For organizations and businesses to thrive in a volatile and complex marketplace, its leaders must be resilient and emotionally fit along with having technical and business savvy. To be truly excellent, they need strong moral compass, a global mindset of cultural sensitivity and curiosity, and the ability to negotiate and manage conflict. Most importantly, they require social and emotional intelligence, which means, not only the ability to get along well with people, but the ability to help them get along with each other. They must command respect, but through making the people around them feel respected. They need a strong voice paired with powerful listening skills.
These qualities are rarely “found” together in a single package, never mind in the same package of business and technical success of those individuals who have risen through the ranks. Yet the more leadership responsibilities one has the more important are these skills of emotional and social fitness. Strategy and execution can founder and shipwreck off of people interactions that miss the mark. To rapidly identify the critical and relevant development need in a leader, team, or organization, a perspective is needed from someone who can get close enough to diagnose but who is not a stakeholder beholden to a specific interest.
Deep and broad psychological and organizational knowledge combined with extensive business understanding allows the right consultant to target the node most pertinent to the organization’s critical need. Dr. Jenai Wu Steinkeller fuses formal psychology training at leading universities and clinics, with hands-on corporate experience guiding top senior executives and organizations. She has an extensive track-record helping executives and their teams perform better, engage more deeply, and unleash their best potential. With dedication and compassion, she offers experience, insight and skill, and encourages clients to call upon their own holistic inspiration of mind, body, and spirit.
Jenai Wu Steinkeller, Ph.D.
CONSULTING PSYCHOLOGIST, PSYCHOANALYST, EXECUTIVE COACH
Services include leadership, team and organizational consulting & coaching, shadow coaching (real-time observation & feedback), action learning, mindfulness, culture, and conflict management training.
50 Franklin St., 3rd Floor
Boston, MA 02110
Phone: +1.617.262.1423
Serving Boston, MA 02110, US, UK and Worldwide
Areas of Specialization Include
- Coaching for Leadership Excellence
Consulting on Strategy and Talent
Team Coaching
Coaching Women Leaders
Building Trust and Credibility
Governance Boards
Global Management
Cross-cultural Coaching
Conflict Management & Negotiation Skills
Executive Presence
Mindful Leadership
Coaching to Leverage Diversity
Stress Management
Why Jenai
What sets Jenai’s approach apart is a totality of perspective rooted in the latest medical and scientific research, and combining academic, organizational, and corporate expertise. She coaches senior executives and global leadership teams, start-ups to the C-suites of Fortune 500 companies, governments, NGOs, Board Directors and entrepreneurs, delivering fully bespoke, hands-on consulting for every aspect of organizational health, from culture and negotiation training, conflict resolution, and the strategic deployment of solutions. She has taught and written on leadership, psychoanalysis, negotiation, culture, gender, race, ethnicity, and conflict.
Jenai strives to share with her clients her lifelong passion for learning. Formally trained as a psychoanalyst, behavioral scientist and cultural anthropologist, she has earned several advanced degress and has been a faculty member of Harvard Medical School for 25 years.
Read more about Jenai’s Training and Education.
Jenai brings to each engagement empathy, passion, and an affinity for the human condition. She offers the compassionate understanding rooted in her own authentic experiences, tempered by a lifetime of learning and fascination with the study of the human mind. Her doctorate plus 13 years of intense higher psychoanalytic education uniquely prepare her to address the most complex and challenging issues her clients face — in every case, letting go of the negatives that consume us, to embrace the positives that liberate and empower us.
Jenai’s informed and refreshing approach is powered by the determination to share her insights: with a deep understanding of human motivations, her work has been dedicated to transformative change in individuals and organizations.
From coaching and consulting to training, Jenai’s mission has been to comprehend the polar forces and paradoxes inherent in the common struggles of organizational life, while recognizing the vast complexities of the interpersonal realm. At the very core of her practice is a foundational belief in the value of being human. Augmented by her own life experiences that enable her to go beyond the expected, she patiently probes deeper to offer help, source inspiring motivation, and empower self-driven breakthroughs. Her approach is a far deeper dive, and is executed with a skilled and calculated purpose to benefit individuals, leaders, their teams and organizations.
A critical distinction in her transcendent approach reflects the parallel understanding of not simply what is known but also what is felt. It is this fusion of formal psychology and corporate senior management coaching expertise that allows her to see what others miss or dismiss, and to then better understand both the personal obstacles of her clients as well as their uniquely individual opportunities to positively overcome them. The over-arching objective and her practicing priority, is the conversion of apparent weaknesses into strengths and assets, while overcoming separation and alienation to instead accentuate our shared humanity and values.
Jenai’s own mindfulness training began over 2 decades ago, as part of a deeply personal spiritual quest. Her practice has honed her insights, which she combines with her professional training to articulate the experience of speis rooted in common humanity and felt experience rather than beliefs and orientations. It is the experience of vitality, the creative, animating life force, which is offered between people as respect, and directly results in global, business, and management successes. Conducted from the foundation that all human life is valued, its natural conclusion is that what makes humans thrive is living a life whose fabric is the joy and quality of their love, leading to interconnectedness rather than divisions.
Experience
Jenai has extensive experience coaching and consulting to C-suite executives, board directors, entrepreneurs, and senior management
Industries
Client industries include high-tech, biotech, hedge funds, pharmaceuticals, HR services, media, hospital and university administrations, finance, law firms, creative arts, chemical and health care, and numerous non-profits
Regions
She works with companies ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, especially in US and Europe
Presence
In her work she joins authentic engagement and nonjudgmental presence to a true appreciation of the complexity and volatility of today’s organizational and business challenges.
Examples of Client Requests
Confidential and Neutral Sounding Board for Specific Challenges of Senior Leadership:
- Need to navigate complex stakeholder interests
- Need confidential space to talk through key decisions
- Confidential discussions about succession
- Need to be able to share human aspects of the individual, including emotions, discover personal blind spots, frustrations, difficult relationships
- Need to manage power constructively, maintain balance without being afraid of it, becoming addicted or corrupted by it
Improve confidence and develop authentic leadership
Emotional Intelligence for organization’s critical players
Transitions – Individuals or teams stretching into new roles and accountabilities; change in management, mergers
Cultural Complexity — Global business environment and global organization and personnel leading to new tensions and dilemmas