Anika Gakovic, PhD

Organizational Consultant & Executive Coach

Dr. Anika Gakovic is a business psychologist who partners with executives to achieve strategic clarity, accelerate leadership and capacity development, and amplify impact to enterprise priorities. Highly regarded for building high-trust, outcome-driven relationships, she integrates the people side of business with strategic execution to navigate organizational complexity and deliver outcomes that matter the most.

Anika’s organizational consulting work focuses on aligning teams for enhanced communication and collaboration toward shared success. She specializes in optimizing talent strategies, modernizing learning frameworks, and enabling the people side of technology adoption and digital transformation. By focusing on growth acceleration and risk mitigation, she ensures organizations possess the cohesion, capability, and confidence to perform at their highest potential during transformational change.

As an executive coach and leadership advisor, Anika prepares leaders for peak performance and culture dexterity by activating their ability to influence stakeholders and cultivate professional credibility. She leverages pattern recognition across relationships and environments to help leaders problem-solve with precision. Her whole-person approach equips leaders to master emotional intelligence, navigate high-stakes conversations, and turn strategic insights into decisive action.

Anika brings twenty years of progressively impactful corporate experience as a Human Resources and Talent executive within high-performing organizations in financial services and life sciences sectors. As Director of Learning at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, she modernized the organizational learning strategy and led the people side of digital transformation. Her tenure at JPMorgan Chase as Executive Director for Leadership Edge required global scope research, redesign, and execution of global management programs to centralize and enhance culture, engagement, and retention. Previously, as Head of Organizational Effectiveness for OppenheimerFunds / Invesco and Talent Executive at New York Life, Anika coached senior leaders, enabled Salesforce transformations, and facilitated executive offsites to drive strategic enablement. Her early career was grounded at HSBC Private Bank and UBS Wealth Management, where she implemented professional development and change management solutions to drive employee engagement.

Prior to her corporate experience, Anika worked as an independent consultant developing tools for candidate selection for Hess Oil and the Chicago Police Department. Additionally, she served as adjunct faculty at University of Houston where she completed her MA and PhD in Industrial Organizational Psychology. Anika’s presentations and publications focus on a range of topics including executive development, employee engagement, and driving people strategy through learning and culture change. Anika served on the Board of Directors for New York HR Planning Society (NYHRPS) and contributed as a coach for the Entrepreneurs Challenge Competition at New York University Stern School of Business. She is a member of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and the Oxford Character Project.

Anika is trained to International Coaching Federation (ICF) standards and completed iCoach Global Coach supervision by Dr. Bob Lee. Her coaching certifications include Front-end Columbia Coaching Program, by Dr. Terrence Maltbia, NeuroLeadership Institute Brain-based Coaching Program, Positive Intelligence PQ Coaching Program, and Institute for Contemporary Leadership Team Coaching. Assessment certifications include Hogan Assessments, WorkPlace Big Five, FIRO-B, BTS Bates ExPI, Lominger 360 feedback, Team Diagnostic Survey, and Appreciative Inquiry by Hult Ashridge Center for Coaching.