Ahmad Alafaliq

Leaders and their leadership teams tend to come to me when what got them here has stopped working. They’re capable and experienced, often at the top of their organizations, but they’ve hit a pattern they can’t see their way past. They’ve tried to fix a people problem with strategy, and it keeps coming back. Or they’re carrying a transformation that asks them to lead in a way they’ve never been led themselves.

Most of my clients are senior leaders in government, semi-government and large private organizations across the Gulf, from ministers and CEOs to the frontline managers who make change real. Many are working at the meeting point of a fast-moving national agenda and cultures built on hierarchy, loyalty and saving face. I understand that world from the inside. That lets us skip the explaining and go straight to what’s actually in the way.

I’m currently working with a national technology organization moving from a command-and-control, waterfall culture to agile ways of working. The technical shift was well underway. The harder part was psychological. Leaders who had built their careers on control and certainty were being asked to trust, delegate and tolerate not knowing.

We designed a year-long program on three levels: the top leader and his general managers, a cohort of internal change makers, and the wider teams. It combines 360s, one-to-one coaching, retreats on identity and trust, and regular time in the room with teams as they work. The aim isn’t to teach agile. It’s to help leaders notice the assumptions that quietly pull them back into old habits, and to build the capacity to act differently when it counts.

I help leaders see the unconscious patterns behind their people-related challenges. Once a pattern is visible, change tends to follow without force. I’m less interested in giving answers than in creating the space where a leader catches themselves in the act. That moment of recognition is where real growth starts.

In groups and leadership teams, I work with what’s happening in the room: the unspoken dynamics, the alliances, the conversations nobody is having. I also believe insight has to show up as behavior. My workshops are practical and measured. Leaders practice real conversations, see the gap between how they rate themselves and how they actually perform, and leave with evidence of what shifted.

I draw on adult development theory, particularly Robert Kegan’s work on how leaders make meaning and how that meaning can grow. I also use psychodynamic and systems approaches to group behavior, Nonviolent Communication, and Immunity to Change. Assessments like Hogan and MBTI give us a shared starting point. I use 360s, structured role-play, team diagnostics and one-to-one coaching, and I tailor each engagement to the leader and the system they’re in.

I started my career at Microsoft in a program for future leaders. That’s where I first got curious about why capable people get stuck, and why groups behave in ways no individual in them would choose. That curiosity led me to a master’s in Computer Science and Psychology at Virginia Tech, and later to INSEAD’s Executive Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change. There I learned to look beneath the surface of organizations at the psychodynamics driving them.

Over 20 years I’ve worked with organizations including Aramco, SABIC, NEOM, STC, Almarai, the Saudi Central Bank and the Ministry of Interior. I was a Middle East facilitator for Harvard Business Publishing and have co-presented with Dave Ulrich.

My meditation practice and love of silent retreats shape how I show up. I’ve learned that the quality of a leader’s inner state shapes everything they touch, and the same is true for me as a coach. I try to bring calm, presence and patience to the room, and to trust the process rather than rush the outcome.