Mentorship Teams

Great mentors are crucial to development in any career path, but this is no more true than for faculty researchers. Mentors can advise you and support you in focusing your research, attaining funding, balancing your commitments, prioritizing, etc. Given this initial list, it's not surprising that mentoring is a large time commitment, especially for the mentor.

Excellent mentors are difficult to find, and those with excellent reputations can be even more difficult to secure as a mentor. You want to be very careful about having a mentor in name only, especially if you're using that mentor's name to apply for a mentored funding award. Dr. Jean Kutner, Professor in the School of Medicine, at an ORDE seminar last year cautioned participants against this practice. Your research community is usually small enough that reviewers know if a mentor is overcommitted and being used in name only, and will question the feasibility of your career development plan because of it.

Dr. Kutner offered a creative solution to this - research teams. As a senior researcher and mentor, she has more requests for mentorship than she can realistically commit to. However, she has mentored several investigators to a point where they are now able to effectively mentor others. So what she has done is to recommend some of her more developed protégés as mentors to new early career investigators (ECI's). She gave one example of an ECI who was applying for a K award from the NIH who had Dr. Kutner listed as her senior mentor and one of Dr. Kutner's protégés as her main mentor. Dr. Kutner had committed to meeting monthly with the ECI, and the protégé met with her weekly.

This approach offers benefits to all the team members. The ECI is able to have a junior mentor who is accessible to them and able to work with them closely and a senior mentor to lend extra credibility and more of an oversight role to the mentorship group. The junior mentor gains substantive experience and expertise as a mentor. They are being "mentored into mentoring" by the senior mentor, suggests Kutner. The senior mentor benefits from being able to more effectively manage their time and lend their expertise in a way that doesn't lend itself to fatigue.

Traditionally a mentor was thought of more as one guru who had answers and advice for every query their protégé might have, but today, given the ever more diverse responsibilities of faculty researchers, having a diverse mentoring network to support you makes more sense. So, as you identify and ask well-known mentors to work with you, when they apologetically explain that they are time-constrained, ask them if they can recommend one of their protégés  or propose a mentorship team where they take more of a senior mentorship role. In this way you can get the support that you need and effectively use the time and expertise of multiple mentors.

Resources
A Mentoring Plan for Junior Faculty - University of Utah, Vice President of Research (good definitions of possible types of mentoring)
Mentoring Best Practices Handbook - University at Albany (SUNY)