Zafer is an executive coach, a team coach and a designer and facilitator of leadership development interventions. He embraces a developmental approach aimed at increasing his clients’ inner complexity to match the outer complexity of the challenges they face. Using conversation and moments of truth as a platform, Zafer seeks to surface, challenge and unfreeze leaders’ limiting beliefs so that they can step into more expansive and more fluid ways of engaging. As an outcome of his work, clients can see more possibilities for mutually empowering moves.
Zafer has spent 34 years as a top tier management consultant – including 27 years as a Partner – with McKinsey & Company. At McKinsey, Zafer led the development of the Firm’s senior partners learning curriculum, and personally designed and delivered as lead faculty several of the Firm’s most iconic leadership development programs.
Zafer is exceptionally adept at bridging across cultures. He has spent extensive professional time serving clients across the globe. Born in Damascus and raised in Lebanon, Zafer has studied, worked, and lived in another nine countries. He is fluent in Arabic, French and English and can also converse in Spanish, Japanese and Bahasa.
Zafer is a graduate of HEC (Paris) and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He is a certified Leadership Circle coach, and a certified Growth Edge coach. Zafer is also a graduate of the prestigious Director Education Program of the Canadian Institute of Corporate Directors (ICD). He has co-founded the Montreal Chapter of the ICD and has served on the national board of the ICD for 3 years. Zafer also sat on the Board of Governors of the Board Director Institute (BDI), a GCC-based institution that promotes better governance through Director training.
Zafer has six children; he splits his time between London, Beirut and Dubai and works across the globe.