Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report put global employee engagement at 21 percent in 2024, down from 23 percent the year before the first annual decline since the pandemic, at an estimated cost of $438 billion in lost global productivity. The figure is more than a workplace statistic. It is a signal that many organizations are still treating engagement as a morale problem when it may be better understood as a leadership and behavioral systems problem.
Forward Training & Consulting FZE is one of the firms working from that premise. The UAE-based practice, founded by Dr. Soha Chahine, works with senior leaders and organizations across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman private sector companies, government and semi-government entities, multinational corporations, and large family-held businesses. Its central argument is straightforward and uncomfortable: most leadership development programs measure the wrong things, and the consequences compound quietly inside organizations for years before anyone notices.
The firm received a 2026 Global Recognition Award™ in the Innovation, Leadership, and Service category, useful as a marker, but not the reason its work warrants attention.
A Founder Working at the Intersection of Science and Practice
Dr. Soha Chahine, who holds a doctorate in organizational psychology with a focus on talent and culture transformation, an International Coach Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential, and a TEDx speaking record, built the firm around a thesis she had been refining for years: that leadership inside complex organizations is not primarily a skill problem. It is a behavioral system embedded inside culture, and one that can be redesigned through sustained, evidence-based intervention.
She is the co-author of The Talent Matrix (Global Influencers Publishing House, 2025) and Shaken, Stirred but Not Deterred, Vol. 2 (Global Influencers Publishing House, 2023), and a contributor author to Harvard Business Review Arabia and Economy Middle East.
“Most leadership programs measure what people learn,” she says. “Far fewer measure what people actually do differently afterwards. That gap is where leadership development either holds or breaks down.”
The distinction is not academic. In Dr. Soha Chahine’s reading of the GCC market, organizations spend significant sums on programs whose return is essentially un-auditable. “If you cannot describe the behavioral change you’re trying to produce, you cannot measure whether it happened. And if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. Most of the industry skips over this and goes straight to content design.”
Behavioral Science as the Operating System
Forward Training & Consulting positions itself as a behavioral-science-led practice rather than a conventional corporate training provider. Its programs combine validated psychometric instruments such as the EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 emotional intelligence assessments, the Leadership Circle Profile (LCP), and the Resilience at Work (R@W) model with proprietary leadership and behavioral frameworks developed internally by Dr. Soha Chahine and her team.
The firm’s programs are deliberately experiential rather than instructional. Sessions are built around scenario-based simulations, business case immersions, role-plays, structured group dialogues, reflective practice, and creative methods including LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, chosen and combined according to the leadership challenge at hand. The intent is to pull senior leaders out of passive learning and into environments where they can surface assumptions, test decisions in a low-risk setting, and translate self-awareness into observable behavior.
The behaviors the firm focuses on are the ones that matter most inside complex organizations: decision-making under pressure, difficult conversations, stakeholder influence, accountability, and resilience during structural change.
A Cross-Sector Practice
The firm works across the full breadth of the regional economy and engages clients across all major sectors, from banking and financial services to retail, FMCG, energy, healthcare, real estate, automotive, pharmaceuticals, aviation, conglomerate, government, logistics, professional services, hospitality and technology. Typical clients include CEOs, board members, HR directors, and learning and development leaders building leadership capacity inside organizations operating in fast-changing markets.
The underlying behavioral science remains consistent. The application is calibrated to the operating reality of each client. A multinational bank developing its next generation of relationship managers does not need the same intervention as a family-held real estate group preparing for generational transition, even when the behavioral patterns at the leadership level rhyme.
“A capable executive coach can run a good session anywhere,” Dr. Soha Chahine notes. “A capable methodology has to survive the difference between a sovereign-backed entity and a third-generation family business in the same working week.”
What the Recognition Reflects
The Global Recognition Award evaluates nominees on innovation, leadership, service, sustainability, and social responsibility, using a multi-stage review and a Rasch-model scoring approach. What the recognition reflects, more than the marketing value of an award, is a methodological discipline that the leadership development field still does not consistently deliver. A program that produces measurable behavioral change is harder to build than one that produces good post-training feedback. The two are routinely confused.
The longer-term argument the firm is making implicit in the work, explicit in Dr. Soha Chahine’s published work is that organizational performance in the GCC over the next decade will depend less on what leaders know and more on how they behave when the information in front of them is incomplete, the stakes are high, and the room is watching. Workforce nationalization, AI-driven role redesign, and generational transition inside family-held businesses are each, in their own way, pressure tests for that thesis.
“The economies in this region are moving faster than the leadership infrastructure inside most organizations was built for,” Dr. Soha Chahine says. “You can rebuild the infrastructure, or you can keep paying the cost of running advanced strategies on outdated behavioral systems. The cost is not always visible on a balance sheet, but it is real.”
About Dr. Soha Chahine
Dr. Soha Chahine is the founder of Forward Training & Consulting FZE. She holds a doctorate in organizational psychology with a focus on talent and culture transformation, and is an International Coach Federation (ICF) Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and TEDx speaker. She is the co-author of The Talent Matrix (2025) and Shaken, Stirred but Not Deterred, Vol. 2 (2023), and a contributor to Harvard Business Review Arabia and Economy Middle East.
About Forward Training & Consulting FZE
Forward Training & Consulting FZE is a UAE-based leadership development, executive coaching, organizational development, and corporate training firm. Founded by Dr. Soha Chahine, the firm serves clients across the United Arab Emirates and the wider GCC including private sector organizations, government and semi-government entities, multinational corporations, and family-held enterprises with practice areas spanning executive coaching, leadership development, emotional intelligence, resilience at work, psychometric assessments, team development, and human-centered organizational transformation.
