Dr. Anika Gakovic
Consultant
Meet Anika Gakovic
Anika is a leadership coach and business psychologist who helps clients achieve strategic clarity, accelerate growth, and amplify impact on business priorities. Highly regarded for building high-trust, people-centered relationships, she navigates complexity and adapts to ambiguity to deliver results. Anika coaches leaders for peak performance, career growth, and culture dexterity by activating their ability to influence people, cultivate credibility, and reinvigorate their personal brand. Leaders who master themselves and their emotional intelligence are better equipped to apply pattern recognition across relationships and environments to enable problem-solving with precision and accomplishing objectives with confidence. Clients grow skills to understand stakeholders, pitch direction, and navigate difficult conversations in high-stakes contexts to create alignment and accountability. Her whole-person coaching approach helps leaders under pressure think, plan, and strategically drive enterprise priorities with velocity for turning insight into decisive action and measurable outcomes. Specialty areas include:
Drive Strategic Clarity and Execution: Navigate change and transformation to enable tangible business outcomes.
Optimize Team Performance: Build structured accountability and capability to deliver measurable results and growth.
Master the Matrix: Align and unify cross-functional stakeholders to eliminate friction, speed up decisions and accelerate enterprise results.
Elevate Brand and Presence: Amplify leadership positioning and visibility to expand influence and broaden business impact.
Her consulting work helps teams align for stronger communication and collaboration toward shared success. She optimizes talent strategies and employee experiences, and enables the people side of technology adoption — with a focus on growth acceleration and risk mitigation at every stage of the journey. Leaders, teams, and organizations emerge with the clarity, cohesion, capability and confidence to perform at their highest potential.
Anika’s twenty years of business experience as a Human Resources leader in high-performing organizations in Financial Services and Life Sciences anchors her approach to helping clients lead people, advance skills and navigate transformational change. As Director of Learning at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Anika modernized the learning strategy and enabled the people side of digital transformation for the organization. As Executive Director for Leadership Edge at JP Morgan Chase, Anika designed and executed global management programs to enhance culture, engagement, and retention. In her roles as Head of Organizational Effectiveness for OppenheimerFunds / Invesco and Talent Executive at New York Life Insurance Company, she coached executive leaders and high potential employees, enabled salesforce transformation, and facilitated senior team offsites in order to drive strategic enablement. Earlier in her career, Anika created and implemented professional development, employee engagement and change solutions as talent program manager at HSBC Private Bank and UBS Wealth Management. Served on the Board of Directors for New York HR Planning Society (NYHRPS). Contributed as a coach for the Entrepreneurs Challenge Competition at New York University Stern School of Business.
MEMBERSHIPS, ASSOCIATIONS, + CERTIFICATIONS
Trained to International Coaching Federation (ICF) standards
iCoach Global Coach supervision by Dr. Bob Lee
Front-end Columbia Coaching Program, by Dr. Terrence Maltbia
NeuroLeadership Institute Brain-based Coaching Program
Positive Intelligence PQ Coaching Program
Institute for Contemporary Leadership Team Coaching
Team Diagnostic Survey, Hogan Assessments, WorkPlace Big Five, FIRO-B, BTS Bates ExPI, Lominger 360 feedback, Appreciative Inquiry, Hult Ashridge Center for Coaching.
Education
PhD and M.A., Industrial Organizational Psychology, University of Houston
B.A. with honors Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa, Psychology, University of Arkansas
Select Coaching and Consulting Results:
Drive Strategic Clarity and Execution: Anika supports senior leaders navigating complex organizational shifts to turn strategic mandates into measurable business outcomes. She coached a FinTech CEO and a Media CEO successor who are both seasoned technical experts through transformational transitions. Utilizing role-based assessments, she helped each executive refine their strategic direction, realign organizational structures around evolving growth objectives, and lead high-stakes change while cultivating board and stakeholder partnerships.
Optimize Team Performance: Anika builds structured accountability and operating capability, helping high-performing leaders deliver results under pressure. In the legal sector, Anika partnered with an HR Leader at one of the nation's largest law firms to establish partner alignment around strategic initiatives, building functional credibility through operational excellence and disciplined execution. She coached a Senior Sales Leader managing burnout and competing operational demands, helping him rebuild key stakeholder relationships, streamline priorities, and drive a banner revenue year.
Master the Matrix: Anika unifies cross-functional collaboration in matrixed and hierarchical organizations, eliminating operational friction to accelerate decision-making and business delivery. She coached CFOs and accomplished financial deal-makers to bridge complex financial mandates with business operations to deliver execution excellence. She also coached two Associate General Counsels at rapidly scaling banks, enabling them to expand beyond functional legal experts to drive enterprise-wide influence, align business priorities, and navigate scaling growth.
Elevate Brand and Presence: Anika helps successors amplify their authority, build executive presence, and expand their influence across complex ecosystems. She coaches rising leaders in highly demanding, results-focused financial and corporate environments to establish partner-level voice, adapt communication styles, and build cross-organizational credibility. For retiring Managing Partners at top professional services firms, she designed an Executive Transitions framework that helped senior leaders translate their expert authority into portfolio careers as Board Members, Private Equity Operators, and Advisors.
Empower Decisions and Alignment: Anika equips senior leaders facing high-stakes decisions with the clarity and composure required to navigate competing demands and priorities. She coached senior Life Sciences leaders managing multi-stakeholder friction, applying structural pattern recognition to clarify accountabilities, resolve cross-departmental conflicts, and build shared strategic direction. Her work creates high-trust environments where talent retention, execution speed, and business outcomes operate in unison.
