Competing in the fast-moving and every changing business environment is full of peril and risk. Complex decisions and relentless drive for results leave little room for error. Organizations need and demand considerable personal and emotional resources of its workforce and management – often bringing forward talent and capability – but just as likely exposing fault lines. Under stress and conflict, leadership’s blind spots are sometimes as obvious and impactful to others as they are not to themselves. An individual’s psychodynamic issues can affect every aspect of their functioning, from problem analysis to decision making to management style.
Unacknowledged, emotions and psychodynamic forces can turn into force vectors influencing an entire organization and the dynamics of its teams, potentially leading to crisis, paralysis, or chaos. If these hidden or unaddressed dynamics are not dealt with, it is likely they can gather hidden power out of the control of stakeholders. It often seems more compelling to stay focused on day-to-day business problems than to invest time embarking on an uncertain process looking at apparently amorphous dynamics.
As a psychoanalyst and management consultant, Dr. Jenai Wu Steinkeller brings to her clients deep experience and understanding of human behavior, grounded in rigorous theoretical roots, as well as broad experience with the realities and complexities of today’s business environment and management challenges. She balances unbiased objectivity with the capacity for quick and intuitive human connection to help executives deal with their challenges. Her special interests include executive leadership, team dynamics, women leaders, corporate governance, global management, diversity, and conflict management
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