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This booklet was compiled as a guide to encourage mentoring
activities at the School of Medicine on the Medical College
of Virginia Campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. It
is not meant to be a formalized program, but rather a series
of suggestions based on research concerning mentoring in health
care, academia and business. Mentoring is a highly interactive
process and requires strong commitment from both the mentor/guide
and the mentee/protégé. Also necessary is serious
commitment to mentoring from divisions, departments and the
institution's administration. This handbook is one of many
steps to foster such commitment at our university.
This guide is designed to help you in several ways. It will:
- help you determine if you are in a position to be a mentor;
- describe the rewards associated with the undertaking;
- offer direction on how to seek a mentor and why you should
do so whether you are a clinician, basic scientist, researcher,
teacher, administrator or combination thereof;
- provide a checklist of qualities to look for when seeking
a mentor or a mentee;
- offer alternatives to traditional mentoring;
- offer suggestions for departments and divisions in devising
mentoring programs;
- point out potential obstacles to mentoring;
- provide template forms to assess need and monitor mentoring
relationships;
- offer additional resources for more detailed information
on mentoring.
Mentoring Past, Present and Future
Since the days of the Trojan War, we have many accounts of
mentoring in fact and fiction, science, medicine, business,
education and law. Most of us can recall some famous mentor/mentee
pairs: Socrates and Plato, Haydn and Beethoven, Sigmund Freud
and Carl Jung, Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, Ruth Benedict
and Margaret Mead. In each of these cases, a "senior"
person who had garnered respect and an amount of prestige
and power within her/his field, took a "junior"
person under the wing to teach, encourage and provide an extra
push to ensure that junior individual's success. Not inconsequentially,
the success of the junior person ultimately reflected on the
senior person, further adding to her/his prestige.
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"[Mentoring] is one of the major processes
through which scholars replace themselves
and through which flexibility or openness
to ideas and creativity or the manipulation
of phenomena can be maintained.
A. Hinshaw 36
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Different types of relationships are possible between a junior
and a senior professional in an academic setting:
- Those assigned by the institution (the adviser, tutor,
or preceptor) and
- Those chosen by the learner (the role model or the mentor).
Institutionally assigned roles customarily assume the relationship
to be a strictly professional one: the senior person ensures
that the junior person completes institutional requirements,
is progressing appropriately in his or her field of study
and has the knowledge necessary to achieve career success.31
Relationships chosen by the learner often involve a personal
element in addition to professional guidance. A role model,
for example, can provide a "vision" of a practicing
professional who functions in a real world context.31 The
real world is not simply what we see from 8 to 5; it also
involves the integration of personal life with professional
life. The role model is usually chosen because of acknowledged
status within a field and perceived competence in dealing
with the challenges in his or her profession. The role model
is not, however, necessarily a senior person. He or she may
be a peer, and the similar age and background one of the main
factors involved in the relationship.
Mentors, however, are almost always senior persons within
their fields. They are chosen specifically for their ability
to use the power of their positions and experience to develop
the careers of those less powerful and experienced. A mentor
has moved beyond preoccupation with self to foster the growth
of a developing professional.
The precise definition of "mentor" is difficult
to pin down, but in his book The Seasons of a Man's Life,
David Levinson wrote that the mentoring relationship is one
of the "most complex and developmentally important"
in a person's life. Levinson did not see the relationship
in formal terms, such as "teacher/student" or "boss/subordinate,"
but rather in terms of its character and its functions. Several
functions are considered integral in the mentoring relationship:
teaching, sponsoring, guidance, socialization into a profession,
provision of counsel and moral support. Of all of these, Levinson
believed that the most important function of a mentor was
assisting in the realization of a dream.18
The relationship is, at its most fundamental, a multifaceted
collaboration between a junior professional and a senior professional
with the primary goal being the nurturing of the junior professional's
development.30 In virtually every profession imaginable, a
mentoring relationship is considered an excellent route toward
ensuring not only a profession's vitality, but growth of the
workers within that profession. Since the days of guilds,
we have recognized the synergy of the "master/novice"
combination. Many industrial professions still use the apprenticeship
model. In 1979, the business world turned its attention to
revitalizing the concept of mentoring when an article in the
Harvard Business Review reported that mentored executives
earn more money at a younger age, are better educated and
more likely to follow initial career goals, and enjoy greater
career satisfaction.29
In health care, the concept of mentoring has traditionally
been restricted to the teacher/medical student, graduate student
or resident relationship. Emerging research on medical university
faculty development is casting new light on mentoring as it
relates to promotion, professional growth and tenure in academia.
The results of the studies are sobering, especially in reference
to women and minority faculty. Increases in numbers of women
and minority physicians in no way guarantees them equal access
to leadership positions.
In 19963,12 and again in 2001,43 national studies of women
in U.S. academic medicine performed by the Association of
American Medical Colleges (AAMC) indicate:
- The proportion of full-time medical school women faculty
increased from 25% in 1996 to 28% in 2001.
- In 1996, 21% of all associate professors were women and
10% of all full professors were women, and in 2001, the
numbers are up a small percentage: 24% and 12% respectively.
- Also in 1996, on average, a medical school employed only
17 women full professors, including nontenured and basic
sciences faculty, compared to 158 men full professors per
school. By 2001, on average, there are still only 23 women
full professors per medical school compared to 166 men at
this rank. This translates to about one woman full professor
per department.
These statistics are particularly interesting in light of
the fact that women in 2001 comprise close to half of medical
students (45.8%) and instructors (46%), and in 2000, 38% of
residents.
A 1990 survey of male and female medical students, house
staff and faculty conducted at the University of California,
San Francisco indicated:
- 45% of women faculty said they had never had a mentor,
compared with 8% of the male faculty — males noted
positive mentoring relationships three times as often as
female faculty.27
A 1991 study of mentor relationships in academic medicine
found:
- White faculty are more likely than minority faculty to
have a mentoring relationship;
- Women with mentors have more publications in peer reviewed
journals, spend more time in research, and report greater
career satisfaction.19
Certainly such research indicates that women and minority
faculty could benefit from the assistance of a senior professional
who would protect the interests and guide the career path
of these junior professionals so that they may achieve success
in their own right. We maintain that all junior faculty
could benefit from the presence of a mentor; of course, the
rewards are great for the mentor, too.
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