About us
We are a boutique executive coaching and consulting firm located online with on-ground offices in New York City, Lausanne, Switzerland, Athens, Greece, and Paris, France. We work globally with individuals and organizations to meet professional and personal goals.
Our team is made up of distinguished and internationally recognized practitioners, researchers, and published scholars. We remain diligent in ensuring our professional expertise is on the cutting edge of the current and developing business environment in which disruptive technologies such as robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence are changing the way we live and work. Our core team is profiled below.
Our Team
Daphne Halkias, Ph.D., CEO,Executive Coach, Industrial-Organizational Psychologist
Daphne Halkias is an international executive coach and business consultant as well as a distinguished academic and psychologist. She has held executive positions in a variety of organizations and has had 25 years of experience as a successful executive coach, trainer, group facilitator, and psychotherapist. Publications carry her name in research on executive coaching, entrepreneurship, family business, leadership, sustainability, cross-cultural negotiations, innovation women’s issues, organizational behavior, education, and clinical psychology. Daphne’s research focus includes working with colleagues on projects supporting the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.
Sam Abadir, Ph.D., President, Executive Coach in Leadership and Negotiations Strategy
Sam is recognized as one of the business world’s most respected executive coaches in the areas of negotiation skills and international services marketing. Sam is a best-selling author and researcher whose work focuses on cross-cultural management, e-negotiations, entrepreneurship and family business team capacity development, and business ethics. Sam’s corporate and military experience has given him a unique perspective in his leadership coaching of behavioral change and acquiring results under stress. He also specializes in building team agility and MENA geopolitics.
Paul W. Thurman, DBA., Vice President of Operations Executive Coach for the Healthcare and Finance Industry
Paul is a much sought-after international consultant to for-profit, not-for-profit, and government clients with a focus on healthcare management and policy, strategic planning, data analysis, and decision-making, financial management, and executive education. Paul has twenty years of senior management consulting experience supporting Fortune 500 firms to realize value from innovative and sustainable business operations, and technology strategies. A distinguished academic author, Paul works closely with his clients on six continents to develop solutions around customer segmentation, demand forecasting, and performance improvement.
Nicholas Harkiolakis, Ph.D. Executive Vice President Director of Research and Innovative Technology Projects
Nick Harkiolakis is an internationally recognized researcher and author in the areas of research methods, leadership, and e-negotiations. He has over 25 years of experience in organizational development of E-Business, E-Commerce, IS/IT management and strategy. Nick has been involved at the executive level in technology, education start-ups and consulting in the IS/IT area. After a distinguished international academic and research career, Nick leads our Research division, developing cutting edge research studies and programs in Executive Coaching with global corporate and academic partners.
Sylva Caracatsanis, Project Manager
Sylva is an academic project manager, published researcher and quality assurance professional with 20 years’ successful experience with clients from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. For ECC, Sylva develops and supervises academic projects and manages training events.
Tatiana Harkiolakis, Director of Communications
Tatiana is a communications professional and published journalist. She manages ECC’s social media strategy, directs public relations campaigns and the flow of information to and from the public, organizes company media events and represents ECC at industry media events.