A key feature when you are preparing a doctoral project is that the research is guided by different directors. The task that should do the director should be vocational and go beyond the supervision of activities related directly to the successful publication and defence of the doctoral thesis.

• The director shall provide encouragement, personal support and guidance in all the stages of the thesis until the defence of this one.
• The director must act as a mentor and teach the doctoral student the learning process that he/she will use throughout life; he has to teach them to grow professionally and personally through reflection about self-criticism and also to be responsible for the maintenance of professional ethics.
• The director should be a good model of what a professional researcher does.

One of the main keys of success is based on having a good relationship with the doctoral student and creating around him a good atmosphere of trust and respect. This relationship, in turn, has to be bidirectional. For winning the confidence of the doctoral student the best is to listen to him, but in this case not in the sense of finding out how they are doing with the research, but simply to make feel them understood.

This relationship between the director and the doctoral student must be adjusted as the research progresses. Initially, you must act as a tutor, providing training and help. In the following states the director should act as a coach, basing his/her contribution in the construction of skills and generating the appropriate confidence of the doctoral student and, finally, he/she should act as a colleague and the behaviour should be on equal level.

Additionally, the director is not just responsible of the individual work of the doctoral student, but he/she also has to incorporate the results of the research in his/her personal tasks and start learning from the guardianship experiences for applying them in the future with the next doctoral students.