Category Archives: Shadow

The Sheer Grandeur of Our Mistakes

In case you haven’t been fol­low­ing the Wells Far­go scan­dal, I am reprint­ing the tran­scrip­tion of Sen­a­tor Eliz­a­beth War­ren ques­tion­ing John Stumpf, CEO and Chair­man of the Board of Wells Far­go dur­ing recent Sen­ate hear­ings. Over a peri­od of five years, 5,300 employ­ees were fired for open­ing accounts for cus­tomers with­out their knowl­edge, result­ing in […]

September 21, 2016 – 5:43 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices, Self-Knowledge, Shadow, Trust | Comments (2)

The Wolves Revisited

It is a strange time to say the least.  Peo­ple are begin­ning to pub­lish more and more about Trump, rais­ing aware­ness of the dan­gers he rep­re­sents. The good news is he is being stopped, grad­u­al­ly, by peo­ple shar­ing the rapid­ly accu­mu­lat­ing evi­dence of his pat­terns: author­i­tar­i­an­ism, racism, misog­y­ny, xeno­pho­bia, crude­ness, nar­cis­sism, denials, divi­sive­ness, blam­ing, lying, violence. […]

March 14, 2016 – 5:49 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Choices, Love, Power, Shadow | Comments (4)

Leadership Feedback, Leadership Wounds

In one way or anoth­er, lead­ers are always receiv­ing feed­back. Some­times it is from the voiced reac­tions of peo­ple at a meet­ing they are guid­ing. Some­times it is more for­mal, for exam­ple from a staff sur­vey or 360 degree appraisal process. As a con­sul­tant and coach, I’ve noticed a fair­ly com­mon pat­tern in the process […]

January 4, 2016 – 10:35 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Conflict, Consciousness, Grief, Organizational Culture, Reflective Leadership, Self-Knowledge, Shadow, Wounds | Comments (4)

Soul-Making

Soul can be a dif­fi­cult word when it is asso­ci­at­ed with a work­place. Work and busi­ness are the domain of mea­sure­ment and man­age­ment, of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, log­ic, struc­ture, sys­tems, strate­gies and align­ments. Often these are things that have lit­tle obvi­ous con­nec­tion to the deep­er sto­ries of the peo­ple with­in the sys­tems. Those hid­den sto­ries may contain […]

October 12, 2014 – 2:14 pm | By Dan Oestreich | Posted in Love, Organizational Culture, Shadow | Comments (5)