Juan Pujadas, former Vice Chair and Global Head of PwC Advisory and former Board Member of Wells Fargo Company, and a mentor and coach at The ExCo Group, shares insights with Adam Bryant on the power of deep listening, using lifeline conversations to understand what drives leaders, and staying true to your compass bearing amid constant crosscurrents.
Q. What have you learned about the subtleties of effective mentoring?
A. Listening has the most powerful impact on the mentoring relationship. You have to be able to put yourself in your client’s shoes to understand not only what they want to get out of the mentoring relationship, but also what’s possible.
You have to understand the layers of transformation challenge that they’re facing. And if you don’t listen carefully, you can walk in with a preconceived notion of the solution set, and that may be on a different planet than where your client needs to get to.
Q. Is there a particular tool that tends to the biggest unlocks for you in your mentoring engagements?
A. Having a conversation about their lifeline—their highs and lows, starting at a young age—is probably the most valuable one. You have to really listen to and understand their history, because how people have reacted to different events in their lives provides a lot of insight about what is driving them today. I will then cross-check what I’ve learned through the interviews I do with my client’s colleagues.
The second thing that is important to me is having a conversation about what they want to get out of the mentoring relationship. I will often simply say, “So why are we doing this?” And one answer may be that they were encouraged to do it by their boss. But I want to understand from them, what do you want to do?
And those conversations often take us into areas of their life beyond their job, including what they may be thinking about for their next chapter, and that may include one or two more steps on the corporate ladder, or it might be moving into philanthropy or something else outside the corporate world.
Where do they want to live? Are they aligned with their spouse on what that next chapter might look like? It’s about taking the conversations beyond the usual coaching topics around team dynamics, conflict resolution, etc.
Q. What’s the best lesson you learned from a mentor of yours over your career?
A. The best mentors have been those who invested the time to stick with me throughout my career. I don’t necessarily talk to them every day, but when I check in with them, they know enough about me and my life to ask the right questions about a decision I might be wrestling with. And those questions include, is this a no-regret move? What’s the alternative?
Q. What is the wisest thing that you’ve ever read, heard, or said in the context of leadership?
A. You have to stay focused on the things that are true to your compass bearing, and that includes your principles and your strategy. And by strategy, I mean your broader goals—not tactics, which I find many people use interchangeably with strategy.
There are so many crosscurrents right now in technology, in regulation, in politics. So you have to pay attention and make sure you are not distracted by the crosscurrents as you are pursuing your long-term goals.
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