Dr. Eva Bilhuber Galli

Cooperation with university staff

Entering the apartment on 7th floor of Poly Heigh at Campus of NUST felt like coming home! It was a great privilege and pleasure for me that I was invited again from B360 and NUST to support diverse initiatives around the faculty of management sciences and graduate business school. Nico Smit welcomed me warmly and managed the impossible: I could meet all my cooperation partners already on Monday to sort out how we would go about our planned cooperatives during my two weeks stay. We realized quite quickly that two weeks is an awful short amount of time for making cooperation with three different units happen!

Human Resources Management Department
With Dr Nambira, Fiina, Andrew, Sanni and Enzy we agreed that I will support with a Workshop on “Write-up Research” for honors students. Beside, Dr Nambira encouraged that I hold a presentation on Peer-review Journal Publishing during the annual Research Day of Management Sciences that took place during my stay. Further, he encouraged to share some ideas with Sanni who is about to establish a HRM master program. For the rest of the time, we agreed I would be available for individual research consultancy for lecturers or students. It was really a great pleasure to meet the colleagues again from last year and to build on our relationships!

Cooperative Education Unit (CEU)
The cooperation with the CEU Team, i.e. Martha, Carol, Khumalo and Matchwell started already before my stay. We designed remote together the Mentoring-Workshop for Industry Mentors who host internships from the compulsory Work-Integrated-Learning Program (WIL) of NUST – a pogram that spans all faculties. It was a first Pilot-Workshop that CEU had invited for and we jumped in this endeavour in a co-teaching format together during my first week. It was a great collaboration experience and proved that such collaborative approaches can work out – even over Skype!

Harold Pupkewitz Graduate School of Business
The collaboration with Cynthia from last year has actually never stopped. So, we always kept contact and continued our exchange remote. As soon as we agreed with Sabina to offer some Executive Education against pay, we agreed on two major topics: Coachings Skills and Innovation Leadership for Executives. Unfortunately, when advertising the Workshops, Namibian economy just ran into a time of recession and downturn. Particularly, training and education budgets were affected. Accordingly, Cynthia had a hard time to make people register. Finally, she managed by opening up as well to academic and management staff of NUST. Thank to her phantastic engagement we ended up with 20 participants for Innovation Leadership and 26 for Coaching Skills! Additionally, we agreed on a Research-Fellow-Talk to Master-Students how to go about a research project. That was as well highly appreciated by the new director of the School, Dr. Villet, because equivalent support offerings are currently missing due to shortage in supervision capacity and the recent change in management of the business school.

Cooperation with students / Participants

Writing-up research (for HRM honors students)
The one-evening lecture was addressed to HRM part-time and full-time honors students. However, students from other departments, such as marketing and business development, joined as well. So, I had the pleasure to interact with about 60 very interested students. Above, the HRM lecturers were present, too. This was highly appreciated from my side. By this, they could assist when students came up with questions regarding specific guidelines etc. Overall, students were grateful and appreciated it very much, particularly the examples given. According to the feedback, they would love to have this session earlier in the year, before they start their proposals.

Creating Mentoring Impact (for industry mentors and WIL-Coordinators)
This Pilot-Workshop was for CEU a great endeavour! It was the first time to invite the different roles engaged in the WIL-Program to one event. The idea was to create alignment and a shared understanding about mentorship at the workplace. Above all, it should serve to appreciate the efforts of industry mentors and bring coordinators from NUST and mentors closer together. According to the feedback, the mission was successfully achieved. It was very well received and participants encouraged very much to have such a Workshop on a regular basis. Above, there was the Dean of Human Sciences present who advised to offer equivalent workshops to academic staff of the university as well.

Executive Innovation Leadership Workshop
To offer an Innovation Leadership Workshop in times of economic downturn was a bit of a risk. But at the same time, it is one lesson of innovation that it is not related to money and needs a continuous approach. Accordingly, we had a very interested group of participants, composed of industry managers and management staff of NUST. Participants highlighted the better understanding of the innovation landscape, the role of their own mindset and the interactive format of the workshop as most beneficial. After the Workshop, four participants decided immediately to register as well for the following Coaching Skills Workshop.

Executive Coaching Skills Workshop
We were a very heterogenous group of 26 people, consisting of managers from the Namibian industry and again “Nustarians”, including the team of the CEU-Unit. We practiced coaching skills for half a day and participant were particularly grateful for the part of active listening and powerful questions. We concluded that such an offering has much potential for a 1-2 day offering in the industry but equally at NUST for academic as well as management staff.

Research Fellow-Talk
There have been roughly 30-40 students who followed the invitation to the research fellow talk. Most of them master students from Graduate School. They were very happy to receive such a talk and to discuss in a more general manner how to go about a their master thesis. Particularly, the very concrete hints on how to do a good literature research, how to sequence the writing, etc. were very welcome. It seems that these “informal insights” are not covered by official methodology/research seminars. And due to shortage in supervisory capacity, students have not much orientation to navigate their research.

Impact and win-win

The set of those colourful engagements we carried out this year was a wonderful endeavour and success for all parties involved! One of the success factor was certainly that we started to plan the engagements already quite some time upfront of my stay. This was only possible because I was already familiar with the environment and knew most of the colleagues already from my last stay. I think such a continuity in the relationships and the engagement is certainly most favourable for creating in best sense win-win and impact in sustainable ways. It allows to dare as well to approach Pilot-Projects, to learn and to move things further by building upon previous ideas such as we tried e.g. with the Pilot Mentoring Workshop or the Executive Education Pilots. It also allows to connect the dots between different disciplines and to involve stakeholders much more to grow together the impact.

Personal message

Once again, I was fascinated by this wonderful country that I already fell in love with last time! I appreciated again the very warm-hearted encounters with the wonderful colleagues from NUST and beyond! Again, it was a particular pleasure to serve side-by-side with B360 Expert Armin Hollenstein. I value it as a particular gift of the stays at NUST that we can enjoy the highly appreciated exchange with other B360 at place. In this vein, I would like to thank Urs and Armin for their lovely company this time! Creating impact together makes it even more rewarding! Last but not least: I am again very grateful to B360, particularly Sabina, for your trust and invitation to work again in the name of the foundation at NUST! It was my greatest pleasure and I hope there will be more opportunities to come!