And neither the workplace nor the educational system is yet designed to handle this change. Yet change they must, she said, or they will lose out in competing for these workers and keeping them productive once they have them.
Dealing With Diversity
In theory, optimal mentoring should involve mentors’ sharing of knowledge and experience with the like-minded individuals who can be most receptive. In practice, there may be no choice but to accommodate a seeming mismatch between mentor and student. Today’s mentors – whether program directors, senior surgeons, senior faculty members, or even a senior residents – may need to step outside of their own comfort zone in life experiences, interests, and worldviews.
Dr. Julie Freischlag
Perhaps a key indicator of the rapidly developing need to manage workforce change was the fact that the SVS mentorship session was sponsored jointly by the SVS Women’s Leadership Committee and the SVS Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Indeed, Dr. Julie Freischlag, surgeon-in-chief and chair of the department of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, who was one of the key speakers, represented a major facet of this shift: Next year, Dr. Freischlag will be the first female SVS president.
Dr. Freischlag pointed out that mentoring is, first and foremost, a relationship between two people, and not a set of teaching rules. A key aspect of mentoring, therefore, is trust. A coach is there just to get you through your job, she said, whereas a mentor will stick by you and continue to help even when you decide not to follow in the mentor’s footsteps.
A good mentor is one who has authentic guidelines; who promotes mature, self-governing work teams; and who walks the walk. "You need to have sound judgment, independent thinking, a tendency to think divergently, and a good sense of humor so that they want to come see you," she noted. The mentees "are not going to look like you. They may not be from the same background as you. They are going to have different aspirations."
She emphasized the importance of helping people to grow, to learn how to decide what is best for them, and to identify their real interests – not what the mentor would do in their position. "When you hear what they need, you need to have other people talk to them, pointing them to sources of information and other colleagues, all the while being supportive and enthusiastic about the choices made, even if they are not the ones that you yourself would have chosen."
To be in the top 10 among surgical mentors, she gave this advice:
• Let go of your expectations; look at their expectations, not yours.
• Put things into perspective for them and set a good example.
• Agree to disagree on certain things.
• Make light of being overwhelmed yourself, and do not belittle their feelings of being overwhelmed by their number of choices, activities, and so on.
As for identity, sex, race, specialty, family issues, or other areas upon which a mentor may not feel able to advise, she said that it is the mentor’s job to find appropriate additional mentors. "As you mentor people who are not like you, you may need to ask a lot more questions about how they are feeling or what they want, because you really don’t know. And saying to someone else that you ‘know what they are going through’ isn’t true, because you really don’t. So ‘tell me more what it’s like to be a student from Nigeria; tell me more what it’s like to be the only woman in this training program; tell me more what it’s like to be a single mother in this situation’ – those are the questions you need to use."
Dr. Fredrick P. Beavers of the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C., spoke to his own experiences as an African American and to those of minorities in the past who did not have demographically similar mentors. He pointed to the success of these pioneers as evidence that mentorship does not require having identical sex, race, nationality, or other characteristics, but rather an ability to transcend such differences in terms of the values, respect, and true concern for the development and well-being of the mentored.
However, that is not to say that there is not a problem in the pipeline from medical school to the workforce. He cited statistics showing that the percentage of minorities drops dramatically at every step upward in the medical workforce. The percentage of minority individuals decreases from medical school to the level of junior faculty and staff, and further decreases from the junior to senior level and beyond. "The impact a positive mentoring relationship can have on a junior faculty member is immeasurable. The impact that a negative mentoring relationship can have has been measured, and is reflected in these statistics," he concluded.