Dr. Cathy Greenberg-Executive Coach, Author & Speaker Dr. Cathy Greenberg, Ph.D., Author, Speaker, Consultant, and ICF Certified Coach has been named a worldwide authority on leadership and human behavior by all major business and financial news organizations, and by popular media outlets such as Fortune, Oprah Magazine, and Working Mother. Named a “Top 100 Leadership Coach” by Executive Excellence Magazine, she is an engaging speaker and business talk show host on Voice America: Leadership Development News. An active contributor to television including ABC, NBC, PBS, CBS, BBC, and Prime Time Specials on CNN. Dr. Greenberg is known for achieving outstanding results for others. A former executive in her own right, Dr. Greenberg enjoyed executive positions at two of the world’s largest consulting firms, founded two leadership centers, three consulting firms, and works across all industries around the globe. Dr. Cathy Greenberg is a founding partner of CSC’s Global Organization Change Practice and the co-founder of the Executive Leadership Theme Team at the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change. She was an executive coach for Accenture’s top high potential leaders in its Northeast region and designed a training program to transfer this knowledge, “High-Performance Coaching,” which led to the creation of 500 internal coaches worldwide. In addition, Dr. Cathy Greenberg is an educator and entrepreneur, often combining the two fields in her work on behalf of fostering leadership, workplace efficiency, and happiness, and in showing how emotional intelligence ensures better performance, greater job satisfaction, higher profits, and overall corporate stability. She was named a Top 100 Executive Coach by Executive Excellence Magazine and a Top 50 Female Entrepreneurs by Insights Magazine, a journal on leadership from the renowned pioneer in leadership studies, Warren Bennis. Dr. Cathy Greenberg is the New York Times bestselling author of What Happy Working Mothers Know and, with Dan Baker, of What Happy Companies Know. In addition, her book “Global Leadership,” co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, Alastair Robertson, and Maya Hu-Chan, was ranked as the number-one business book on Amazon. Her most recent book is Fearless Leaders: Sharpen Your Focus – How the New Science of Mindfulness Can Help You Reclaim Your Confidence, written with T.C North, Ph.D. Dr. Cathy Greenberg has made it her goal to apply new findings in the science of leadership and achievement to the workplace, and to help people shape their destinies as leaders. She uses science to create tools for people to recognize and build on their emotional intelligence and mindfulness, improve their career performance, and achieve their personal goals. To know more about Dr. Cathy, visit this link.
Gantuya Tsevegdorj-Entrepreneur & Women Empowerment Advocate
Gantuya Tsevegdorj-Entrepreneur & Women Empowerment Advocate Gantuya Tsevegdorj is an Entrepreneur and an accomplished public relations expert, with a distinguished career spanning twenty years in the private and public sectors. Originally from Mongolia, she has lived and worked in Italy for over twenty years. Currently, she has launched her digital branding platform intending to educate, empower, inspire and motivate future leaders, young generations, and woman business owners through video episodes on “Success stories” of outstanding business leaders, designers, creatives, and great minds that created champions of the industries and family legacies. She is the Founder of the Italian branch of «Be an ICON» a philanthropic association, part of the global Mastermind platform dedicated to success and prosperity. «Be an ICON» was launched in the UAE to leave a legacy through leadership development, knowledge sharing, and creating a positive impact in society. Until recently, she served as Honorary Consul of Mongolia in Milan and Representative of the Mongolian National Chamber of Commerce in Italy, representing the Mongolian government and businesses on trade and investment, especially in luxury, textile, and fashion commodities. Throughout her career, she has facilitated dozens of business missions and diplomatic meetings between high-level Mongolian and Italian dignitaries, including Presidents of Mongolia, Speaker of the Parliament of Mongolia, Prime Minister of Mongolia, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Agriculture and Industry, and the President of Italian Republic, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, Italian Minister of Economic Development and numerous other government officials and businessmen. After completing her diplomatic service, she founded several boutique firms bringing high-quality Italian heritage to Mongolia in the luxury sector: fashion and high jewelry, fine food and premium wines, architecture, and interior design. Her commitment to international culture and trade development extends outside the trade and business to the numerous symposiums and leadership programs she has organized, including the Mongolian Women in the Business conference program with the Italian Stock Exchange (London Exchange Group), Mongolian Young Leaders Program in Europe, and numerous other art exhibitions, classical music concerts, and shows of Mongolian and Italian culture in both countries. In the private sector, Gantuya previously has held senior positions at Italian industrial and Japanese multinational trading companies in Milan. Before her MBA studies, she served as Head of Foreign Cooperation at the Mongolian National Chamber of Commerce and Industry promoting trade and investment with the Asia Pacific region, and has organized different business and investment forums in Mongolia, including IX Asian Trade Promotion Forum. Gantuya holds an MBA from MIB Trieste School of Management and a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from the Irkutsk Agricultural University. To know more about Gantuya, visit this link.
Aleen Zakka – Founder of Net2work & Digital Marketing Expert
Aleen Zakka – Founder of Net2work & Digital Marketing Expert Aleen’s story began in 2005 when she discovered Facebook and was in awe of the significant potential such a platform could provide to its users. It was then that she decided she wanted to teach people about digital marketing and become successful doing so. In 2016, she was able to reinforce her passion and abilities as an entrepreneur by building Net2work Branding, and she has, ever since, helped grow brands, CEOs, and top directors in the Middle East to widely use social media platforms for their global personal brand. As a personal branding expert, Aleen realized the enormous difficulties of starting from scratch in a world dominated by huge marketing companies. So, she took the liberty of contacting several different foreign companies with expertise in personal branding, allowing her to gain their insights into the world of reputation management and personal branding. In turn, Aleen was invited to contribute to a book called Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators, and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life, co-authored by Raoul Davis, Kathy Palokoff, and Paul Eder, as an influencer. “Being the only Middle Eastern woman mentioned in the book, I started wondering about the lack of Arab women in the field. My mind went back to my mother who, through her strength in raising me alone after her divorce from my father in a war-torn Lebanon, has inspired me to focus on a different goal while sharing my ideas and expertise to help advance other women’s careers.” Aleen didn’t waste any time. She immediately started to record episodes for an Arabic online magazine, Like Nafizati, where she openly discussed and explained how women seeking success should go about starting their journeys on digital media. After building diplomatic relationships with various prominent individuals and organizations in the Arab world, Aleen’s name subsequently flourished in the digital marketing field. It was the moment when she decided that she was ready to share her knowledge with the women of Lebanon and the Arab world. Aleen started by teaching women the basics of digital presence at seminars that she organized. In just three short months, Aleen had taught over 400 women the basics of social media so they could go out into the world and use it to promote themselves and their projects with the support of a plethora of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and online networks. “My passion for women grew the more I shared my knowledge with them. Women deserve an essential boost in their careers, whether they are entrepreneurs or not. All women need the kickstart to become strong and successful business people or leaders.” Executive-Women had the pleasure of discussing more in-depth topics with Aleen through an exclusive one-on-one interview. Click here for the full read, or visit this link for more info.
The New World of Work .by Mona AlHebsi
Are You Ready For The New World Of Work? We’ve all witnessed how the world changed around us in the past 20 months or so, and the frantic speed we had to adapt with it to continue managing our affairs in the best possible ways. This was surely not easy, but as we know, progress is impossible without change, and if we don’t change, we don’t grow; and if we don’t grow, we cease to live. Those remarkable circumstances called for extraordinary responses. Ever since many facets of our lives have transformed significantly; the way we learn, the way we shop, the way we spend our leisure time, and most prominently, the way we work. In this article, I’m going to shed light on the 3 key highlights of the new world of work and how these call for both companies and professionals to change their outdated game plans and prepare themselves to become more competitive and fit for the new future of work. The Future Arrangement of Work We’ve all experienced a major shift in the way we started working since March 2020. Remote, Virtual, and Hybrid are 3 buzzwords characterizing the reality of our work-life today. Many organizations and workers are currently in favor of hybrid work structures to get the best of both worlds. It’s expected that remote work and virtual meetings are likely to continue even after the pandemic is over, as many organizations, as well as individuals, reported more efficiency in time, cost, efforts, and outcome when certain tasks were done remotely without the need to commute. As a result, many organizations started thinking seriously about granting their employees flexible working arrangements and place great importance on results-driven performance management, being the most accurate way to measure productivity for remote and virtual work assignments. In the same context, around 278 executives told McKinsey during a survey conducted in August 2020, that they are planning to reduce office space by 30% on average. For companies, this will surely bring about some definitive adjustments in cost and focus of doing business. As for individual workers, this will open doors for other possibilities like having parallel career paths, investing quality family time, fulfilling parental duties, and dedicating more time for education or leisure to name a few. Nevertheless, regardless of the many amazing advantages of remote and virtual work, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns! Overworking, conflicting priorities, constant interruptions, loneliness & lack of social interactions, communication issues, technology hiccups, and bad health habits are all logical consequences to this new approach of how work is being done these days. Like any other thing in life, practice makes perfect, and the more we get used to this new way of working with all its good and bad sides, the more we learn how to master it and make the most of it. This of course means that we – as businesses and individuals – need to constantly adapt to the continuous changes coming our way in the way we work. Learning & Talent Management The focus in future jobs will revolve around a lifelong learning mindset, and the main criteria for sourcing talent will not be fixated on “Experience” as the practice has mostly been. Companies need to adopt a more agile and holistic approach when it comes to their basis for sourcing and selecting the best person for the job. This is because the future workforce will care less about employment stability and long-term loyalty and will be more characterized by job-hopping, active learning, innovative thinking, and continuous talent development to stay relevant in such a fast-paced world. Since the new terms of the psychological contract between employees and employers are becoming more volatile, ambiguous, and unpredictable, the key defining factor in this relationship moving forward will be: “What’s in it for me?” for both ends. Employers need to focus on harnessing a quality work environment and providing a culture conducive to learning, experimentation, and support for making mistakes at the same time for the sake of learning. Highly talented people thrive on challenges and enjoy taking initiatives and implementing original solutions for highly complex organizational problems, and thus having rigid policies or tyrant leaders in place would be a huge disadvantage to the survival of any business in the future and a primary source for talent departure. Equally so, it’s important for individual job seekers, to keep their eyes on these evolving trends in the job market and understand how this new approach to continuous learning and embracing a more creative mindset about how they carry out their day-to-day work can impact their employability and competitiveness in this new age and time. So, It’s very clear that in the world of tomorrow, the degree of learning capability, as well as the level of innovation, will be the focal point that determines the attractiveness of both companies and professionals for each other and the key to the survival of all. As Alvin Tofler rightly said: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write; but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”. Wellbeing, Stress Management, and Finding Meaning After more than 20 months of uncertainty, stress, and constant adaptation to the ever-changing job requirements, many workers became more aware of what they want and what they won’t tolerate. This was the most prominent finding of “The Great Resignation” Workhuman’s fall 2021 international survey, which highlighted three areas of opportunity for organizations to attract new talent and high caliber professionals as well as increase their retention rates by improving their management practices and company culture. This can be achieved by having better communication, providing greater psychological safety, and running more employee recognition and wellbeing schemes in the business. Furthermore, building on the above, it’s very important to create more meaningful working goals and assignments that help employees find meaning and fulfillment at work. This can be achieved for instance by providing counseling, coaching, and mentoring that will direct them and
On Patriotism & Digital Marketing With Aleen Zakka
On Patriotism & Digital Marketing With Aleen Zakka What helped shape the woman you are today? Over the course of my career, I’ve had the chance to work with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs. I learned a lot from them. Mostly that people who care about making a difference will make a huge positive impact on your life. If you meet one of them, hang on to them. So you can pass that positive impact on to others. These people have deeply inspired me to find my own passions and causes worth fighting for. My passion for helping women CEOs began when I was a kid. My mom taught me to never leave a fight in the middle of a war. That lesson has been held from high school to the workplace to my business; in every project, you have to put your best foot forward and never stop without making an impact or a change. That dedication to my work is my biggest asset. Considering how stressful your work environment can be, being a Digital Marketing and Reputation Management expert, how do you manage stress and avoid burnout? Every successful person has had to develop strategies to manage stress and avoid burnout; I do this by striving to be systematic in everything I do. When I have an idea or a project, I plan everything out in front of me. What will it take? What do I need to focus on? Who do I need to leverage? Even though I plan crisis strikes from time to time, every crisis used to worry me, and I would overthink and work endlessly. With experience, I managed to teach myself how to deal with any stressful task by weighing the advantages or disadvantages of the situation. Never letting a bad situation drag me down and working out several times per week helps me to stay positive and manage my stress. Can you name one person in the field whom you highly regard and admire? I truly admire people who exhibit humility, responsibility, resilience, respect, and an ability to influence others. I believe that these characteristics represent the essence of true leadership. Without these characteristics, it is impossible to lead well. In my opinion, Raoul Davis, The CEO of Ascendant Group has these pillars of Leadership. To cut the story short, he taught me a big lesson: Give the Other Person A Reason to Like You! He once said, I quote, “In this day and age, people are not looking for a leader, they are looking for a way-maker. They want someone who is going to show them the way forward, even if it means making a few tough decisions along the way.” What was the most challenging moment in your entire career? What was the lesson learned at that moment? The most pivotal challenge in my entire career was to choose to suspend my business when I was asked to become an advisor to the Prime Minister in the Lebanese government. It was a very difficult decision for me because I love my business and I had worked hard to build it. However, I knew it was the right thing to do. I started working 14 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. I put my business skills to work supporting the new Prime Minister, Professor Hassan Diab, by creating channels of communication. I wanted to create a new way of communicating with the Lebanese people. The experience changed my life, as, after only three months in the position, I realized I was functioning at a much lower level. There were so many complexities and challenges in the government that I couldn’t even imagine how a simple administrative problem would be solved. The bureaucracy in the country makes the government very dysfunctional. It took me a long time to understand how important it is to have a “mental switch” that turns you off from the day-to-day hassles of running a business and on to the more complex challenges of building a country. Serving my Country was the best thing that ever happened to me! Looking back at your tweets and quotes on your social media platforms, we can’t help but notice the way you empower other women in any business they handle. What piece of advice would you give to any woman who is not yet aware of the importance of digital marketing? I believe there is nothing more important for a woman than to be knowledgeable and lead in the digital world. It starts by leveraging her digital presence. Right here and right now, you can become an expert and “Powerhouse in the Digital World”. Start by learning all about what makes a website “successful”. Learn the 50/30/20 rule for websites. Know the difference between “search engine optimization” and “organic search engine optimization”. Learn the three S’s of digital marketing: Sales, SEO, and Social Media. Know the difference between direct marketing and “indirect” marketing. Understand “affiliate marketing”. Know your “buying power”. I’m not saying that you have to do the job yourself. But be aware of what you need for your business. Ask questions. After all, what does it cost to hire someone to help you make more money with your website? Last but not least, keep this in mind: the average website is a total failure after one year. How challenging is it for one to preserve their identity, integrity, and credibility in the world of Media? There are many people out there who would like to destroy your reputation. They are very good at what they do. It is much easier to criticize than to compliment. Most people don’t have a clue about what it takes to be a star in the Media. A lot of people in the Media world lack honesty and morality. They will say anything to get ratings. They will report anything that can be used against you; no matter how truthful it might be. Look at all the “fake news”
Mona AlHebsi – Hotelier, HR Expert, and Success Coach
Mona AlHebsi is a thought leader, accomplished Hotelier, Human Resources expert, success coach, passionate author, and a multi-award winner in the field of HR, Hospitality, and Leadership. Born to a traditional Emirati family, Mona hails from the magnificent mountain area of Ras Al Khaimah – one of the seven cities in the United Arab Emirates – where she grew up and completed her schooling, acquiring later on her pre-graduate from the Higher Colleges of Technology – Ras Al Khaimah Women’s College in 2004. During her college years, she also volunteered as a host in the One & Only Hotel Chain and completed her internship in Hilton Ras Al Khaimah, where her interest and passion for the industry grew. She then moved to Dubai in early 2005 and was among the very few UAE nationals who have pioneered in the hospitality industry which was a rather unpopular career path for Emiratis at that time. Her first assignment with the iconic “Burj Al Arab” hotel was a fascinating learning experience and her door to a world of glamour, endless discoveries, and astounding challenges. In January 2008, Mona stepped out of the hospitality industry for some time to focus on self-education. She has since embarked on a lifelong learning journey where she has worked for Zayed University while earning several professional certifications and a dual MBA in Human Resources and Operations Management. In May 2012, Mona joined the hospitality industry again, this time, as a Human Resources Manager in Grand Hyatt Dubai where she was responsible for overseeing the day-to-day HR operations as well as formalizing and executing the Emiratization Strategy for the hotel. She kept pressing forward through managing the resistance of line managers to hire local talent by visiting colleges, universities, and career fairs to attract potential Emiratis and promoting the local culture in Grand Hyatt Dubai. During her 2.5 years tenure in Grand Hyatt Dubai, Mona doubled the number of UAE Nationals from 17 to 35, accomplished her PMP and CIPD certifications, got shortlisted as “Best HR Person of the Year” in Hotelier’s Middle East Award 2014, and received various appreciations and accolades for her contributions to supporting Emiratization in the hospitality industry. In December 2014, Mona was appointed as a Director of Human Resources in Jumeirah Creekside Hotel, part of Jumeirah Hotels and Resorts, the luxury hospitality brand in UAE. In that position, she was the only Emirati woman in the Executive Committee Team of the hotel. She has, ever since, transformed the team in the HR department and introduced several HR initiatives to uplift the employees’ performance and engagement scores and support the business results. In August 2017, Mona got promoted to the post of Director of Human Resources in the majestic Ottoman-inspired Jumeirah Zabeel Saray resort. In April 2019, Mona was awarded the highest status in the HR profession from CIPD which is the FCIPD (Chartered FCIPD). In addition to being an accomplished hotelier, Mona is also a success coach and a published author. She published her first book titled “Beat The Odds” or “المألوف اكسر” in both Arabic and English wherein she shares her tried and tested techniques and success secrets with working women and especially hoteliers to help them achieve success by adding value throughout their working life. Moreover, Mona is a member of several professional bodies such as the Project Management Institute (PMI), the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD), and the International Coaching Federation (ICF). Furthermore, Mona is a member of the Advisory Council in the Dubai College of Tourism. She is a blogger and publishes periodic articles in LinkedIn and Brainz Magazine on her life experiences and areas of expertise such as Human Resources, Coaching, Leadership, Self-Development, Emiratization, Hospitality, Women & Youth Empowerment, etc. Mona currently continues adding value to the community through her unique coaching program, workshops, webinars, and writings. She has recently launched 2 exclusive career talk shows on YouTube, one in English (Beat The Odds in 1 Minute) and the other in Arabic (مهنية افكار) to provide useful career tips and advice to help individuals look differently at their career and make the most of it. To know more about Mona’s inspiring journey, visit this link or click here.