Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Mentorship
Today in class Colleen and David presented on mentorship. We talked about formal and informal mentoring as well as peer mentoring. We watched a short film about peer support which was very interesting. It was solely related to the healthcare industry, and it talked about making peer support more common, to the point where a person would have someone a peer support personal on their medical team. Professor Bonica even chimed in by telling us about some peer mentorship in a hospital type setting where patients even help each other by recommending treatments. Role model mentoring is what I feel is most common to me. It would be when a boss or a teacher is a mentor to a student or an employee. Colleen mentioned reciprocal mentoring and I had never really heard of that before but it is extremely interesting. Both parties are able to help and mentor each other, and we were able to watch a TEDTALK about it. The guy in the talk believes that mentor relationships should not be mentor mentee, but mentor mentor. He says that he will only agree to be someones mentor if they agree to be his. I don't think I agree with this, because I don't think I would deny being someones mentor just because I don't think I could learn from them. I believe that we learn from every single person that we come into contact with in our lives. With this being said, I don't think that we should go into a mentor relationship only wanting to learn from them, but willing to teach. This summer I am hoping that my preceptor for my internship, Jennifer Foley, will become my mentor. I know that there is so much that I can learn from her, but I don't necessarily see any skills that she could learn from me, as she's already been in the field for about 20 plus years. I am sure that at some point over the summer she will learn something from me, whether it be on a personal level or a work level.
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OK - seems like you made your choice for internship! Good for you!
ReplyDeletePatients Like Me is the site I mentioned. It's really cool: https://www.patientslikeme.com/
Everyone has different mentoring needs in my experience. And different people have different things they can offer. One of the big benefits to a mentor is the feeling of their experiences having meaning and value.
ReplyDeleteI talked with Nirav Shah, the COO of Kaiser-Permanente's southern California region, and one of the things he said was that he meets with a young person as a reverse mentor who explains things like social media to him.
Here's a bit from that interview:
DeleteBonica: We've talked about mentors already a bit. One of the things I'd like to be able to advice my students is to go out and try to develop mentor relationships. What kind of advice should I give them, in your opinion to develop good mentorship relationships?
Shah: I think this is a stuff that your grandmother teachers you. It's about answering emails on time. It's about treating people with respect. It's about the hygiene that most people don't necessarily remember that it is hygiene, that is you treat people as you want to be treated yourself. That's 90% of being a good mentee and the other 10% is understanding, and learning from, and teaching your mentor as well.
For example, I had two mentorship meetings today and I can guarantee you I think I learn more from my mentees than they learn from me, whether they knew it or not, and I actually have a formal reverse mentor. She's a millennial and she just taught me about what generation Z is, everyone born after 2001, and how they differ from generation Y. It's great stuff. I would never have come across this. She is mentoring me. In the meanwhile, I'm helping guide her in other ways. We have fun together, we learn from each other.
You can make it as formal as you want. You don't have one mentor for all aspects of your life. Someone you follow because of how they manage their time. Another person you have as a mentor because of how they manage their family life and understand how they plan aggressively months in advance for all of their family vacations and things like that. You bring together a group of a kitchen cabinet or others and I guarantee you that a mentor gets much more out of it than a mentee. If you go in with that, most mentee should not be afraid. Reach out, ask. Almost everyone has been mentored so you'll be surprised that most folks will say yes.
http://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/p/dr-nirav-shah-interview-transcript.html
I think mentors (such as yours this summer) may be able to learn from us because we are young and still in school learning new material, meaning we may have the ability to bring fresh ideas to the table!
ReplyDelete