Curious Principle Number One
Everyone wants a mentor
Curious Principle Number Two
Everyone enjoys talking about their mentor (sometimes more than other people like listening to them talking about their mentor)
Curious Principle Number Three
The really strong protégés always seem to find the really strong mentors
Curious Principle Number Four
The protégé may get more out of the relationship than the mentor – but not by very much
Regardless of where you are in your professional development, two assumptions about you are almost certainly true. First, you have undoubtedly worked very hard to get to where you are now; second, you are, in all likelihood, hoping to eventually achieve some measure of professional success. Irrespective of how much of the high school → college → medical school → residency → fellowship → faculty spectrum you have traversed, you have had to make decisions and negotiate bottlenecks that have filtered out sizable numbers of people. Along the way, you have accumulated a number of accolades and skillsets (perhaps an incredible work ethic, an uncanny recall of medical information, precocious successes in laboratory research, or rare technical talents as a surgeon) that have enabled your continued progress toward professional success (however you define that).
It may be sobering to consider the possibility that all the skills you have accumulated may only be the second most important predictor of your likelihood of achieving success in academic surgery.1 The personal biographies of “successful” academic surgeons clearly highlight stories of rare and occasionally supernatural individual talent; however, the more common theme is that of powerful and effective mentorship. Surgeons are no more humble or modest than other professionals; yet approach and ask any “successful” academic surgeon if her/his career was transformed by the influence of a mentor, and you will almost universally hear some near-mythical description of how their lives were transformed, through almost providential intervention, by their mentor (see Curious Principle Number Two).2 The “I was a Nobody until Dr. So-and-so somehow found me worthy of guidance” plotline is far more common in these autobiographical accounts than the one that goes, “I am a self-made Success Story who made it on my own with no special thanks to anyone in particular.”
One of the problems with these (often overly romanticized) accounts of mentorship is that they may give the listener the wrong impression that the marriage of mentor and protégé is an ethereal and magical phenomenon that arises more out of unexpected blessing than from intentional work. If you are waiting for the perfect mentor to appear, you may end up waiting a long time. On the other hand, if you assume that the first person to push your career path in a favorable direction must be your predestined mentor because the circumstances of your initial interaction just seemed appropriately magical, you could end up investing in a suboptimally productive relationship. The objective of this chapter is to offer some reflections on how best to identify and foster a strong mentor-protégé relationship. The first point of discussion should be an exploration of the criteria that define a strong mentor.
Defining an Effective Mentor
As with many nonintuitive concepts, effective mentorship is often easier to define in terms describing its absence than its presence; it is easier to identify a bad mentor than to describe a good one. One can indirectly approximate its meaning by listing lesser roles that fall short of effective mentorship (Table 2.2); the effective mentor synergistically combines all of these in a way that allows her to help a protégé in ways that none of these lesser roles could ever impart. There are four defining criteria of effective mentorship (Table 2.3), some of which are straightforward, and some of which are more subtle.
Table 2.2
A list of people who are not mentors
This is a partial list of the people on whom we all depend for personal growth and fulfillment. By mixing and matching aspects of each of these important roles, the effective mentor is able to offer professional guidance in ways that none of these individuals can. It is obviously important that we have people in our lives who fulfill these roles; but you should not confuse them as being your mentor: | |
Friend | The one who provides unconditional support and counsel |
Supervisor | The one who makes the rules and sets the expectations |
Protector | The one who makes sure nobody hurts you |
Advisor | The one who is willing to share his/her experience in ways that will help you make decisions |
Advocate | The one who votes for you and works to get you the things you want |
Counselor | The one who tells you when you are straying too far from where you need to be |
Table 2.3
Four defining criteria of effective mentorship
Accumulated wisdom |
Personal interest |
Generosity |
Impermanence |
Accumulated Wisdom
This first criterion is the most obvious one. The effective mentor must, by definition, own a depth of wisdom consisting of technical expertise and interpersonal connections that the protégé does not possess. This expertise and connectedness can only be accumulated over years of effort; by sharing these, the mentor provides a springboard from which the protégé’s professional growth may catapult. Neither keen insight nor boundless energy and enthusiasm can ever substitute for accumulated wisdom. If you are a brand new assistant professor in search of effective mentorship, the charismatic and approachable junior faculty member who generously shares all of her collective experiences and advice may become your friend or counselor but will probably fail you as a mentor. The breadth of this wisdom is not critical; for example, the perfect laboratory mentor may not be at all useful as a role model of clinical acumen and so forth.
Personal Interest
This second criterion refers to the fact that the effective mentor-protégé relationship is one of intensity and individuality. Remember Curious Principle Number One: everybody wants a mentor. Now intersect that with Curious Principle Number Three: the protégé gets a little more out of the relationship than the mentor. The result is that it can be very tempting to romanticize and falsely misinterpret a relationship (often one of the relationships outlined in Table 2.1) as being a mentor relationship. Imagine a senior and universally adored chairman of an internationally prominent department of surgery – the one who is asked to give countless visiting professorship lectures on anything at all, simply so that his audience can have the joy of hearing his witticisms and reflect in the reflected glory of his historically significant presence for an hour or so. It is quite likely that this person, who may have overseen the graduation of seven chief residents a year for 30 years (7 × 30 = 210) while signing the paychecks of 90 different surgical faculty members during his tenure, may be considered as “the most important mentor I have ever had” by (210 + 90 =) 300 surgeons on this planet. This is not possible. A more realistic claim would have been for those 300 surgeons to consider them “the biggest surgical hero I have ever had” or “the biggest surgical role model I have ever had.” Or consider this alternative illustration: you may have read every book ever written about William Halsted. You may have intimate familiarity with every opinion he ever shared on the training and conduct of surgeons. You may even shape your professional behavior and guide your professional decisions based on what you think he might have done. Even within this (fairly extreme) circumstance, William Halsted is not your mentor. The mentor-protégé relationship is simply far too intense and personal; it is one that is forged over hours of intentional and individualized attention. Mentorship is not a shared, generational experience.
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