1.- You are the pioneer of mentoring in Spain and have been practicing professionally in this field for many years. What did you see in mentoring? What does it give you?
What surprised me when I started working in mentoring in 2002 were its results. I formed a team of 25 mentors to work for 4 years with approximately 250 novice businesswomen, and the results in terms of business progress and participant evaluation were excellent. More than 80% of the businesses grew over the 4 years the project lasted.
Furthermore, the mentors were enthusiastic about their role; in fact, as a result of this project, they also became involved in two similar ones that we developed together with the Government of the Principality of Asturias in 2008 and 2009.
I believe mentoring works because it is based on something essentially human: learning through one’s own experience and that of others, conversation, learning together, sharing life stories and experiences, and extracting lessons and ideas from them.
Mentoring provides mental clarity, reduces the sense of isolation and loneliness felt by many entrepreneurs and business owners, and allows for making decisions with greater security and confidence by being able to contrast ideas, broaden perspectives, and learn about other ways of doing things.
2.- Mentoring is in fashion, but many different activities are called mentoring. How would you define mentoring? What is essential in mentoring?
Mentoring has existed since human beings appeared on Earth because, as Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said, the virtuosity of learning from experience is that it allows us to save time and effort, as well as avoid risks, by taking advantage of the pre-existing knowledge and skills of other members of our species, in addition to our own. Since we have existed, we have learned by doing, observing, and listening to others.
Mentoring is learning from experience through a reflective conversation guided by the mentor, so that the mentee converts experience into learning and uses it to make better decisions and obtain better results in the field of practice, activity, or knowledge they are working on.
The essential thing in mentoring is knowing how to listen deeply and ask good questions to understand the person you are accompanying as a mentor: what they want, what they need, where their handicaps are in obtaining the results they desire, and helping them make good decisions to achieve them.
3.- There are many mentoring programs. What are the keys to the success of a mentoring program?
The first thing is to be clear about the objective of what is to be achieved and assess whether a mentoring program can contribute significantly to it. The objective will always depend on who the entrepreneurs are—the people you want to help, support, boost, or benefit. Based on both variables, entrepreneur and objective, the next step is to choose the right mentors, who must be the most suitable to help these people and achieve the program’s objective. The selection of mentors is based on their experience, track record, results, and network of contacts in the field in which the entrepreneurs operate. If they are entrepreneurs or business owners, then the mentors must be from the business world, have started a business, have owned a company, or currently own one, and stand out for their results and skills in achieving success in their field. Besides this, mentors must have the skills to guide others: empathy, listening, assertiveness, strategic thinking, and being good conversationalists. One of the qualities of a good mentor is wisdom.
However, I consider it fundamental to train mentors in mentoring methodology, as it is one thing to have experience, contacts, and certain skills, and another to know how to guide processes of learning, change, and development, which is what mentoring focuses on to improve reflective, executive, planning, decision-making, and relational capacities.
The role of the program coordinator (mentoring manager) is also a central element of a program’s success, as they are the one who supports the mentors and entrepreneurs, monitors the mentoring processes, and ensures that everything works correctly by providing the additional resources necessary to do so.
4.- What do you think of the Autoocupació mentoring program?
I consider it a great initiative, especially in times like those we have experienced where many people see their businesses suffering difficulties and at risk of closing. In these cases, emotional support is often even more important than business solutions. Furthermore, it must be taken into account that in moments of stress, such as those generated by a health and economic crisis, we do not think clearly, especially when the situation affects us personally and emotionally; therefore, the help of someone who brings us peace of mind, more perspective, new ideas, and with whom we feel supported to make decisions, usually turns out to be fundamental.
5.- What skills and competencies should a good mentor have?
Before skills and competencies, they must have a motivation to develop other people, to share their time, experience, knowledge, resources, and wisdom with another person so they can boost their career, their business, and their life.
A mentor is characterized by having wisdom, which is a competence that life gives you and is closely linked to reflection on daily experience to convert it into learning in an agile and effective way. Mentors are good conversationalists with themselves; they stand out for the quality of their thinking when it comes to learning, finding solutions, setting goals and drawing up action plans to achieve them, making decisions, and improving self-knowledge and that of others through daily experience.
I would say that a mentor is characterized by good emotional, relational, conversational, and executive intelligence, as well as a good dose of creativity and strategic thinking.
6.- How do you help develop these skills and competencies at the School of Mentoring?
Our Integral Generative Mentoring methodology, as I explain in my latest book “Mentoring, a learning model for personal and organizational excellence” (Ediciones Pirámide 2019), is based mainly on the development of relational and conversational intelligence by working on all the skills that compose it. Additionally, we increase the level of self-knowledge and empathy of mentors because they are key to being able to guide others well in their processes of learning, change, and development.
We have different training programs where we teach our methodology, from introductory mentoring courses to the International Certification in Mentoring that qualifies you to practice as a certified professional mentor. In addition, we supervise mentoring processes to improve the performance of the mentor role. In organizations, we work with tailor-made programs to train organizational mentors whose function is to develop the talent of their collaborators.
In all cases, our training programs have a high practical content, because mentoring is learning from experience; therefore, in addition to numerous role-playing sessions on real mentoring sessions, we include mentoring practices. Our students must carry out real mentoring processes that we supervise, both individually and in groups.
Another characteristic of our School is that we do not teach from theory; all our trainers are professional and accredited mentors with a large number of hours and mentoring processes behind them.
7.- Autoocupació’s claim is I am what I want to be. And you, are you?
Not only do I believe I am, but I dedicate myself to mentoring precisely so that others can be too. My life purpose is to help everyone be who they want to be, and to feel fulfilled and happy doing so.
