Dr. Diane Malnekoff is the founder of DM Consulting and a successful executive coach with a stellar client roster that includes Google, Yahoo, Wells Fargo, PG&E, Genentech and numerous others. She holds a PhD from Palo Alto University, a master’s degree in psychology from Antioch University, and multiple coaching certifications.
Earning those graduate degrees required some hefty tuition payments, and Diane was grateful, back in the 1980s, to receive our interest-free student loan to help lighten the financial burden. She’s now a donor to Hebrew Free Loan and delighted to be a member of our Hebrew Free Loan Business Circle, which she finds to be a great place for networking with entrepreneurs in the Jewish business community. Diane looks forward to sharing her expertise as an executive coach with like-minded individuals who want to grow their leadership skills.
Diane’s career path was circuitous. Her first career was as an executive for an international aviation company, where she learned how to manage and lead an organization. She then moved to Israel for a year, taking her first psychology courses at the University of Haifa. Diane was hooked by the prospect of learning more about human nature, and when she returned to the States, she enrolled in graduate school in psychology.
Diane became licensed as a marriage and family therapist and developed a private psychotherapy practice, and eventually completed her Ph.D. to become a clinical psychologist. But she missed using her business acumen and wanted to utilize her skills in organizational psychology. She consulted with a number of large companies and realized that she could leverage her business and psychology backgrounds to become an executive coach. Diane takes a lot of satisfaction in helping her clients manage corporate politics and personalities. She’s especially proud of her work on mastering the gender divide, which brings insights from neuroscience into the workplace to help men and women work together more effectively.
Another area of expertise for Diane is PTSD, an area in which she has both professional experience — she did her PhD dissertation on the subject — and personal experience. Diane lost her home in Santa Rosa to the Tubbs Fire in 2017, and she leaned on all her training to get through that challenging time. Her website offers advice on how to navigate a natural disaster or other crisis, and she’s glad that she could provide a safe haven recently to friends from Southern California who needed temporary respite from the Pasadena fire.
Here at Hebrew Free Loan, we feel fortunate to have someone with such a diverse array of skills as part of our Business Circle. Diane loves to cook and travel, so if you don’t need help negotiating a workplace issue or navigating the aftermath of a wildfire or other trauma, you might ask if she’ll share some of her fabulous recipes or travel tips with you.
