‘It’s more than just the network effect – you can learn from everywhere’
“The conventional ‘mentor and mentee’ creates this power difference, but it should be more like they’re my thinking buddy.”
This is Clara Llamas’ view of the mentorship paradigm, and as someone that has been on both sides of the table, she is uniquely placed to make this observation.
As a Master’s student at London College of Communication, Llamas described herself as “a super-duper grown-up” – having completed her undergraduate degree in 1997. So when she took part in LCC’s programme as a mentee, she hoped to work with someone that would reflect the depth of her professional experience.
Llamas found that she could relate to her mentor’s diverse background and, as she had worked variously in journalism, business design and strategy management, she appreciated that “his own trajectory was a little random”.
Even as a mentee, Llamas believed in the symbiotic nature of mentorship, and that its purpose should be to instil both parties with knowledge and experience. “Tim said to me, ‘this is like reverse mentoring’ – we were just having a conversation where we learned from each other – but I said, ‘why is it reverse?’”
Now set to mentor graduates herself, Llamas is nonetheless a firm believer in the rewards afforded to one in her position, asserting that it is not just the ‘student’ who reaps the benefits of this working relationship.
“It shouldn’t be transactional, there’s a reciprocity. It is also for your own personal development – to find what you can learn as a leader. We learn from unexpected places.”
On Service Design… the activity of planning and organising each element of a service to improve the experience of customers and service providers. Social media, events, airline check-ins – these are all services that need to be designed!
“For me it’s been like a second life,” says Llamas of her move into service design, first through the year-long MA course and now in her position as senior service designer at Livework. Working for years in business development, she remembers: “I felt like an imposter because my background was in social sciences.” her first degree was in Anthropology, whilst many colleagues were designers by trade. “The main reason for studying was around visualising things – forcing myself to develop a visual language.”