ep 56 - The Mentor Gap_ Why Good Mentors Don_t Automatically Create Promotion-Ready Faculty
===
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to the Academic Medicine Strategy podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about the mentor gap, and this is why good mentors do not automatically help you create promotion-ready faculty. Not that we don't love good mentors, but there is more to it, and academic medicine has invested heavily in mentorship.
It's important. Most departments have formal programs. Many institutions have mentorship committees. Many of our national organizations have invested in this, and the assumption behind all of it is if you give someone a good mentor, they will advance. Unfortunately, the data is not quite as straightforward Now, there's a foundational review that was done by Sam Bonjack et al.,
and they found that mentorship has a significant influence on personal development and career guidance. Great. That's what we're looking for, right? But the evidence base for this is on hard promotion outcomes, and the methodology was limited. So in another review of junior academic medicine, [00:01:00] ninety-eight percent identified lack of mentorship as a barrier to career progression.
But the inverse, having a great mentor who reliably works with you, does not always produce promotion. And it's harder to demonstrate the relationship between the two, even though clearly it's helpful. It's just not always enough. So this suggests that we need to think beyond that. What kind of active mentorship can we embed in the system?
And then what else can we do to help people with this? Maybe not just the assignment of a mentor. Let's talk about what a mentor can and cannot do, whether you are the mentor or you're being mentored, or hopefully you've got both, 'cause I've never met a point in my career where I didn't need both. But a good mentor can give guidance.
They open doors if they are sponsoring, especially, perspectives from their own trajectory, and they advocate within the institution or the organization or the specialty. And these are important. These are meaningful contributions. And sponsorship especially is fantastic. [00:02:00] But they do not substitute for intentional career infrastructure, and that's the point I wanna make sure you understand today, that you need to be able to create your own career infrastructure in order to put into effect any of that great advice or sponsorship you're getting from mentors and sponsors.
So I can tell you in my own career, fantastic man, Joe Kirschner, who was dean of the Medical College of Wisconsin, where I did my residency, was very kind and generous with his time and his attention. He was a genuinely exceptional mentor, and in fact, he still is. He was generous and credible and deeply invested.
He helped me figure out what I should be doing next. But still, I found myself holding back the questions. There were some that I needed answers to what do I need the next two years to look like? Not just what committee should I be doing or what my research niche should be, and it wasn't a small question.
I was worried about overasking, that there was too many things that I wanted to understand, and I would look dumb doing it. And so it's not that the mentor wasn't offering it, [00:03:00] but there's too many things in order for one person, especially a busy person in an executive role, to take the time to ask And those questions that I was self-censoring were exactly the things that a structured career development sy- system would have answered.
They're the things that we answer in our faculty excellence and retention initiative because we have the space and the time to give regular intervals and regular answers. And that's also why we have monthly implementation calls because I don't know about you, it's like when you start learning an EMR and they give you all the advanced tricks, I'm not ready to learn them.
It's the same idea when you start your career. They give me the promotion criteria. They give me some idea of what my career trajectory is supposed to look like, but I'm still trying to find the ER. I haven't figured out how to use the E- EMR. And so what you need oftentimes is to revisit that in the first three to six months so that now that you can find all those relevant things, like where your desk is located, you can figure out how you wanna build your career in an intentional way and using frameworks that help you do it.
And it's not [00:04:00] because a mentor isn't doing their job. It's because we need different things at different times, including a system to help move us forward. Now, mentorship's obviously a relationship and a fantastic one if it's done well. They have dynamics, and not all of those are conducive to an honest, direct conversation, especially if that mentor is in a leadership position in your own division.
They're also oftentimes a direct collaborate, and they may have competing interests. You may be working in the same area. They may be having limited time. They have-- maybe have other mentees. In fact, most of the good ones do. And they may have been trained in a different era where the requirements were different.
I can tell you the promotion criteria absolutely have changed over the time that I've been around. New tracks have existed. New ways of getting promoted come out, and those are great. But it may be that if I tell you the path that I took, it doesn't reflect the mentorship system that's most effective now.
And that bar has moved, and some of the activities that careers were built on don't carry the same weight anymore. In fact, QI wasn't really much of a thing back then, but it's a huge [00:05:00] thing now. And none of that means that your mentor is unhelpful or that you as a mentor will be unhelpful. It just means that mentorship alone, without that structural support, leaves gaps.
And so the opportunity here is to both have the mentors and the sponsors, but then also have intentional career development and infrastructure through a program that's actually set up to do that. Now, what does that infrastructure add? Career development infrastructure is not a replacement for mentorship, but what it does do is make that mentorship more effective.
You understand clear promotion guidelines. You understand how to site your clinic efficiently. You understand how to have great research systems, so you keep track of things. That infrastructure allows you to have consistency and accountability and a framework that works independent of the quality of any individual relationship.
And when it's built well, that effect is measurable. There are prospective studies looking at formal mentorship programs like such as one at Mass General, And mentees were significantly more likely [00:06:00] than matched controls to hold senior faculty positions in the long term, and it was forty-seven percent versus thirteen percent.
So a huge difference. And there was no difference in their starting administrative rank. But among the subset who started as instructors, mentees were more likely to be funded and promoted than controls. So the differentiator was not the existence of a mentor, but the structure that surrounded that relationship.
So I want to just reiterate, infrastructure ensures that a faculty member's mentor is busy or unavailable or a poor fit doesn't make that so that you're gonna fall through the cracks. And when that infrastructure is in place, it works alongside the mentorship and the sponsorship to help improve your trajectory and get there much more quickly and with much more clarity.
This is what the Faculty Excellence and Retention Initiative is designed to do. We call it the FERI program. It's not supposed to replace what already is happening in departments, but it does augment what the leadership is doing in terms of promotion readiness and career development. And the most effective career development happens before there's a problem.[00:07:00]
So that's the true for mentorship, and it's true for the systems that support them. Now, if you want to be effective in these ways, I want you to do three things. I want you to write down the three questions you need most answered about your promotion trajectory right now, especially if you haven't asked them.
The second one is to ask them. Go to a mentor, a chair, a senior colleague, the promotion committee, figure it out. And the next is to evaluate your mentorship honestly. If your mentor is able to give you specific institution-informed guidance, that's amazing. But if they're offering some general encouragement, both are valuable.
You might just need more infrastructure in order to get to where you need to go most efficiently. If your department has a formal mentorship program, ask the coordinator what structured career planning exists beyond the mentor relationship. And if it doesn't, please reach out, and we are happy to give you more information about our Fac- Faculty Excellence and Retention Initiative, or you can go to our website at amedsg.com and look under Department Coaching.
In the meantime, I look forward to [00:08:00] talking to you next week. Please share this with anyone else who it might be useful for, and we'll talk soon.
