Why more early career faculty should become mentors

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene Hello everyone. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is such a pleasure to be talking with you today. I want to thank you for taking the time to tune in and to listen to today's episode. We're going to talk about early career faculty becoming mentors as soon as possible, and I think it's so important because mentoring is part of your mentor journey.

1:22 So yes, your early career, somebody else is mentoring you, and you get to mentor too. And the reason you want to get to mentor as early as possible is because as you grow as someone who's mentoring others, then you become better as a mentee, and you're able to create space for others while others are creating space for you. So it's so important to be a mentor. I will tell you that for the longest time in my career, I always felt like I couldn't find the right mentor. It was like, oh, if only this person would do this, and if only this person would do that. And I was just looking for a mentor who would be everything to me.

2:04 And yes, that was kind of short-sighted of me. But when I finally, finally started seeing myself as a mentor, it changed my experience. And I think I recognized that instead of having this neediness of, oh, I need someone who can help me, I need someone who can help me, the moment I started to help someone else, it was like I was taking ownership of the skills I already had. Because in order to help move someone forward, you have to acknowledge that you have what it takes to help them move forward, or that at least you've acquired some skills along the way such that you are able to help them. So becoming a mentor is actually an important career development or professional development experience.

2:44 And I just want to encourage you that the earlier you can become a mentor to someone else, the better. If you say, wait a minute, I'm just a fellow, it's great. You're a fellow, you can mentor residents and medical students. You're like, wait, I'm early career faculty. I don't even know where I'm going. It's like, great. Your early career faculty, you can mentor med students, residents, and fellows. So no matter where you are on the pathway to becoming a clinician scientist, there's always someone behind you that you can reach out and help up. And I want to talk to you about five ways to grow in your mentoring capabilities as an early career faculty. Okay. In order to be a mentor, you've got to accept your knowledge and expertise.

3:28 You have to. It's absolutely important. And one of the challenges is when you are looking for mentors, sometimes you're coming at it with this deficit mindset, like, oh, I don't have X, Y, Z skill. And that mentor has all these skills. And if I could just connect with this mentor, then my life would be better. And you're always, you tend to look at yourself from the perspective of a deficit. I don't have enough. I don't have enough. Somebody else has what I don't have. And it can be limiting. It can be limiting. But the moment you step out and you say, I'm going to mentor someone else, you first of all have to acknowledge, what do you have to give them? And the moment you start to think about what you have to give them, you find that you've got so much to give them.

4:09 Holy cow. You've learned a lot along the journey. And so of course you can be a mentor. So that's one half of the equation. The other half is it becomes clear what you don't know. When they ask you questions or they need help in a certain direction, it becomes an opportunity for you to acquire knowledge and expertise to help them move forward. And it's so awesome because as you're moving them forward, they're moving your research program forward because you're a mentor that they're working with. But it's so helpful because it allows you to acquire, to actually to accept and acknowledge the expertise you already have, and then to figure out what your gaps are and what additional knowledge and expertise you need to go after.

4:52 And so it allows you to improve your self-awareness and your self-gratitude. I don't know if that's the right term. It allows you to have a good sense of self-esteem about how far you've come because you're able to acknowledge what you've done and how you can help someone else. And so it allows you to both acknowledge your knowledge and expertise and then identify gaps in which you can grow. So it's an important personal development activity to mentor someone else. And I hope that you will take it. You'll take the challenge and you'll look to it. Next thing it helps you do is it helps you become a better listener.

5:37 If you wait until you're like a senior person to try to do all this mentoring, then sometimes you may have this fallacy that you know everything and the people who just listen to you talk for hours and hours and hours and hours on end. But if you start early, especially where there are a lot of things you actually do not know, it helps you come at it from a perspective of humility. It's like, you know what? I don't know. I don't know very much. And when you don't know, the best thing to do is to find out, is to ask questions. And I think something that's so important and when we think about our own mentoring journey is it's not helpful when people are autobiographical, when people are autobiographical, and they say, well, this is my life story and this is how I did it and look at how amazing I was and I took this opportunity.

6:25 It's great, but it's not as helpful as when people create space for you to share your hopes, your expectations, your aspirations, your dreams, because then what it allows you to do is to clarify how your connection, your intersection with them helps you move forward. But where people don't create that space for you and they're always telling you what to do or giving you advice, it doesn't always help you grow in the way you need to grow. And sometimes you may veer off a path that you really want to go on because you don't want to disappoint someone. And so when you start out early, you don't have as much of that. I mean, I hope you don't or I hope you don't, you know, come across as feeling arrogant like, well, I've learned it all.

7:07 You probably are able to come from a better place of humility. And part of that humility is to ask, hey, how can I help you? What do you need? What questions still remain? What do you need? And what you end up having is an opportunity to become a great listener, someone who listens without interrupting, someone who's able to show empathy to the person who's before them as a mentee and the employees of asking open-ended questions so the mentees can truly express their thoughts and concerns. And it's really important because I think there is a power differential in the mentor-mentee relationship no matter how much the gap is, unless it's a peer-mentoring relationship. There's not really a power difference in there.

7:49 And at some future episode, in a future episode, I am going to talk about the importance of these peer-mentoring relationships and how powerful they are. But the moment it's not a peer-mentoring experience, sometimes that can be a feeling of a power differential. And so being a mentor who has active listening skills, who really creates space for the mentees to be themselves and to voice exactly what they need from you is an amazing skill to have. And it allows you, as you reach out and be into mentor people, it really does allow you to grow in your active listening. Now one of the things that, oh, so number three is they're providing constructive feedback. Okay, what did I say?

8:30 It's constructive feedback. Okay, if it's not constructive feedback, it's destructive feedback. I was just listening to a book by Brian Tracy today. It's called Maximum Achievement. And it talks about the difference between constructive and destructive feedback. So I definitely recommend this book to you. Again, that's Brian Tracy, Maximum Achievement. But it is, you know, in medicine, there's a lot of judgment, there's a lot of criticism. And so because of that, we are more likely to share destructive criticism than constructive feedback. And what do I mean by constructive feedback? Constructive feedback is feedback that helps people improve, not feedback that pulls them down or criticizes them.

9:14 And the reason it is helpful for you to start early in your mentoring journey is because you are so attuned to your negative feedback experiences, right? You are attuned to the time when mentors said something to you that really demoralized you or made you disappointed or angry or hurt or anxious and afraid. And so you are less likely to want to inflict the same kind of pain on your mentees. And so one opportunity you have is to really learn to be constructive in the feedback you give so that people are left feeling good about themselves at the end of your feedback.

9:55 So if you are giving feedback and people are, you know, crying or they're upset or they're broken or really sad, then it hasn't been constructive and it hasn't been feedback. It's been destructive. And so learning to do that early on is so powerful for you because one of the things it also allows you to do is to show compassion on others. And when you show compassion on others, it's an opportunity to show compassion on yourself. And then it allows you to learn how you can help people treat you well as well. And so in providing constructive feedback and being a great space for someone to bring challenges so that they can grow, it allows you to learn how you want to be treated, how you want to be given constructive feedback as well.

10:39 And then you can take it to your mentors and say, hey, I know that you mean well when you yell, but when you do, I feel anxious and I feel stressed. And so I would really appreciate it if when you give feedback, you give it in a neutral tone so that it doesn't trigger the fight or the fight or flight response. So anyway, that's an example of how your ability to practice constructive feedback to someone as a mentor allows you to really help whatever, whoever the mentors in your life are in helping you move forward in the way you want to.

11:20 So that's important to do. I think one thing that it also helps you to do is to help you set clear expectations. OK, so don't be like one of those mentors where someone comes and says, will you be my mentor? And you're like, of course, I'll be your mentor. And then you shake hands or you hug or you cry or something, and then you're done. And it's like, well, what did you just agree to? What did you just agree to do? Did you just agree to be this person's confidant and relationship expert advisor? And you're like, no, I didn't sign up for that. Oh, great. So set clear expectations so you can know what you signed up for and what you didn't sign up for. And I think it's important because many times, and you probably know this for yourself, mentees are not sure where they're going.

12:05 They're still figuring it out. And it's OK. This journey takes time to really figure things out. But to the extent to which they understand where they're going, there's a very clear role for you as a mentor. And so what it allows you to do is to set very clear expectations so you can establish the boundaries of your relationship. Say, hey, I can help you understand the technique to do X, Y, Z, and the series of experiments to do X, Y, Z. I'm not going to be the person to come to if you're having marital problems or relationship issues. I'm not going to be that person. And it's important to just set it up front so that there isn't that expectation. And you're like, well, how could that be an expectation?

12:45 It's like if you don't declare it, you don't know. And so it helps you learn to set clear expectations for your mentor-mentee relationship. And then it allows you to turn around and look to your mentors and say, well, are my expectations clear for my mentors or are their expectations clear for me? And it allows you to just harmonize so that you know that you're going to get out of it what you want to get out of it because it's very, very, very clear. OK. The fifth thing that it helps you do, and I hope you do it as you become a mentor, is to encourage people's independence. So if you've ever experienced a mentoring relationship where everything you're kind of like it was like go for a delegation.

13:31 OK. Now I am referencing Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And in one of the chapters, he talks about go for a delegation where it's like do this, do that, then do this, then do that, then do this. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop that. And that's go for a delegation where it's just I tell you what to do, you do it. I don't like it, you stop doing it. But what you start to do, what you want to do is encourage someone to grow in their thinking skills to be able to make decisions, to be able to get information, act on the information and process it. And it really allows you to support people to have creative strategies to create creative strategies for problem solving.

14:17 It enables people to grow in their critical thinking. And that's a gift that you get to give to your mentees. And you turn around to begin to ask it of your own mentors and your mentoring relationships as well. The other things that are important is that it helps you grow in patience, it helps you be more understanding and flexible. If you're a parent, it's the same thing as when you finally become a parent, you start to really appreciate the sacrifices that your own parents made. You're like, wow, who knew how hard this is? I should go back and say thank you to my mom and dad. It's the same kind of thing where you're like, wow, being a mentor can be challenging. I should go back and say thank you to these mentors who allowed me to grow in this way, who spent so much time with me.

15:04 But what you want to do is you foster mentoring relationships with mentees. Even though you don't feel you're ready, it really does help you to acknowledge how far you've come. And it also allows you to be patient and understanding with those who've come before you. So just to recap the things that I mentioned. Number one, it allows you to both acknowledge your skills, knowledge and expertise, and then to go acquire the ones that you may be missing. Number two, it does help you to become an active listener where you really are the one helping the mentee guide and drive their own career experience. Number three, it allows you to learn to provide constructive feedback because you may have been the recipient of destructive feedback and now you know better and it allows you to practice constructive feedback.

15:55 It allows you, number four, to set clear expectations for the relationship. And as you set clear expectations for the relationship, you begin to think about your own mentoring relationships and you go back and set clear expectations for those relationships as well. And finally, it allows you to encourage and foster in others independence and critical thinking because that is so needed in terms of moving people's career forward. Moving people's career forward and also moving your own career forward as well. And so as you are encouraging other people's independence, you become someone who is independent as well. All right. If this episode has been helpful to you, please, please, please share it with somebody else.

16:36 If you're looking to make this transition from clinician to clinician scientist, please reach out to us. We would love, love, love to be helpful to you. All right. It has been a pleasure talking with you today. Thank you so much for listening. I invite you to become the mentor that you wish to see. And we need you to take ownership of mentoring relationships so that you can create the kind of mentoring relationships that you've always wanted. All right. It's been a pleasure talking with you today. I look forward to talking with you again the next time. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher Podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor.

17:26 If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do healthcare.