This post is written by Mariana Carvalho, public advisor and coordinator of a pilot mentorship project for senior executives of Brazilian federal government, National School of Public Administration (Enap), and João Vitor Domingues, General Coordinator of Training for Senior Executives, National School of Public Administration (Enap)

  • **The problem: ** Finding new competency development formats for senior executives in the Brazilian public sector was difficult.
  • Why it matters: Senior executives need to be prepared to deal with complex public issues and be able to make decisions in difficult times.
  • The solution: A pilot mentoring project for senior executives achieved inspiring results and will be launched on a larger scale.

Since the end of 2015, the National School of Public Administration (Enap) has been implementing strategic actions aimed at training and developing senior executives in public sectors, reaching professionals who work in the strategic core of the government. After carrying out some successful initiatives, a unit at Enap was created to develop programmes to the highest level of the federal public administration.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, in March 2020, the federal government chose to place a large part of its civil servants in remote work. Enap’s team went to the virtual environment with a great challenge: all of their actions were in face-to-face format. In a few days, Enap’s team had to transform or adapt them, as far as possible, to the online format. It was also important to create new offers that were suitable for the new world reality and that adhered to the institutional function of the area, focused on the senior executives. A new development experience mapped by the team was mentoring for the public sector.

Mentoring processes are already a reiterated practice in the private sector, especially with the intention of promoting institutional culture. In the Brazilian public sector, there are also successful mentoring experiences, but in very specific applications. In the international context, other governments are also running mentoring programmes, such as the United Kingdom, with the Senior Leaders Scheme (SLS); Portugal, with the Mentoring Program for Innovation and Leadership; and Canada, with the Program Cercle des jeunes leaders de l'administration publique.

Developing a project of one’s own

Thus, Enap, a government school always in search of new opportunities for training public servants, designed and implemented the Pilot Project for Mentoring Senior Executives in the Public Sector. For the purposes of this programme, mentoring is an approach in which a professional with extensive experience and strong theoretical and practical support - the mentor - helps a less experienced professional - the mentee. Some of the tools are knowledge transmission dialogues, guidance regarding the routine of activities, counseling, supervised practices, etc. Its purpose, in general terms, is the transfer of knowledge and expertise for the development of professional competencies.

In the case of our project, Enap's essential leadership competencies matrix outlined the competencies required.

For the pilot, 16 mentees were selected from among 139 candidates (all senior executives from the public sector), as well as 11 mentors among people who are or have been senior executives from the public sector and with extensive management experience. Mentors and mentees participated in a formal matching process conducted by a company with expertise, in addition to having participated in preparation workshops and individual and collective supervision sessions throughout the process. To assist the performance of the pairs, manuals, document templates such as mentoring agreement, individual development plan and monitoring sheets, among others, were created.

Seeing early successes

The pilot lasts six months and ends in October 2021. A mid-term evaluation was carried out and the results were so good that Enap is already preparing to launch, also in October, the first class of the continued senior mentoring program for senior public sector executives. Lessons learned will be incorporated into the new class, such as a specific supervision lab for mentees and a more objective format for controlling sessions held.

In complex moments like the one we are experiencing with the Covid-19 pandemic, teams around the world needed to reinvent themselves to achieve their institutional goals. Enap also went through this process and sought national and international experiences, from the public and private sectors, to devise and implement a pilot project that would test, on a small scale, a new format of action for the development of leaders in the Brazilian federal government. — Mariana Carvalho and João Vitor Domingues

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