About the Author

Dave McCleary is a social scientist who has designed and facilitated interventions for tens of thousands of leaders across the globe at virtually every organizational level possible. He has worked directly with over a hundred individual leaders in long term, deep, personal change relationships. He has collected decades of leadership and organization change data from which to draw, and his work stems from extensive experience with leader transformation and strategic organization change. He is the CEO of Flawless Leaders, LLC; his clients include leaders from organizations world wide such as Volvo, Home Depot, Experian, Loblaw Companies Limited, Flextronics, Dell, Multek, and PCH China Solutions.

McCleary also serves as a consultant and advisor to Pepperdine University’s graduate program for Organization Development professionals. In this program, he assists leaders in undergoing deep personal transformation. His experience in both the public and private sectors has been primarily focused on the work of leaders effectively navigating their dark side. McCleary concludes that the dark side of leadership is the psychological collection place for the dysfunctional mindsets and behaviors that contribute to most leader failures.

Dave contributes to various list-serves and blogs on leadership and organization development, writes his own blog, writes an Internet-based monthly leadership article, The Compass, and has published an academic dissertation, Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. He has also written on executive coaching for the international journal, Development and Learning in Organizations.

David, his wife, and four daughters live and work on their family farm in rural Connecticut.