The mentor-mentee relationship is a mutually beneficial two-way street requiring active participation from both people. While physician mentors have many places where they can learn efficient and effective mentorship practices, unfortunately, the same is not true for medical student, resident fellow, and early career faculty mentees. In our experience, mentees are given little guidance for success.
At the outset, a mentee must learn when the relationship simply is not working, e.g., difficulty setting up a meeting after multiple attempts, a lack of responsiveness to communications, and a gut feeling that the connection is more difficult to establish than expected.
Next, we encourage mentees to invest in and feel equally responsible for the development and sustainability of the relationship. This is not the time to wait passively or around for a mentor to save you and your career.
Here are six ways mentees can champion their role in the mentee-mentor relationship:
Learn about the Mentor
Read about the mentor. Read the hospital website, the medical school website. Perform an internet search. Google them. PubMed them and actually read their publications. Watch their YouTube talks, and listen to their podcast appearances. Verify if their expertise or skill set is compatible with your professional goals and gaps. Try to get a sense if they can provide the support you need. You may find training institutions and people you have in common.
Ask the Mentor Their Communication Preference
Polished communication is an art and a science. It’s nuanced and becomes specific to the individual. Instead of assuming, ask the mentor how they wish to communicate. Some people want email, some prefer text. Some will handle the back and forth directly with you and others may ask you to work with an administrative assistant or calendaring software. Be flexible and open to learning preferences.
Make Scheduling Easy
Anticipate how to make scheduling a meeting easy for you both. Once a day, time, and medium are selected, send a meeting invite that is a seamless click and add directly to the calendar. If virtual, send the Zoom or Teams video conference link or state the plan for one person to phone the other. If in person, suggest and confirm a central meeting location on campus, at the hospital. Close to the time of the meeting, send a reminder — particularly if scheduled far in advance.
Prepare for the Meeting and Organize Your Questions
Your time is just as valuable as your mentor’s time, so demonstrate that respect by organizing and planning your goals and objectives for the meeting. Focus on concrete discussion topics, such as discussing your rank list, interviewing for a new position, or going up for promotion. Make your questions clear and specific.
Share Updates
Keep in touch between scheduled meetings. You could share specific news, e.g., email the PDF of your publication that just dropped, or share the link to the podcast episode you joined. You can share your thoughts on the book you read at their suggestion, and update them on the job interviews you discussed.
Support the Mentor
You are not a child and mentors are not your parents, so you don't want to develop a relationship consisting of one-sided asks and tasks. Think of ways you can supplement their work, their learning, and their professional development. There may be hospital and specialty specific awards for which you can nominate them, or articles which come to your email inbox and related to their work which you can share. You can email their supervisor a letter of positive feedback for their annual review evaluation and promotion portfolio.
Like all relationships, managing up the mentor-mentee duo takes work. In our time as medical educators, we have seen many mentees take these six tips and incorporate them naturally as a part of the connections they cultivate. Mentees can build mutually healthy relationships with their mentors — they simply need to learn how.
What are your suggestions for how to be a better mentee? Share in the comments.
Resa E. Lewiss, MD, is a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and host of The Visible Voices Podcast and The Academic Emergency Medicine Education and Training Podcast. Adaira Landry MD, MEd, is an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and co-founder of WritingInColor.org.
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