Mentoring and Sponsoring: Keys to Success

This book is a compilation of very personal approaches to mentoring and sponsoring, breaking the stereotypes of seniority, age or experience. The authors have provided a platform to understand that mentoring and especially sponsoring are in fact a win-win relation, in which both sides, mentors and mentees; and sponsors and sponsored individuals learn from each other, enhancing their career paths. How they managed to create a growth space for themselves and their teams through mentoring and sponsoring, is a story of professional leadership. They shared a privileged outlook to understand the root causes of barriers, as well as to envision plausible solutions for difficult career crossroads, in which mentorship or sponsoring was key to steer step changes.

The authors propose not only their vision, but a remarkable collection of unfiltered interviews with young and renown professionals in many sectors, from photography to music, research, sports, energy, and more, completing a vision of what is key for both sides of the equation pertinent to mentoring and sponsoring: the givers and the receivers. They explain what is needed to gain the most out of the mentoring and sponsoring loops, with their own career stories.

Success is supported by many factors, in which the most important are the technical competency and performance aligned with resilience. However, in the long path of a career, mentors and particularly sponsors play a foundational and frequently a changing-life role, improving our perspective or triggering reflections and actions that benefitted our journeys at work and in life.

This book provides insights on what works for an effective mentoring and sponsoring process. It is useful for all professionals, especially those starting their career journeys.

Maria Angela Capello is a renowned leader in the energy sector. The lead author of Learned in the Trenches: Insights into Leadership and Resilience (Springer, 2018), she was the first woman to supervise seismic crews in the jungles of Venezuela, to advance a career that spans three continents.  Maria Angela has had leading roles at Kuwait Oil Company, Halliburton and Petróleos de Venezuela SA, PDVSA. She was awarded the Cavaliere dell'Ordine della Stella d'Italia (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy) honorary distinction by the President of the Italian Republic. She received the highest individual recognition of the  Society of Petroleum Engineers, the Honorary Membership in 2019, and the Special Commendation and Lifetime Membership Awards by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG). She is a Physicist from the Universidad Simon Bolivar (Venezuela), a M.Sc. of theColorado School of Mines (USA) and is certified in coaching, training and marketing. 

Dr. Eve Sprunt was the 2006 SPE President and is an SPE Honorary Member. She has 35 years of experience, 21 years with Mobil and 14 years with Chevron. In 2013 Eve received the Achievement Award from the Society of Women Engineers. She was the 2018 President of the American Geosciences Institute. She was the founder of the Society of Core Analysts in 1985. Her S.B. and S.M. degrees are from MIT (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and her Ph.D. (Geophysics) from Stanford where she was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Geophysics . She has written more than 120 editorial columns, holds 23 patents, and has 28 technical publications.  She is the author of A Guide for Dual-Career Couples:  Rewriting the Rules (Praeger in May 2016) and Dearest Audrey:  An Unlikely Love Story (2019).