Show Notes
Description
Dr David Eckmann visits the studio as we explore the power of mentorship in academic medicine. Mentorship programs can have a positive impact on mentees, mentors, and their institutions… but they require intentionality and planning. Tune in to learn more!
Topic
Mentorship
Learning Objectives
At the end of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Describe the personal, professional, and organizational benefits of mentorship in academic medicine.
- Differentiate mentorship from coaching and sponsorship based on purpose, structure, and outcomes.
- Apply best practices for initiating and sustaining effective mentoring relationships.
- Evaluate strategies for building a culture of mentorship within academic departments and institutions.
Guest
Dr David Eckmann
Professor of Anesthesiology
Director of Mentoring, FAME Program
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
Links
FAME: Mentoring and Coaching in Academic Medicine
FAME: Faculty Mentoring Program
Nationwide Children’s Center for Faculty Development
NRMNet: Building a National Resource for Mentorship
Top 10 Tips to Maximize Your Mentoring
The Science of Mentoring Relationships: What Is Mentorship?
Developing a Culture of Mentorship to Strengthen Academic Medical Centers
Episode Transcript
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of FAMEcast is brought to you by the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
[Music]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Hello, everyone, and welcome once again to FAMEcast. We are a faculty development podcast from The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
This is Dr. Mike coming to you from the campus of Ohio State. It’s episode 14. We’re calling this one The Power of Mentorship in Academic Medicine.
I want to welcome all of you to the program. So happy to have you with us. You know, mentorship is one of the most powerful forces shaping careers in academic medicine.
It helps faculty members grow, it strengthens teams, and it fuels institutional success. However, just like teaching and leading and practicing medicine, mentorship doesn’t just happen. It requires intentionality and skill.
So today we are going to explore the many dimensions of mentorship, its impact on mentees, mentors, and organizations, the structures that help it thrive, and tips on how every faculty member can both give and receive helpful guidance throughout their career journey. Of course, in our usual FAMEcast fashion, we have a terrific guest joining us in the studio to discuss the topic. Dr. David Eckmann is a professor of anesthesiology. He’s also the director of mentoring for the FAME program at Ohio State. Before we get to him, I do want to remind you that we have some great additional resources from The Ohio State University College of Medicine that you can find on our website. So, if you head over to FameCast.org, click on the resources tab that’s up at the top of the page. We have two links for you there to faculty development modules on Scarlett Canvas. The first group is called Advancing Your Clinical Teaching, and the second group is called FD4Me, or Faculty Development for Medical Educators. There are scores of learning modules in these two programs, so be sure to follow those links to find lots more useful information specifically targeting academic medical faculty.
Also want to remind you the information presented in FAMEcast is for general educational purposes only. Your use of this audio program is subject to the FAMEcast Terms of Use Agreement, which you can find at FameCast.org. So, let’s take a quick break. We’ll get Dr. David Eckmann settled into the studio, and then we will be back to talk about the power of mentorship in academic medicine. It’s coming up right after this.
[Music]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Dr. David Eckmann is a professor of anesthesiology at The Ohio State University College of Medicine, and he serves as director of mentorship for the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at Ohio State. He has a passion for mentoring, of course, but also the implementation of effective mentorship programs, ones that benefit the mentee, the mentor, and their institutions. That’s what we’re here to talk about, the power of mentorship in academic medicine. Before we dive in, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Dr. David Eckmann. Thank you so much for stopping by the studio today.
[Dr David Eckmann]
Thank you. It’s really a pleasure to be here.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, we are very excited to have you and to talk about mentorship. Let’s start with just an explanation of why this is an important thing to consider. Why is mentoring a really valuable component of academic medicine?
[Dr David Eckmann]
It’s actually a well-studied topic in academic medicine that faculty who get good mentorship have much more satisfying careers, they advance more quickly, and they’re more productive. And so, I think for any of us who are investing in our careers in academic medicine, we would really want to do things that are going to help us be successful in our careers. And when the literature, which has been a long study for a couple of decades, shows academic clinicians in particular who spend ample time in a mentorship arrangement do better in their careers, why would you not want to participate?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So why is that? What is it about mentoring that contributes to success?
[Dr David Eckmann]
I think it falls in a few different tiers. One is a lot of academic medicine is independent productivity as a clinician, as a scientist, as an administrator, as an educator, and so forth. And it’s hard to get a benchmark for how am I doing?
And sometimes the only process for that is an annual review. But having a mentor can really be a way to access or a gateway to getting new and specialized knowledge about how you’re doing, where you are going in your career, and helping to hold you accountable to your goals, keeping you focused, keeping you on track in your progress, helping you to motivate yourself as others show that you are reaching your potential, and they’re demonstrating their belief in you to reach your potential. That’s the real way to gain self-insight is to get some insight from others.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. Now, I’ve been involved in mentoring relationships where you get together once a quarter, maybe you do it over lunch or coffee or dinner, or it may just be in someone’s office. But a lot of times then the conversation, it’s friendly conversation, you’re sharing what’s going on in each other’s lives, and you don’t really necessarily get down to business.
There’s it’s an informal conversation that you have once a quarter. How can we structure mentorship so that we can really get more out of it, but also be able to have some familiarity with each other? Does that make sense?
[Dr David Eckmann]
It does. I think that there’s certain value in the occasional curbside consult. Hi, how are you doing?
I’m doing great. My work’s going well, etc. But you’re right, it doesn’t really get down to the nitty gritty of here are my very formal goals.
Here’s what I need to learn. Here’s how I need to become more effective. Here’s what I am achieving.
Here’s where I’d like to land. And putting structure to that relationship is really effective because establishing a framework for discussion is no different than having the framework for writing a paper, having a framework for caring for a patient, having a framework for writing a grant proposal, etc. All of those things, you have guidelines, you have timelines, you have explicit goals.
It’s another way of establishing accountability and tracking progress. So structured mentoring and having a structured mentorship relationship is a very effective means of keeping that focus. It relies on having very clear roles.
You are going to be my mentor, I am going to be your mentee, and then you can assess my impact, and I can demonstrate to you what my impact is. That is not the general line of topic that comes out in a curbside consult.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, absolutely. Are there tools to help the mentor structure that? So especially if maybe they’ve never had a mentee before, they really want to do a great job and jump in, but you’re not quite sure where to start.
How can you best do this? What tools are available for us to help?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Well, some of the tools are institutional, meaning, for instance, here at Ohio State, we have FAME, the organization that you’ve already mentioned in my introduction, which has many online resources. So, it’s easy to learn about a mentorship relationship either as a mentee or as a mentor. Other tools, I think the biggest tools are for a mentor to learn to listen, to be objective, and to spend the time to help their mentee as more of a lighthouse demonstrating the path forward for them rather than as a tugboat pulling them on the correct path.
For mentees, I think the most important mentorship aspect that they can address or learn is about their own behaviors. No one will ever be as invested in the mentee’s career as the mentee themselves. So, developing the communication skills, being willing to participate in the collaborative dynamic, if both parties are willing to bring that to the table, then it can be very, very instructional for the mentee and very rewarding for the mentor.
Those are things that have to be learned, and the tools that are available for them are many. Literature, online resources, and experience.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, yeah. So be sure to check out the FAME site, and we are going to have some links in the show notes for you so you can find that easily. But, you know, the tools that are available through the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring, and Engagement at Ohio State are fantastic.
If you are at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, they also have a Center for Faculty Development. We’ll put a link to that site as well. I know they also have a mentoring program within their institution.
And, of course, we have a lot of listeners who are outside of Ohio, or you may be in Ohio but at a different institution. Definitely do a search. It is very likely that your institution, whether it be an academic institution or a hospital, likely has a formal mentoring program with tools for you.
So do a Google search, find out what’s available in your area. I think that that’s going to be really helpful rather than just saying, okay, I’m going to be a mentor and then setting up a meeting without really thinking through, you know, how to do this well. And like you said, David, it’s really important to listen, you know, to have active listening, to ask follow-up questions, to really try to get at what someone is, you know, where they’re coming from in their career.
Because each mentee that we have is going to have different priorities, different ideas about work-life balance, for example. And so just really getting to know them as a person is going to be important. But, of course, we do want to take it beyond that for sure.
Now, we’re talking about the benefits of mentoring. It’s not only beneficial for the mentee. Mentoring also benefits the mentor.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Sure. Some of this has been my experience, and I think the experience of anyone who’s mentoring is that you develop your own leadership skills and you certainly advance your own communication skills. Talking about very specific issues with a mentee, your goal is to help them get a really fresh and current perspective on themselves.
And so, you gain that too, and then you have to process that. So that really benefits you as a mentor, because as you process that, it’s like processing for anybody who’s a parent, seeing your child succeed as they grow. And so, I tend to think of those individuals that I mentor as my academic children.
And seeing them succeed is no different than seeing my own children or my grandchildren now succeed. And these have really positive benefits. I have more job satisfaction because of that.
I have a greater sense of purpose through this because I am helping to advance the next generation or maybe next two generations of those individuals who will be in academic medicine. And I have a sense of accomplishment because I’m helping others, and we get that from patient care, and we can get that from our research, et cetera. But getting it from this direct interaction with a faculty colleague is really satisfying.
And then I think that it also means I know how to, or I’m learning, still learning, how to nurture talent. And that means I get to nurture my own talent by the things that I gain out of mentoring. So, it just contributes to my workplace satisfaction, and I think that’s a universal theme in the benefit of mentoring.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And then really the organization or the institution that you’re at also benefits from these relationships. Tell us a little bit about how that works.
[Dr David Eckmann]
Yeah, 100%. Any academic medical center is investing in its faculty in particular for long-term relationships. So, this is about developing and retaining talent, and that talent falls in all kinds of different ways, education, administration, research, patient care, all of those things.
So good mentoring influences greater employee engagement, and that leads to better retention of faculty, especially in an academic setting when people can say, oh, I’m not compensated quite the same as people who are in private practice. No, but you get to do very different things in addition to the patient care that overlaps with private practice. So, this is a way that the mentoring process and the organizational benefit that comes out of it is a way of growing organizational effectiveness, meaning we develop talent.
They come in at entry level or at mid-level, and we bring them to very senior level, and they are this organization’s future leaders. So, developing that talent takes a community, that community involves the mentors, and that’s part of succession planning. Today’s leaders will retire or leave, and who will follow in their footsteps are people that we develop.
In academic medicine, this is particularly important because when we look at who are our future, they are the people who are here in our present.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Absolutely. Now, how do we match up mentors and mentees? So, someone may buy in and say, okay, this is an important thing.
This is something I want to get involved with; I want to do. How does the matchmaking aspect of it work?
[Dr David Eckmann]
That’s always a curious issue in that in certain environments, which could be at a division level, at a department level, at a college level, at a whole institution level, mentoring is a formal structure that begins on the first day of someone’s hire into the institution. A mentoring committee or a mentor is assigned. That’s, I’d say, the least, the less common, not the least common, but the less common model.
And even in that model, it’s a matter of after a few months or a year of that relationship, is it working? Reassess it. And by the time a mentee has their feet on the ground and is more fully entrenched in the work environment, they should be able to know, they should have learned, who can I trust?
Whose careers do I want to emulate? Whose successes would I like to achieve? Will that person be willing to help me achieve the same kinds of things that they’ve been able to do?
And that may be piecemeal, meaning this person has been very successful in growing a new clinical program, or this person has been very successful in obtaining extramural funding. I really would like to have that person mentor me. And that requires an ask.
And that ask, you know, I think is a really, really important step. And it has to come from the mentee. Because as I said earlier, no one will ever be as invested in the mentee’s career as the mentee should be themselves.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Now, I may have a career in which there are a couple of different areas that are going to be important to me. Just for an example, you know, I may practice clinical medicine.
And in that respect, you know, I have goals and ambitions that I may want to accomplish. But then I also may have an administrative role or some other service activity that I really also want to cultivate. Is it okay to have multiple mentors?
Or should you just really have one at a time?
[Dr David Eckmann]
No, I think the role of multiple mentors should be 100% the target in mentoring. And the reason is, in academic medicine, we talk about people being a true triple threat. That is a very rare entity.
The person who is a superb clinician, a tremendous researcher, and an outstanding educator. Finding people who fit that model, that’s really a four-leaf clover. And the same is true for mentors.
Nobody can mentor someone and cover everything, all four leaves of the clover. So, you need to find mentors whose specific capacity to help you gain the diversity of perspectives that you want. Grab the larger range of skills and knowledge and get a broader network.
That’s only accomplishable with multiple people. Now, having 10 mentors, I think late in career, people might have accumulated that many. But starting with maybe two or three mentors and evolving those relationships over the series of many years, I think is a very, very fine way to accomplish career goals.
Great.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Now, a couple of other terms that people may have heard of, it’s a little different than mentoring, but sort of in the same category, I guess you’d say, and that’s coaching and sponsorship. So, can you define each of those and explain how they’re different than the mentoring relationship?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Sure. Let’s start with what a mentoring relationship should look like or can look like. And as I just mentioned, it’s something that can evolve over multiple years.
So, it’s really a long-term relationship, and it should be focused on skill development in the various academic areas. And the real role of the mentor is to share knowledge, to share advice, and provide support, whether that’s professional growth or personal, in terms of work-life balance and other issues in the mentee’s life and livelihood. That’s very different from a sponsorship relationship.
Sponsorship is really about opening very distinct doors for career advancement and promotion. An example is a sponsor who uses their influence or their credentials to help their protege, the individual that they are sponsoring, to have a new opportunity distinctly, such as I serve on a national committee and we’re looking for new members. Would you be interested in being on this new national committee?
Or I’m the editor of a new textbook or the next edition of a textbook. Would you be willing to write a chapter for that textbook? And while those things end up going on the individual’s CV, it’s not really focused on their skills development or a long-term relationship as in mentorship.
Sponsorship differs from coaching. Coaching is really about refining and developing performance-driven metrics. It’s usually about gaining skills, improving skills, and improving on-the-job effectiveness.
Think about baseball. What’s a batting coach? A batting coach specifically is helping an individual with their batting stance, how they hold the bat, how level their swing is, how to look at pitches to decide if it’s going to be a ball or a strike.
It’s really about measurable goals at the end. Did you increase your batting average? So, coaching in academics is really about finding these short-term and highly specific measurable goals and achieving them.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Now, can a mentor also act as a coach at times or as a sponsor at times, depending on the context of the situation?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Absolutely. Someone who has specialized skill is available to serve as a coach. Someone who has access to academic opportunity can share that as a mentor, can share that in the form of sponsorship.
There’s no reason that a mentor can’t also provide coaching and or sponsorship with excellence.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, just again, depending on the individual needs, and I know we’re talking in a lot of generalities here, but it’s really because each mentor-mentee relationship is very unique, right?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Yeah, we don’t come out of a cookie cutter. Every relationship is different from the last one, and that’s why being a good listener is really important as a mentor.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Now, what are some of the pitfalls that can sort of derail this relationship between mentor and mentee? You know, you talked about after a year, let’s look at things and say, is this working? Are there things that we can do to keep it working or is that just sort of an organic thing and either it’s going to work or it’s not?
[Dr David Eckmann]
I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention. That’s actually part of my answer, which is communication skills are really important here. That is a major detractor from effective mentoring that on either side, you have to listen to each other.
You have to open up to each other. You have to share. That is, and in that process, sharing realistic expectations of each other.
What do I expect of a mentee? What does a mentee expect of me as a mentor? Having prepared adequately for those formal structured meetings, demonstrating that you’re committed to the relationship, showing up to the meetings, preparing for the meetings.
There are other reasons that mentoring relationships can fail to thrive. Personalities or values can just be so disparate that people don’t get along, and that can happen with an early assigned relationship, or it could be part of an evolving relationship. For instance, keep politics out of your mentoring relationship.
Keep it focused on the academic interests. Don’t be overbearing as a mentor or don’t be over demanding. If you’re a mentee, carry through on the things that you agreed to do.
Not doing it is not showing that you’re realistically engaged in the process and a proponent of your own success to your mentor. And I would phrase it this way. If you won’t invest in your own success, why should your mentor invest in your success?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. Now, can you be both a mentor and a mentee at the same time?
So, I would imagine, especially at many of us sort of in the mid-career stage of our life, there are things that we can offer those who are more junior, but there’s also things that we can learn from someone who has been around the block a little longer. So, I suspect that you could be a mentor and a mentee at the same time. Is that correct?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Absolutely. I’m at an advanced stage of my career, but I still receive mentoring from people who were mentors to me at earlier stages of career and of my own career, but also at earlier phases of my career, meaning though I’m a full professor and I’m tenured, et cetera, et cetera, there are still things that I can learn to be an effective academic physician and an academic medicine. So, receiving mentoring is still valuable because I still tread into what for me has been unexplored territory and I want to have success there.
It’s not just that I can learn from someone more experienced. I can learn from those who are less experienced, meaning I also learn things from the mentees that I mentor. Any successful partnership depends on both individuals being really open and willing to learn from each other and to hold each other accountable.
So those pieces are things that you continue to learn because if you’re a mentor and your mentee is doing things that aren’t really holding to accountability, you will learn how to manage that and you learn how to respond to it. And you also learn how you need to behave in an accountable way in your relationships. You strengthen each other’s roles as mentor and mentee by establishing open communication, by showing mutual respect.
That’s a really key element of effective mentoring. And by mentoring, I don’t mean being the mentor. I mean being either the mentor or the mentee.
And by having real commitment to the shared goals, that those are priorities. The shared goals are the mentee’s success, but that success I live vicariously through as well. I’ve mentioned this, the mentees need to take initiative.
They need to be prepared. And I learned from that, that as a mentor, that I need to be, have that same kind of preparedness in the relationship. And then finally, strengthening each other’s roles, being constructive in the guidance.
That’s what I would want from anybody providing me guidance is for it to really be constructive and helpful to my goals. And I learned that by, we often learn things about good judgment by exercising poor judgment. And sometimes you’ll learn that after you’ve done it and then realize, oh, I made a mistake here.
So, thinking things through on both parties, really thinking things through to make the guidance as constructive as possible. It’s very important.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Now institutions, as you mentioned, and other healthcare organizations benefit from mentoring. We’ve established that.
So that how can institutions then cultivate a culture of mentorship? How can they help kind of push this whole thing along since they benefit from it?
[Dr David Eckmann]
That’s a really provocative question. And my initial response is to say, it is very hard to transform a culture. It really is hard from an individual basis to change a culture, but there are things that even individuals can do to help an institution grow, cultivate, and advance a culture of mentorship.
A couple of these things are starts at the top buy-in from leadership, and that has to include real forms of financial or other resource support. So, for instance, here at OSU, that resource support is demonstrated through FAME, that there are administrative personnel who are wholly dedicated to making sure that FAME’s functions on behalf of the university’s faculty can be successful. And that can’t all rest on the shoulders of the mentors, the mentees, the individuals who are members of the faculty.
The second is there has to be some sort of structured training and resources available. So, FAME implements that. And that structured training includes workshops and seminars, panels, and other kinds of things in discussion.
The faculty can attend and participate in asynchronously as well. But I think the bedrock of this is that you have to embed mentorship into institutional values. And that means also putting it into an evaluation system in some way.
So, it’s not enough to do one annual review of our faculty. It’s important that there be periodic review, and that can be done by the mentor who works with the mentee to see how they’re achieving their goals. So, the things that have to be implemented as strategies to make mentorship visible and viable, it has to be a strategic initiative.
So, you have to link it to success metrics. How do you reward participation? So, we try to do that.
The biggest reward in that participation is career advancement. And as I said at the very beginning, mentoring is associated with greater job satisfaction and swifter advancement in career. So, all of the technical things that can be done to facilitate opportunities for making formal as well as informal mentoring connections achievable, that those have to be supplemented, especially by making sure that mentors are available.
So, we have to make that investment first and foremost. You can’t have mentoring without mentors.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so you said that was a provocative question. I have another provocative question for you, but it’s also a really important question.
You know, there’s not necessarily equity in the barriers and challenges that each of us face. So, there may be challenges that are unique depending on our background, and that can be anything from race to sex, you know, all sorts of ways in which we have different barriers compared to someone else. In a perfect world, that wouldn’t exist, and it would, you know, there would just be equity for all.
But in the mentoring relationship, you know, someone as a mentee may feel like I have particular challenges that are linked to who I am as a person. Is there a way to sort of find a mentor that can relate to those things? Does that make sense?
[Dr David Eckmann]
I think there is. It’s a hard topic. It puts a lot of onus on the mentee to be open and expressive about very, very personal concerns.
That means engendering trust in the relationship. So that is the first barrier, I think, is just the barrier of trust. And effective mentoring is most – I think that’s a very challenging piece is to – this isn’t your therapist, right?
So, you’re really relying on someone who may even be voting for you for promotion or writing letters on your behalf and so forth. You’re opening up things about your deepest soul in that way. But it’s really about commitment and perspectives.
And a mentor needs to gain a perspective on what shoes the mentee is standing in. That’s a really important part of that active listening is to hear and being able to question, are you saying this because of X, Y, and Z? Are you saying this because of A, B, and C?
And then hear it and take time to process it. That’s part of the commitment. That will help the mentee gain diversity in perspectives.
And that might take more than one mentor, but it’s really about being brought to a point where the mentoring process will give the mentee a wide spectrum of insights. Without that, they really can’t achieve the things that help them over the precipice of what those barriers are. And this is a matter of being able to listen and process regarding history, experiences, knowledge, successes, failures, fears.
And that’s a willingness to share and a willingness to listen and hence invest in the mentee’s growth. That’s all distilled down to that one word, trust. So, when you build that trusting relationship, it doesn’t happen overnight.
It might take months or longer to have really ascertained, I have built that trust with my mentor. And for me as the mentor, that I’ve really built that trust with my mentee, that we can really, really get into these deep parts of the conversation to help this individual succeed.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. And that’s another way then that that’s, when that does happen and those conversations arise, that’s one of the ways that that relationship also benefits the mentor because you’re getting, you know, maybe looking at something through a lens or from an angle that you wouldn’t have even considered or thought about, but learning about that challenge may help you help others down the road, you know, just because of the relationship that you have with someone who may be experiencing something you haven’t experienced yourself.
[Dr David Eckmann]
For sure. This is all a matter of personal growth. And as a mentor, you grow that way.
As a mentee, I think you can have exceptional growth. And part of the measure of that is your career success. And your career success might not be that you want to get promoted.
It might be that you want to open up something else in your, in your clinical or your research or your administrative or your teaching skillset. And it’s just for your satisfaction in job and not targeted to, oh, I’m, I’m being mentored in order to achieve these criteria for promotion. It’s not for everybody, even in an academic setting.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. When does one become a mentor? Like at what point in your career do you say, okay, I’ve been around the block.
I have something to add. I can guide. How do you know when you’re ready to do this?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Well, that’s a, that’s a kind of funny topic because I’d say the vast, vast, vast majority of us in academic medicine are providing mentoring, whether we recognize it or not. For instance, we’re interacting with our allied health professionals and we’re helping them to understand things in healthcare that are mentoring them to be more effective in their roles. We interact with medical students, residents, fellows, research technicians, graduate students, postdocs, et cetera, research scientists as faculty.
We are providing them the kinds of insights about advancing their careers, their capabilities, their skills, their knowledge, et cetera, that can distill down to mentoring. It may not be very formal, but the skillset is being developed. And so, saying, well, now I’m going to start providing mentoring is not just a switch that gets flipped, but it’s really a process that one recognizes after a while, you know, I actually am able to help people.
And that is, you know, that’s a self-awareness. And, and sometimes that self-awareness happens when someone gets asked to engage in a formal mentoring relationship. And then they say, well, I’ve never done this before.
I’m not really prepared to do this. I’m not a mentor, but that self-awareness, when it has evolved to the point where, you know, I’m already doing all of these things. If I understand what being a mentor is, yeah, it’s a chip shot.
I can do it. I can help you. Here are the ways that I can help you.
Here are the ways that I’m not developed enough to help you where another person can mentor you for these particular topics. And that is really, I think, when you get into that reward state, seeing someone else grow because of your investment in them.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. So, if we’re going to have some key takeaways here, maybe someone is listening who, you know, they hear about mentorship and the importance of it.
They may hear about it in department meetings. You know, there’s mentorship programs within departments and then within, you know, entire colleges even. What is your best advice for getting involved in this?
[Dr David Eckmann]
Best advice? I think about mentoring like I think about teaching. When I get asked to teach a topic, it’s pretty rare that I am already very invested and expert in that topic.
So, I have to do a little bit of a dive myself to make sure that I am covering the topic thoroughly and presenting it clearly. And when I do that, I always come away from a lecture or a seminar or a grand rounds or bedside talk, whatever it is that I’m a lot more educated on the topic than before I got started. And that’s a matter of reward of, hey, I just advanced my own education.
I think the same is very true in mentoring. After every single mentoring session that I engage in, half an hour, an hour with a mentee, I believe that I have grown from new insights that I gained during that time. It makes me a better mentor, and it makes me a stronger leader.
It also shines light on my continued need for growth, advice, support, et cetera. I love the idea of lighting, you know, seeing the light bulbs go on over other people’s heads. And I really enjoy when the light bulb goes off over my head.
That’s a matter of the self-awareness. So, my best advice is if you want to grow and succeed as a professional and reach your full potential, make yourself available as a mentor. Don’t forget that others can and will mentor you.
And usually if you just ask, and that means that if others ask you to mentor them, say yes, because you’ll grow too.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation and we’re going to have lots of resources for folks in the show notes. So, if you head over to famecast.org, this is episode 14. We have a lot of resources for you. Of course, from the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring and Engagement at Ohio State, the FAME program, we’ll have links to the mentoring and coaching and academic medicine information pages. We do have a formal faculty mentoring program.
We’ll have a link to that as well. We’ll also put a link to the Center for Faculty Development at Nationwide Children’s Hospital for the pediatric folks in the crowd. You can use those resources as well.
We also have built a national resource for mentorship from the NIH. That is a nice link. And then science.org has the top 10 tips to maximize your mentoring. We’ll share that one with you. The science of mentoring relationships. What is mentorship from the National Academies Press and developing a culture of mentorship to strengthen academic medical centers.
This was an article in academic medicine. So, we’ll have links to all of those things again over at famecast.org. It’s episode 14.
Just look for the show notes and you’ll find all of them there. So once again, Dr. David Eckmann, professor of anesthesiology and director of mentoring for the FAME program at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Thank you so much for chatting with us today.
[Dr David Eckmann]
Thank you so much. This has been a joy.
[Music]
[Dr Mike Patrick]
We are back with just enough time to say thanks once again to all of you for taking time out of your day and making FAMEcast a part of it. We really do appreciate your support. Also, thanks again to our guest this week, Dr. David Eckmann, professor of anesthesiology and director of mentoring with the FAME program at the Ohio State University College of Medicine. Don’t forget you can find us wherever podcasts are found. We’re in the Apple podcast app, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Audible, and most other podcast apps for iOS and Android. Just search for FAMEcast.
We also have a landing site at famecast.org that has the entire archive of programs, our show notes, so show notes for each of the episodes, our terms of use agreement, and the handy contact page if you would like to suggest a future topic for the program, or if you just want to say hi. I love hearing from listeners through that contact page. Reviews are also helpful wherever you get your podcasts.
We always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show, and it is particularly helpful for a new podcast like this one. We have 14 episodes, but we’ve been out for just less than a year, and so when podcasts are just getting started, reviews are really helpful because when folks come along and they find a particular podcast and they want to know, is this really worth investing my time in, they take those reviews pretty seriously, and they can really make or break a new podcast. So, if you find this information helpful, please do consider leaving a review wherever it is that you get your podcasts.
We do have some additional resources you can find on our website. I mentioned these in the intro. They’re important enough that I want to mention them again.
If you head over to famecast.org, click on the Resources tab up at the top of the page. We have two links for you there. One goes to a group of modules on Scarlet Canvas called Advancing Your Clinical Teaching, and the other goes to another group of modules called FD4Me, or Faculty Development for Medical Educators, and there are scores of learning modules at those two links on the system we call Scarlet Canvas here at Ohio State.
So be sure to check those out. You’ll find lots more useful information specifically targeting academic medical faculty. So, thanks again for stopping by, and until next time, this is Dr. Mike saying stay focused, stay balanced, and keep reaching for the stars. So long, everybody.
[Music]
