Leading With Purpose: QinaWorks Joins Rev
Content Warning: This story contains references to suicidal ideation.
QinaWorks, founded by Sue Mann, helps teams and individuals build people’s nervous system capacity to think clearly and perform well under pressure through NeuroLead for teams, NeuroBalance for individuals, and NeuroCoach for coach certification.
What is your “origin story”?
Our founder, Sue Mann, has spent thirty years working in high-stakes environments: as a diplomat in the Middle East during the Second Intifada, in corporate turnarounds, in energy infrastructure, and in executive coaching. Across it all, she saw the same pattern: what separated teams that rose to a challenge from teams that didn’t wasn’t strategy or skill. It was how people related to each other under pressure, and, as she came to learn, that came down to the state of their nervous systems.
After workplace bullying drove her to a hospital bed with PTSD and suicidal ideation, Sue learned that willpower and advice couldn’t get her through it. What worked was learning to understand and regulate her own nervous system through the Community Resiliency Model (CRM), developed by the Trauma Resource Institute. Once she experienced that shift firsthand, she trained as a certified CRM teacher and couldn’t unsee the pattern in every team and leadership situation she’d ever been part of. Most of what gets labeled as leadership failure or team dysfunction, she realized, is really the nervous system doing what nervous systems do when they don’t have the support they need.
That understanding became NeuroBalance, the individual practice Sue has used in her coaching work for years, grounded in CRM and developed with TRI’s approval.
It’s also what led her to bring together Pauline Milwood, Rob Parker, and Aiswarya Senthil, each bringing different expertise in organizational psychology, coaching, and behavioral research, to build NeuroLead: a way to bring this same evidence-based capacity to teams and organizations at scale.
What customer need is your company attempting to address?
Most leadership development focuses on mindset, strategy, or communication skills. It assumes people can think their way into better behavior. But the stress response that drives reactivity, shutdown, and poor decisions under pressure operates below conscious thought. It doesn’t respond to advice in the moment it’s needed.
Teams and leaders need a way to build capacity at that level: the ability to recognize when they or their team are outside their “performance zone,” and the skills to bring themselves back. Without that, organizations keep investing in leadership training that doesn’t hold up under real pressure. NeuroLead addresses that gap directly.
Do you have any recent company milestones or accomplishments you would like to share?
QinaWorks is in active partnership discussions with Reflect (Orb biofeedback device) to integrate biofeedback into the program, and we are joining Rev as part of the next stage of building out the company.
Where do you envision your company a year from now? Five years from now?
In one year: complete customer discovery, develop NeuroLead MVP and pilot it, then refine the program based on real-world results, and have a working case for the connection between nervous system regulation and measurable team performance outcomes. Move NeuroCoach toward ICF accreditation so coaches can be certified to deliver this work themselves. Continue to expand NeuroBalance to individuals, optionally paired with biofeedback devices.
Five years from now: NeuroLead established as a recognized approach to team performance and leadership development, used by organizations that want their leaders and teams to function well under real pressure, not just in theory. A trained network of certified NeuroCoach practitioners extending the work beyond what our founding team can deliver directly. A track record showing that nervous system regulation-based team development produces results that traditional leadership training doesn’t.