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Communication style inventory results for a Thinker
(I swear this isn't mine)
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At
some point, all trainees find themselves frustrated with aspects of their
experience. For some, this frustration is due to feeling as if their mentor is
not providing the help they expect to receive. Dr. Rick McGee’s session on
Mentoring Your Mentor showed how important it is for trainees to communicate
their needs to their mentor. He guided trainees through exercises and
discussions to learn how to do just that.
One
of Dr. McGee’s key statements was, “This is YOUR life!”, meaning that trainees
are able to have some control over getting what they need from their mentor. He
emphasized throughout the session that mentoring is a two-way street: trainees
have equal responsibility in the mentor-mentee relationship. However, both
parties often believe it is a “have it or you don’t” skill and are rarely
explicitly shown how to mentor. The good news is that mentoring is a learnable,
teachable - albeit complex - skill.
Identifying
communication styles is a principal tenet in learning how to mentor both up
(mentoring your mentor) and down (mentoring your own trainees, such as
undergraduate students). The audience used the Effective Communication Styles Inventory to assess which of the four communication style patterns or domains they
naturally and best matched with: Thinkers, Doers,
Connectors, or Influencers. Keep in mind, none of the categories are better or
worse, just different, and effective communicators learn to adjust their style
for different situations!
Knowing
the communication style used by yourself and your mentors can guide the way you
approach interactions. For example, a Thinker focuses on details and likes to
take time making decisions and preparing for conversations, whereas an
Influencer focuses on the big picture and loves to think aloud with others. It
is easy to see how this match-up might lead to difficulties so understanding
and learning how to communicate with other styles is imperative to mentoring.
In this example, the following advice was given in the handout, “When
communicating with an Influencer, don’t deal with a lot of details (put them in
writing) and ask “feeling” questions to draw their opinions and comments”.
Information such as this, provided in the resources linked at the end of the
post, can really improve the mentoring skills on both sides.
There
are times though when a mentor and mentee have contradictory approaches. One
example is a trainee who feels as if they are not receiving enough hands-on
training in experimental design. It is important to determine whether this is
an unconscious or conscious design on the part of the mentor. A conscious
design – the belief that a hands-off approach is the best way for trainees to
learn – is unlikely to be changed by the trainee. In that case, Dr. McGee
suggested finding additional mentors to provide assistance in the area needed.
When meeting with a prospective mentor, the trainee should schedule a time to
meet and arrive prepared. In this example, they could bring ideas for several
potential experimental designs, explain which they think is best, and then ask
for feedback. This may even work with the hands-off mentor who would see that
the trainee did the legwork to plan the experiment and just needs confirmation
of which direction would be most efficient.
Ultimately,
Dr. McGee would like trainees to understand that they can and should
communicate what they need from their mentors. He provided many resources,
linked below, to help trainees and mentors alike learn how to effectively
mentor each other.
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Resources
“Entering Mentoring” A Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) program. Originally this
was a series facilitated workshops for graduate students who would be mentoring
undergraduate students. It became so popular that the information is now
available for free.
Revised
versions of Entering Mentoring and other resources can be found at these sites.
Evidence-based research on effective mentoring relationships by Christine Pfund and Michael Fleming
Having trouble with the mentoring resources link. Help!
ReplyDeleteThey work for me on my desktop. Are you using a phone to access them? Several are PDFs so that might be blocked on your browser?
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