Best Practices in Mentoring
This overview of best practices in mentoring provides essential strategies for fostering successful mentor-mentee relationships. These tips are valuable for both mentors and mentees, providing insights for long-term planning, addressing immediate challenges, and serving as a useful reference.
Mentoring Best Practices
- Mentors and mentees should discuss what constitutes proactive communication. What does it look like and how will it be received? How does each like to communicate, in person or teams, by email or phone?
- Consider styles and dimensions of communication, including cultural norms and expectations, backgrounds, disciplines, abilities, positions of power, etc.
- Establish mutual expectations about the work to be accomplished. Set goals with the mentee and revisit those goals together regularly. Hold yourself accountable as well as the mentee.
- Communicate expectations for both the mentor’s actions and the student’s, regarding hours worked, time off, accessing mentors, etc.
- The relationship should be reciprocal, although perhaps at varying paces along a continuum. The mentor may need to invest more time and resources at the beginning when the student is taking courses and learning their way around the lab or classroom, and at other times, the mentee may need to invest more time and take ownership over aspects of the work.
- Talk to mentees regularly to assess their understanding and integration of core concepts and processes.
- Consider reasons for lack of skills or understanding (expert-novice, first generation, cultural assumptions).
- Build a relationship based in understanding of individual backgrounds, identities, and current knowledge, and work together to fill in gaps in understanding.
- Consider the impact of conscious and unconscious assumptions, preconceptions, and biases of both student and mentor.
- Above all, be honest and willing to own and correct mistakes (again, both mentor and mentees).
- Discuss the goal of mentoring to develop scholarly independence in students, with there being a continuum of independence from novice to expert.
- Consider and discuss the challenges of working with novice researchers, including adjusting expectations of how much time it will take the mentor to train and how much time it will take the student to learn content and skills.
- Help students identify others who can meet them where they are and encourage them on their pathway toward adult success.
- Embrace the concept of multiple mentors and mentoring networks. No one mentor can be everything to all people. Mentors should identify their own strengths and weaknesses and help students identify their mentoring needs.
- Mentees should develop and regularly revisit an individual development plan, outlining areas of strength and weaknesses, with a mentor’s support in identifying resources and providing referrals.
- Try to provide time during the workday for students to attend to their professional development. Support their attendance at guest speaker and PLAN events as appropriate to their interests and needs, and when practical, help mentees attend conferences and begin sponsoring them by introducing them to members of your network.
- Graduate students are more aware than ever of their mental health concerns and are seeking work-life balance in institutions and disciplines where work-life balance is not necessarily the norm. Let your students know where they can turn if they are feeling stressed out or isolated. Encourage your students to make time for exercise, family, friends and leisure.
- Encourage students to keep their education in perspective. While graduate education is an important part of their career and scholarly development, it is only a small part of the rest of their lives.