Performance Management | Change Management | Leadership Development | Corporate Trainer | Diversity and Inclusion
Anita Prelas Kovacevic is the author of a textbook called Fundamentals of Negotiation, and she has spent over a decade teaching people how to separate a stated position from a real interest. Then leaders began arriving at her coaching practice with a problem no textbook covers. They were not losing to a competitor across a table. They were losing to themselves, quietly, in the hours after everyone else had gone home.
Five Titles That Refuse to Behave Like Five Careers
Anita Prelas Kovacevic, Ph.D, is Head of the Department for Economics at the University of Applied Sciences in Virovitica, Croatia, alongside her work as a tenured professor, an EMCC accredited coach and mentor, a Professional Certified Coach, and a DISC Flow trainer. On paper that reads like five careers stacked onto one person. She treats it as one, and the through line is the thing capable people rarely get help with: what happens when success starts costing more than it returns.
Financial Management Was the Degree. People Were the Real Subject.
She did not start in a lecture hall. In 2004 she was a loan officer at Croatia banka, assessing figures on paper. From there she moved into the European Integration Department of Virovitica-Podravina County, then into administration at the polytechnic in Virovitica, running the Registrar’s Office.
Her doctorate, completed at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, was in business and managerial economics with a specialisation in financial management. The credential points toward balance sheets. The work kept pointing somewhere else.
By 2013 she was lecturing, and the courses she gravitated to were the ones about human beings rather than capital: human resources management, business negotiation, organisational behaviour, international business. She has since co-authored more than 27 professional and scientific papers and supervised over 40 student mentorships.
In December 2021 she took over the Careers Centre, a post she held until October 2025, when she became Head of the Department for Economics. Somewhere in that stretch she trained as a coach, and she is precise about what that decision was not.
“A third important decision was not to build coaching as something separate from everything I had done before, but as a natural continuation of my professional path.”
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of academics run a side practice. Prelas Kovacevic built something closer to a single instrument, where the research informs the coaching room and the coaching room keeps the teaching honest.
“One of the most important decisions I made was to recognise what connects them all: the development of people, their potential, and their ability to lead themselves and others more effectively.”
The Leader Who Rescued Everyone, Including the People Who Never Asked
The people who find her are not struggling in any way an outsider would notice. They run departments and businesses. They deliver. They are the reliable ones.
“I am particularly interested in working with capable, responsible, successful people who reach a point where they realise they no longer want success to come at the cost of constant pressure, exhaustion, or losing themselves in the process.”
One client illustrates the pattern exactly. She held a leadership role and had built a reputation as the person everyone could depend on, which had been a genuine strength for years. It had also become the reason she had no time left for the strategic half of her job, and the reason her team never quite grew up.
She was absorbing tasks that were not hers, stepping into situations her people could have handled, and privately convinced that standards would slip if she did not. Prelas Kovacevic turned the question around on her, and the answer changed how she led.
“She began to leave responsibility where it belonged, stopped automatically rescuing situations, and communicated expectations more clearly.”
No new team. No reorganisation. The same people, given room they had never been offered.
Her team work runs on similar ground. As a DISC Flow trainer she is often brought into groups where the diagnosis from the inside is that someone is difficult, and the reality is that a fast, direct, results-first person and a slower, context-first person have each decided the other is the problem. Naming that difference out loud tends to be the point at which the arguing stops.
She is unusually blunt about what does not work, which is most of what the market sells.
“A one-day training can create a powerful insight, but insight alone does not create behavioural change.”
Her own measure of success is deliberately inconvenient. Not sessions delivered, not feedback forms.
“I know real change has taken hold when it is no longer visible only in the client’s words.”
The younger end of her work runs on the same conviction. Through the Careers Centre she organised 13 workshops and guest lectures in 18 months and built a recurring student session called Small talk. What she found there was rarely a skills shortage.
“I do not see lack of ability as the biggest obstacle for young people.” What she sees instead is thin self-knowledge and borrowed ambition, and the fix is teaching them to tell the difference between what they want and what they think they should want.
The Only Negotiation Nobody Prepares You For
Negotiation theory teaches that the position someone states is almost never the interest they actually hold. Prelas Kovacevic has taught that to students for years and written it into a textbook. Her clients arrive fluent in it, able to read a counterpart across a table within minutes.
Then they sit down opposite themselves and lose, repeatedly, to a version of who they are supposed to be that they never agreed to in the first place. The work she does now is the rematch. The last position anyone learns to question is their own.
Anita Prelas Kovacevic, Ph.D, PCC, is Head of the Department for Economics at the University of Applied Sciences in Virovitica (Veleučilište u Virovitici), Croatia, an EMCC accredited coach and mentor, and a DISC Flow trainer. She works with leaders, managers, entrepreneurs and teams on clarity, communication and confidence, alongside her academic work with students and early-career professionals. To connect with Anita or learn more, visit https://anitaprelaskovacevic.com/ or find her on LinkedIn
