Dr. Rich Fernandez (Interview Archive)
What pulled me in was the idea of building on what people are already good at: drawing out their strengths so they can give fuller expression to their purpose, their work, and eventually their capacity to lead. That question held my attention. After my first year of graduate school I changed direction and moved into career development, advising undergraduates, graduate students, and people in MBA programs at the City University of New York.
That work led fairly quickly to a position in the career development group at JP Morgan Chase. I grew into the role there and gradually shifted toward leader development and team development. The same kind of work carried me to Bank of America, and then, a little under ten years ago, to eBay as head of learning. The emphasis stayed consistent: organization development, team and leader development, working from people's strengths, helping them do their best and helping leaders lead well.
From eBay I went to Google to run executive education. That meant working with the directors, vice presidents, and senior vice presidents, the most senior layer of leaders in the company, and giving them the programs, tools, and content they needed to succeed both as people and as leaders.
If there's one thread running through all of it, it's a steady interest in human development and a strength-based view of what helps people flourish. On a more personal level, mindfulness, in the broad sense of everything that word covers, has drawn me in since I was young. It really started in high school and college, and I've kept up some form of practice through most of my adult life.
When I became head of learning at eBay, something became clear to me. The personal practices that had been so valuable and grounding as I found my way through my own career could be worth something to the employees too. And over the past ten or fifteen years a solid body of research has come in pointing to the considerable benefits of various forms of mindfulness.