” Have the courage to try something new and something different to see how far you can stretch yourself.
I’m a very direct person. When I write emails, a lot of times I forget like, “Hi, Crystal. How’s your day? What are you doing?” Do you think technology is impacting all of the communication inside work as well? People take that as, “She’s mean.” Instead of, “I’m just direct and I’m trying to get the job done. I don’t mean to be mean,” but people take it that way.
If you think about all the generations that are in the workplace, there are Boomers to Generation Z or X. I don’t even know. All of them are in the same space. The way that everyone feels comfortable with communicating is different. You might have a guy who’s been in his position for 30 years and you have this person that came out of college.\
The way that everyone feels comfortable communicating is different, so it's about understanding each other’s preferences. Share on XThis guy doesn’t understand like, “Why don’t you come to my desk and talk to me? Why don’t you pick up the phone and call?” The younger generation is like, “Why didn’t he text me? Why didn’t he send the chat?” It’s understanding everybody else and asking the question upfront, “What’s the best way for me to communicate with you?”
I don’t know if you experienced this, but it’s almost like when your mother gets her phone and she’s texting you in all caps. It’s like, “Why is she yelling at me?”
My daughter, when I put a period there and she’s like, “What’s wrong?” I’m like, “I didn’t know what a period meant.”
What does it mean? I don’t know.
It means you are being abrupt like you are being short.
I didn’t know that. What you are saying is we should not communicate via text in cap or with good grammar and spelling?
We should make them pick up the phone.
Balancing Structure And Meaning In Leadership
That would be nice. You talk a lot in your book about balance, structure, and meaning for leaders in their work. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Being able to look at organizations from a holistic perspective. When a lot of companies are going through transformations or they are going through change initiatives, they are looking at the practices and the behaviors and the processes. Maybe the metrics, but they are not looking at the whole perspective of the company from what is the current mindset of people who are in this space and are they ready for this change?
What is the culture like? Do the cultural norms have to change in order for this to be successful? What governance structures do we have in the company that may hinder or might support the initiative that you are trying to do? Looking at it in a balanced way, in a holistic perspective helps you be able to look at it through different lenses and be able to make decisions based on what you see and not one part of it.
Looking at things holistically helps you make decisions based on what you see, not just one part of it. Share on XThe Four Quadrants Of Holistic Observation
You have a nice graphic in your book that’s a four quadrants framework for holistic observation. Tell us about that. What are those four quadrants?
The first one is processes and behaviors. That is very important. The whole approach is coming from the integral approach to looking at transformations. I feel like that approach could be scaled. You could look at it from an individual all the way up to teams of hundreds. You could look at it from a processes and behaviors perspective, which is the quadrant up that most people spend most of their time looking at it.
They want to look at their KPIs, workflows, and things like that. That is an aspect of it. You do want to measure and make sure that you are successful. There’s another quadrant of the leadership’s mindset. Leadership controls the weather in most spaces and organizations. If their mindset is more focused on outputs over outcomes, they are focused on not being very transparent, and not having two-way communication. Those are things that you should probably take note of when you are trying to implement any change because you need to have buy-in from your leaders or any thought leader in your organization in order to make the change stick.
The bottom one is culture. You have to pay attention to what the culture is in your organization. If you are in a command-and-control space, you can’t put in some group activity where everyone has to agree on something and then it automatically gets shut down by a leader because your culture is command-and-control. You have to be aware of what is the culture and what does that culture need to feel successful.
The last one is the structure. We all are in organizations that have an existing structure, incentive plans, and bonuses that people are trying to get. Those impact all the other quadrants because your mindset is going to be somewhere if you are thinking about your bonus. You are going to act a certain way in the cultural aspect if you are thinking about this bonus. Your metrics are going to be driven probably off of something that your bonus is.
It’s about taking a look at that incentive plan. Is it enforcing the behaviors that you are trying to work towards? Is it hindering it? Is it making people push up or be resistant to it because they want to honor that structure? All of those things should be looked at the same time when you are considering what changes need to be made or what is your business case for change.
How can leaders use systems mapping to better understand their positioning and impact within an organization? A lot of them go in and be like, “That’s the plan. Fly by the seat of my pants to make it happen.”
You’ll be surprised by so many people that don’t realize how many teams they impact and they don’t understand that.
I’m thinking of advertising where the creatives would do one thing because they are creatives and then account services have to go sell it. It’s like, “The clients are going to hate that. You are a genius, but give it to me in a different format that’s going to make sense to the clients,” That was a biggie.
You’ve got to understand that no one works in a silo. No one works in the box by themselves. The system map is individual. This works for teams too, but the first step is individually putting yourself in the circle of the organization and understanding what teams do you impact? Do you impact marketing? Do you impact engineering? Who are you to them? What is your role? You might be a leader in this space, but you might be the project manager in this space. You might be the campaign person in this space.
You have to understand that no one works in a silo. No one works in the box by themselves. Share on XIt’s giving you a visual of who you are in this organization into what areas. It lets you take a step back and look at it and set your goals based on that. Once you can see who you are impacting, then it makes sense to you like, “I should do this because they need this from a leader’s perspective. They need this from a project management perspective.” You can also take that to the next level and take your team and see who does your team impact too, in the same way, and then it helps you drive your goals.
The other thing too, is you don’t want to be the annoyance because you don’t know how you’d fit.
You don’t know who you are to them.
Speaking Your Truth As A Leader: Balancing Effectiveness And Respect
There’s that eye rolling like, “She did it again. Why does she keep doing it?” That happens a lot in organizations and causes a lot of conflict when people don’t understand that impact role there. Your book emphasizes the importance of speaking your truth. What strategies do you offer for doing this effectively and respectfully? As I said, I do it effectively but is it respectful because I have more of that action? I want to get to the meat without the pleasantries.
One of the strategies I have there is to center yourself into creating a vision map and an empathy map to begin with for yourself so that you understand what your goals are, what it feels like when you get to that goal, and who you are in that space. It puts in perspective when you have different responses in different areas.
You can say no to something respectfully. I can say no to something because I know it does not align to my overall vision. If I never know what my overall vision is and what I’m focused on, it’s hard to say no to some things, and then I become that yes person. I’m not a people pleaser, then I’m becoming resentful because I said yes to everything. Taking that moment to understand what’s most important to you, what matters and why. Also understanding what success looks like by using that tool. It will help you be able to speak your truth and be confident in the fact that is your truth.
What you are talking about is knowing your stuff and knowing how to set good boundaries. There is that one person in every team or every office. I read an article when they give you assignments in high school and college as a team, you are not learning how to work as a team. You are learning how to get past the frustration of that one person that always exists that doesn’t do anything but wants the credit or wants the grade.
I thought that was very powerful because in every situation where that’s happened, somebody’s doing most of the work. Some people are contributing a little, and there’s that one guy that’s like, “I need an A. Make it happen.” Probably not even consciously. They don’t want to do the work. That is very interesting and that’s where you do have to set good boundaries and understand.
You got to speak in your truth, know who you are, and why you are saying yes and no to things.
The 12-Week Action Plan: Implementing Your Leadership Goals Effectively
What is the diff significance of the twelve-week action plan that you mentioned in the book? How can it be implemented effectively?
That came from me being in a situation where at the beginning of the year, I would have all these goals that I sat with my manager and I want to achieve all these things for the year. I would get to the end of the year and realize that a lot of the things that I wanted to do didn’t get accomplished because it wasn’t aligned to the overall goal of the organization.
As I went through the year, all these other things came up and I had to push a lot of things to the side, some of those things were important. The reason why I started looking at that, there was a book called The 12 Week Year that I read. They might have a training program, too. It allows you to put your goals in a twelve-week sprint as opposed to looking at it for a whole year. In that way you could feel like, “I’m going to do my end of the year review after twelve weeks and not after the whole year so then I could have perspective and get feedback before the end of the year as to how much I need to adjust or what are the goals that I had that don’t align anymore insignificant.”
It’s effective. It’s worked for me and for a few people that I coach because it also lets you take things off of your plate that you thought were important because you see it in front of you. If you planned on doing that workshop during this twelve-week period and, all of a sudden, the company did a reorganization. The workshop that you created, is that most important or do you put it in the parking lot and replace it and do a trade-off for something else?
It gives you the flexibility to have more agility and things like that. What I do is I have people do a physical board. They use Trello or any virtual board. They put their twelve-week plans or goals on there, and then throughout a quarter, we might move things around. As they get feedback, they adjust from there. It has been impactful for me and for a lot of other people.
Crystal’s book is available on Amazon and a whole bunch of different distributors out there. You have a free gift for us, don’t you?
I do. I have got a booklet that I want to give. It’s called Five Essential Strategies for Impactful Leadership. It’s full of tips and essential strategies that you could use right away to take it to work and implement into your day-to-day.
That’s amazing. Thank you so much for being here, sharing your book, and dressing up. Good luck with your book.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Super Brand Publishing
- Crystal Gibson on LinkedIn
- Leisa Reid on LinkedIn
- Authentic Alliance
- The 12 Week Year
- Trello
About Crystal J. Gibson
Crystal is an Executive & Enterprise Coach, speaker, and author who helps leaders and teams understand the complexities of modern organizations. With years of experience in hospitality, technology, human capital management, and finance, she’s built a reputation for creating sustainable change by focusing on the people at the heart of the work.
Crystal doesn’t just offer solutions—she helps individuals and groups discover their own. Whether coaching a team to streamline processes and cut costs or mentoring a leader through the challenges of driving cultural transformation, her approach is always grounded in building trust and fostering authentic connections. Her CHARM framework is more than a tool—it’s a philosophy that guides her work, helping people align their strengths, overcome barriers, and create lasting results.
She’s helped teams tackle everything from breaking down silos that delay progress to introducing agile practices that improve efficiency and collaboration. Crystal also works one-on-one with leaders, guiding them to step into their roles and navigate complex cultural dynamics confidently.
Her upcoming book captures these lessons, sharing stories, strategies, and insights from her journey. It’s a practical guide for Change Catalysts, Managers, Executives, and anyone ready to take bold steps toward creating meaningful change.
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