Video intervista DIFREE 20240412 171027 Registrazione della riunione

good afternoon everyone Welcome to our interview for D free project to Dr Marco clao colbo board member of chent reer stud Dei thank you Marco clao for being here thank you thank you uh today we are going to talk about examples of homeworks for mentees soft skill development and the first question we would like to ask you if it if you could provide examples of individual work assignments for junior staff members that are aimed for to announce their soft skills well the first example that comes to mind is giving junior staff members the opportunity to

be Mentor themselves and to coach other people uh we strongly believe that the the best way to learn how to improve your own soft skills is to practice them and and practicing is the best way to learn specifically when it comes to managing people and increasing your ability to I would say Room reading so we have a a constant new inflow of new members of uh new employees and we always try to um make sure that even junior staff members are able to participate in mentoring other new employees so I think that this is the

best way to increase soft skills thank you for that so moving on uh I'd like to ask you how did you ensure that individual work assignments effectively complement the overall mentorship project we believe that you can understand the progress that a a person is making by the quality of the questions that you presented is probably the M metric above all so uh once we involve junior staff members into other mentoring activities and coaching of new people new employees we soon see that they come back to the board um asking questions that clearly are a sign

of the fact that they fully understood the the difficulty in managing other people and at the same time they want to know how they can improve so I I think that the the quality of the questions that are being reported is is the best way um to understand that the mentorship process is going really well this is really insightful So speaking about understanding uh how do you encourage junior staff members during the mentorship process to reflect and better understand the lesson learned from the work activities or in one way and in one word transparency we

are a very transparent organization and we believe in um both uh self assessment and peer review at the same time so we are very open when it comes to criticizing each other but always in a in a helpful way and we think that uh when you create an environment that is very transparent this uh Fosters self-critique to the people and I can ensure that all the time when everyone feel relaxed and everyone feels that they can share their own problems their own issues they will also share with you the soft skills that they feel they're

lacking and they will ask you please how can I improve so I think that transparency and also fairness is the key to help someone in increasing their own sof skill if they feel Under Pressure they will never get better and my next question uh was about how to ensure that junior staff members remain motivated and engaged in the completing their assignments is that anything else that you want to add to what you just said yes they need to see progress and progress can be judged by by many ways uh one may look simply at the

numbers for example when it comes to the output of a of a of a given month compared to another but this is like probably the cold answer that I can give uh some that feels more close to soft skills is the fact that when you when you see a progress that is being made by a junior staff member it's really vital to make them feel like they're growing and make them feel like the the growth that they're having is being seen by the organization so I think that growth always needs to be recognized so it's

fundamental that people are being recognized absolutely and moving to the last questions uh what type of activities or exercises are most beneficial in your opinion for developing communication skills in junior staff members in an era of digital meetings and call I don't want to sound too school but you need to go more often on business lunches and business din uh I think that we have kind of forgotten the the importance of creating relationships live due to the fact that remote working is being so so used at the moment but nothing will be comparable to actively

participating in social events and working together with other people both in our business environment but also outside of the business environment you learn more social skills during a business lunch probably than during hours of coaching so it's really important to live together with other people and finding also enjoyment so the keyword in this case is enjoying the time with other people and this will dramatically improve your communication skills this is very insightful and now we move to our last question which is somehow similar to that before which is uh how do you suggest uh Juniors

to improve the problem solving abilities and critical thinking skills well two things that I really love so I will address first the the critical thinking H the critical thinking is a a key asset to to success in my opinion first of all so to develop critical thinking you need to learn how to manage data and manage information uh this requires you to always have several sources to the same information and not give for let's say automatically right the the data and the information we are being provided with so you need to always compare different sources

and once you have different sources es you always need to form your own judgment and once you are always in the in the mood of comparing different informations and different set of datas you will also understand the quality and the reliability of the sources you are using the only way you can do this is either to peer review information and even if you have a very reliable source you still need to be on your toes about it so always compare different sources this is the best way to to create uh critical thinking and the other

part of the question uh problem solving how do you suggest oh problem solving I would say to be thrown out in the jungle but this is not doable in a in a business environment uh when it comes to problem solving I think that the first thing that you need to know is that not all the problems need to be solved in a day so the the time Horizon is essential you need to understand that each problem depending on its entity on its difficulty may require longer Solutions without with a a more large time span so

you don't need to feel the pressure of having to solve everything at the same time so the first thing to a good problem solving is is understanding time management some problems may be solved in a day some others need to be resolved in a month or a year so understand time requirements of problem solving is the first thing that I would suggest the second thing is that it's normal for you not to know anything not to know everything about the problem you need to address so first thing that you need to do is understand what

you're good at and what you're not good at and then you need to gather the proper people for that problem so you only see maybe uh only a piece of information regarding the solution and it's fine and it's all right you don't need to feel stressed about it because we are not superheroes we all have our focus and we all have our blind spots and you need to uh surround yourself with the people people that allows you to see what you're missing to see your blind spots so if you at the same time understand time

management you understand the fact that you don't need to be stressed about it and you surround yourself with the people that are en are enablers in this case so they sh shed light on the blind spots for me this is the recipe of success it's always a team effort and you need to build a team that can help you understanding the problem better and finding a solution together especially surround yourself with people that are different from you so in this case I can really say that uh variety of backgrounds and diversity is a plus especially

because that diversity will allow you to understand the problem better and find a solution that you could have never been able to come up with on your Ro thank you very much Dr Columbo for this important suggestion and see you next time thank you thank you Isa thank you bye bye