Introduction
Joanne Conway spent her early twenties carrying a chip on her shoulder the size of a council estate. "Why me," she says of that decade, "this is so hard." She had grown up in Dublin with her mother and two sisters after her mum left her father because of domestic abuse in the home. She had been the girl found behind the sofa reading Enid Blyton, top of her class, getting A's and B's. Then at fourteen, a move to London to live with a father she'd barely seen in seven years pulled the floor out from under her. She dropped out of school. She went to work in a petrol station.
None of that is the part of her story most people would choose to put on LinkedIn. Conway puts it there anyway. Now Head of Inclusion at DLA Piper, after seventeen years at EY, a school governor, a guest lecturer, and partway through a PhD on privilege and inclusion, she has built a career and a public voice on refusing to be ashamed of a start she never chose. This is what that refusal actually looks like in practice, and why she thinks it makes her a better leader, not a more fragile one.
Growing Up in the Shadow of Domestic Abuse
Conway was born in Padiham, a small town near Burnley in Lancashire [CHECK: spelling of birthplace, ASR-garbled in transcript], to two Irish parents who had moved to England for her father's work as a labourer on building sites. At seven, the family moved back to Dublin. At eight, her mother left her father. "Sadly, you know, like many others, I grew up in a family where there was domestic abuse," Conway says. She calls it one of the pivotal moments of her life, the kind you don't understand at seven or eight but that shapes how you respond to things and what you value for decades afterwards.
What followed was, in her telling, a genuinely happy childhood on a council estate in Dublin: kicking a football with whichever kids were out that day, knocking on doors because nobody had a mobile phone yet, waiting for the mobile library bus to appear without warning and running home to dig out overdue books from under the bed. She was, in her words, "either reading a book or kicking a football." The contradiction sits at the centre of her story from the start: real hardship at home, and a childhood she still describes as good.
Losing Belonging: The Move to London
At fourteen, her mother decided to move the family back to London, to Conway's father. It was the wrong age for that kind of disruption. She lost her friendship group, her sense of place, and with no mobile phones to bridge the gap, the connection to Ireland went quiet fast. The UK and Irish education systems didn't align. Her grades, which had been strong, dropped.
She's careful to name exactly what happened rather than what it's tempting to call it. "I can absolutely attest to the fact that my grades dropped significantly because of that sense of belonging," she says, pointing to the psychological safety research she now cites professionally. She scraped through her GCSEs, got a D in maths of all subjects (she'd go on to spend nine years in finance), and left school without the exam results that might have kept the academic door open.
The Petrol Station Was a Foundation, Not a Ceiling
Her first job was at a busy petrol station, and she rose to manage it. Customer service, cash reconciliation, opening and closing the shop on time, making sandwiches, timing pastries in the oven, all of it. "I think sometimes in society we don't value those roles," she says, "but actually the people that are doing those jobs, they are really hard, and they are super smart people that are doing those jobs." She learned time management, prioritisation and conflict handling there, and she names it as one of the real foundations of her career, not a placeholder before the real work started.
She didn't have a plan for what came next. What she had was a conviction: "I always knew there was more, but I didn't know what that was." Nobody around her was suggesting college, an apprenticeship, or a next step. A regular customer who happened to be a recruiter for a new GE Capital Bank call centre noticed how she ran the shop and invited her to apply, telling her the CV she didn't think she had was already visible in how she worked. She took the job in credit control and never stopped taking on more than her role required.
Saying Yes to the Unpaid Work Nobody Else Wanted
Once inside GE, Conway volunteered for everything unpaid that others turned down: walking the floor, taking escalations, covering for managers. "I think other people thought, well, I'm not getting paid for that, so why would I do it," she says. "I was in there going, wow, people get paid to do this, this is amazing." Every extra task was a piece of learning she wasn't getting through formal education, and she treated it that way deliberately. Team leader followed, then a string of roles each slightly more senior than the last.
She didn't leave the formal side alone either. In her mid-twenties, while working full time, she completed a psychology degree with the Open University, extending her own deadlines along the way because, as she puts it, "it was important to have fun as well." Years later, after nine years in finance, she added a master's in HR management, studied at night school for two years. Then, against her own better judgement and her husband's explicit instructions to stop her if she ever mentioned it again, she started a PhD.
From Finance to Diversity and Inclusion: Building the Case Before Asking for the Role
Conway spent nine years in finance at EY, starting at the most junior level and rising to manage a team of sixty across the UK and Ireland, all without a finance qualification. She built the role on relationships, trust and credibility instead. When she wanted to move into diversity and inclusion work, she didn't wait to be picked. She went to EY's D&I team, asked what they needed from finance, packaged it up, and took a proposal back to her own leadership: let me be the finance representative, I'll deliver on these priorities alongside my day job. They said yes. She helped set up a finance shadow board that, by the time of this conversation, was still running years later.
By the time she formally applied for a full-time role in the space, she could point to work she was already doing and impact she'd already made. "There are times where you have to be very intentional," she says of the move, "and that intentional means slowing things down, creating a plan, and then working on what that plan does." On the idea that hard work alone explains success, she's blunt: "I don't believe that there is a meritocracy. I think that there are plenty of people that work just as hard as me that haven't managed to get where I am." Access to sponsors and mentors mattered too, and she's wary of anyone using her story to argue that circumstances don't matter. "That's not fair. Everybody's circumstance is different."
Rejection Taught Her More Than Success Did
The move from finance into talent wasn't smooth. Conway applied for several roles at EY and was turned down. "I've been used to always overperforming," she says, "and I would apply for these roles and they were like, no, not quite right." The feedback, once she could hear it past the initial sting, was fair and constructive. Stepping back to actually absorb that rather than assume "they're out to get me" is, she says, one of the harder leadership skills to build.
It traces back to earlier feedback in her career that made her defensive at first, until she caught herself and changed how she responded. She now asks for feedback proactively rather than waiting for it: "Tell me what I can do better next time, there must be one thing I can do better." Framing the request that way, she says, gives people permission to be honest when they'd otherwise hold back out of politeness. It's also, in her account, the single practice that has built trust with teams and colleagues fastest, because people learn quickly that she means what she says and follows through.
Refusing to Feel Shame for What Was Never Her Fault
Conway is open, including publicly on LinkedIn, about her past, her health condition (an essential tremor [CHECK: exact medical term, ASR-derived]), and the parts of her story most people keep private. Asked why, her answer is direct: "Because I refuse to feel shame for something that I have no control over." She locates that shame as something society puts on people rather than something they should be carrying, and argues the alternative is not just personal relief but better leadership. "I'm a better leader, I'm a better friend, I'm a better mum, a better wife, because of it."
She doesn't pretend the shift was instant. In her twenties, she carried real resentment. What changed, she says, was age, and with it the space to actually reflect rather than keep moving without pause. Her practical filter for all of it is simple: focus on what's in your sphere of influence, let go of what isn't, and take it one step at a time. "You can't change the past. You can only deal with what you've got." On the hardest days, she says, the belief that kept her going wasn't a fixed target or a date on a calendar. It was certainty that she was never going back to the life she grew up in, and that whatever else was out there had to be better.
Leadership Is Not About You, It's About Your Team
Seventeen years at EY ended not because anything went wrong, but because it felt like time for something different, and DLA Piper's values matched her own closely enough to make the move worth the risk. Her PhD, on privilege and inclusion in professional services, grew out of the same conviction that runs through her whole career: everyone holds some privilege and lacks some privilege, it's a social construct that shifts with circumstance, and understanding that fully would change how people design systems, programmes and workplaces from the outset rather than patching them after the fact.
Asked to define leadership, she keeps it plain. "Leadership for me is about getting the best out of every single person on your team, and bringing that together in a way that collectively means you can do great things." She tells her own team directly that her success means nothing if theirs doesn't come with it. "There is no point in me sitting in a performance review talking about all of the things I've done if my team is not performing, if my team is not happy and engaged." Her advice to anyone building that kind of team is unglamorous and, in her view, underrated: invest the time to actually know people, because you can't motivate someone you don't understand, and the payoff takes longer than anyone wants it to.
