Interview with Zelmira Serrano, General Director of Avantra

This April, Zelmira Serrano will celebrate nine years as a collaborator at AVANTRA. The path that began as an intern has now borne fruit as she has become the company’s General Director.

Throughout all this time, the experiences and learnings have been nothing short of amazing. Zelmira answers three key questions.

1. What have been the most important challenges in your professional life?

Finding the balance between demanding and inspiring. What I always think and say is that the work itself is not complicated. What is complicated are the human relationships and never forget that we do not work with machines, but with people who have emotions, points of view, aspirations, ideals and so on. Sometimes it is easier for us to forget that there is a human being behind every activity performed, while at other times we over-justify people’s failures. Finding that fine balance and being fair in an imperfect world is a daily challenge for me.

2. What projects or plans do you have for the future?

One of my plans is to get involved and help raise awareness about the feminist movement. I think it is important to educate men and women on what this movement is really about and to put aside the negative connotation that has been given to it for so many years. Real feminism does not seek to reverse the roles between men and women, but simply to recognize the fact that women have the same rights as men. It is important to work on this awareness in order to reach a real balance between the genders, in which we both feel equally valued and respected.
Being a woman and being part of an industry controlled and managed by men, it seems to me that my participation in this is fundamental. I hope very soon to be able to share with you in greater detail the projects we are about to initiate.

3. Can you share a tip, habit, or advice that you follow in your professional life?

If I could share 3 tips with you, they would be:

· Learn to communicate. We all receive reading comprehension classes, grammar, spelling and so on, however, I see that we have not learned how to communicate. If there is one basic skill that we all need to master, it is the art of communicating; knowing what I want to say, and making sure that the message is understood by my interlocutor.

· Spend quality time. As trite as it sounds, you can’t give to others what you don’t have. If we really want to inspire others, we must start by inspiring ourselves and knowing what we really want to achieve in life. To achieve this, we need to connect with our spiritual side.

· Do what fills your heart. Find a job that makes you smile every day, that makes you give the best of yourself, and that you really put your love into every action. When there is love and passion in what you do, it shows; when there is not, it shows too.