Q&A with Josina Garnham
Josina joined POD as a training and organizational development consultant in April, replacing Lynne Lazaroff, who has retired.
You were with the Foster School of Business for several years. What kind of work did you do there?
At Foster, I managed a small team centered around providing experiential learning and leadership experiences for students, which helped them build a variety of skills. My role focused on developing partnerships with local companies and creating a pipeline of different types of projects for our students to get hands-on experience. Each quarter we’d partner with a company — Amazon, Mod Pizza, REI, Starbucks — and hundreds of students would compete on teams, crafting a solution to a real-world case around a strategic issue the company was facing and then presenting to representatives from Foster and ultimately the business community and company.
While at Foster, I also partnered with a colleague in the Alumni Association and started a mentoring program that became immensely popular. I would say that my real passion is in designing and delivering workshops, and helping cultivate interpersonal skills in teams and leaders. To that end, I led workshops for students on emotional intelligence because I believe emotional intelligence is so crucial to success in the workplace and differentiates the leaders and star performers.
How emotionally intelligent are you? Has that changed over time?
First of all, I am not the most emotionally intelligent person in the world, and at times, especially as a parent, I’m acutely aware of that! Not every moment of every day am I my absolute best self. At the same rate, a powerful thing about emotional intelligence is that it can be learned and developed. There’s a whole host of very practical tools; it just requires intentional effort to put it into practice.
I think the key thing around emotional intelligence is the notion that you’re trying to widen the gap between the spark and the flame. As Stephen Covey described this concept, “Between stimulus and response is our greatest power — the freedom to choose.” To me, that’s the essence of emotional intelligence in a nutshell: giving yourself a little space between whatever spark of emotion and choosing your response rather than simply reacting.
I’ve had moments where I’ve recognized I could choose to utilize a tool around emotional intelligence to help myself feel more present, more grounded, or better equipped to manage a situation. Part of emotional intelligence is being self-aware and paying attention to the physiological things that cue us, for instance to the fight or flight response. In challenging or emotionally charged conversations at work, I try to give myself a little bit of space; I take a deep breath and respond in a way that, rather than getting mired in anger or debate, keeps the conversation moving forward.
I appreciate that there are objective measures of emotional intelligence. The tool I really like is called the EQi, which I and others in POD are certified to use, because it helps bring out the various dimensions of emotional intelligence, sets some objective data around interpersonal skills and can provide a kind of road map to make changes to our behaviors.
For instance, the EQi confirmed that problem-solving and decision-making were not always my greatest strengths. On the business side, I’m relationship-focused but also decisive. With important personal decisions, I tend to rely on emotions and sometimes struggle to make a decision. That’s an area I’ve consciously worked on and have developed. I’ve learned I can apply tools, like doing a Force-Field Analysis, to help me balance out my natural tendencies and make decisions that are more rational.
What parts of Lynne’s role are you most looking forward to taking on? What else might we anticipate from you?
I’m excited to take over Managing Employee Performance. It’s such a core class for new and aspiring supervisors, as well as for the Supervisory Skills Certificate, and I’m really interested in integrating more content around motivation, positivity and creating a culture of feedback into the nuts and bolts of managing performance. I think those concepts have such value and are a good starting point for avoiding performance problems.
I know that Lynne did a lot of custom work, and I also love working on custom consulting projects with specific clients; that’s what I’ve done for my entire career. Prior to Foster, I worked in executive education at the business school at the University of New Hampshire. Our focus was custom work for different companies, trying to get a deep sense of client needs, crafting a design to meet those needs and then facilitating and hopefully seeing some kind of change. Also, in my private practice, Constellation Consulting, my work centers around developing teams and leaders. My long-term client work has focused on designing and facilitating a curriculum for a week-long leadership development program for high-potential employees as well as a developing and leading a two-year, cohort-based program for mid-career professionals.
I love working in the positive psychology space, and lately I’ve been doing a lot around resiliency and managing change as well as mindfulness at work. I frequently utilize the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which centers on setting priorities for yourself so that you know you are focusing on the right thing at the right time.
We’re so overwhelmed with information, but I believe if you take a little bit of time to set your priority for the day, that can be huge. The priority isn’t always about work either. One day your priority might be leaving by 3 p.m. so you can make it to your kid’s game. It’s all about managing your time and energy with purpose.
I also love working with teams and the idea of teaming, and I’m looking forward to doing some work — custom or otherwise — around that. Another topic I’m super curious about right now is agile practices and ideas, which, quite frankly, I think could be applied very handily in higher ed.
What drew you to this role?
This is my jam. A big part of what excited me was that I feel like I know the higher ed population pretty well, having worked in different universities now for nearly 20 years. I love the facilitation and consulting aspects, and I’m really excited to engage in coaching, especially around 360-degree assessments.
Back to the idea of managing your time and energy with purpose — I guess you could say I’m passionate about that on many levels. I love helping leaders and teams reach their full potential, and to be able to do that in the University context is really exciting. A big part of that is freeing constraints and improving systems so that people can better work towards their purpose, and I think this role will provide ample opportunity for me to facilitate that kind of change and development.
View Josina's consultant profile.
