Welcome everyone, I'm very delighted to be here today,
kicking off the first iBiology Mentoring Masterclass.
I'm gonna talk today about one of my very favorite subtopics
of mentoring which is peer mentoring groups.
This is the first of a three part series.
The first part is going to be
about what is a peer mentoring group
and a little bit about why mentoring is fantastic
even if you don't think that yet.
The second part will be more about the logistics
of forming an actual peer mentoring group,
and finally some mentoring general best practices
that will help you
in all of your mentoring relationships,
groups or one-on-one mentoring.
What is mentoring?
Really people think about this
as some sort of loaded relationship,
comes from Greek mythology, a lifelong teacher.
In fact, I saw a Nobel Prize winner say
that a mentor was always someone
who was in your life forever.
(thunder rumbling) Forever
And that's just really not the case.
You can have a mentor for a minute.
You can have a mentor for a week
and you can have a mentor for a really long time,
but it's not even always a formal relationship.
Anyone who's teaching you
perhaps a long-term technical skill or shares advice
or even inspires you could be a mentor.
Mentors are not there to solve specific problems.
They're really there to help ask questions
and to help you work through making difficult decisions.
It doesn't have to be something big and loaded
and mentors may come in and out of your life.
And you may be lucky enough to find a mentor
that does stay with you for a long time
and serves as a mentor.
And that's great.
That should happen naturally though.
It's not the kind of thing
that you should expect or push for
if it doesn't come naturally.
So, mentoring really solves the purpose
of helping you navigate change.
And we have so much change in our lives.
If you look at your career path,
every time you make a transition,
every time you're promoted,
every time you wanna be promoted,
every time your life situation changes,
maybe you have to change your geography.
All those changes are really stressful.
And so mentors really help you work through that stress,
think about the choices that you make,
not that any choices necessarily right or wrong,
but maybe make the right choice at the time
and help you work through all those different changes.
So the more mentors you have in your life, the better,
because change is gonna happen
and different types of change
will need different types of support.
Organizations that have a lot of mentoring and teaching
also really benefit from it.
And I mentioned this because I'd like you
to think about your own organization
and perhaps how you can bring more of a mentoring culture
to your group, your department, your lab,
wherever it is that you are working.
One thing that's really been shown
is that mentoring cultures improve communication.
Communication is so hard.
When people have a culture of mentoring,
that is people are mentoring one another,
formally and informally, communication is just better.
People are learning and sharing and teaching
in a just more lifely, more beneficial fashion.
And so communication is the number one problem
as companies grow, as organizations grow, even among labs,
almost every thing that goes wrong
at my job has to do with a miscommunication every time.
So strengthening mentoring ties,
having everybody teaching all the time
is gonna make communication better across the board.
In addition, people like to learn and grow,
scientists by their very nature in particular,
that's kind of my definition of a scientist,
it's people who are learning stuff all the time.
That's what we learn how to do.
We learn how to learn stuff.
And so when we're learning and we're changing and growing,
that's when we're happy.
And mentoring cultures are always
about learning and changing and growing and developing.
And so if you wanna be in an organization
that really retains its employees
and that has great innovation and productivity,
look for cultures where mentoring is strong,
where people are teaching one another
and there are many mentoring relationships.
And finally, this talk is not about diversity,
but anyone who's ever seen me speak
knows that that's another topic
that's very important to me.
And the reason I got started working on mentoring programs
way back when with the MASS Association for Women in Science
is that mentoring was shown to be the one thing
that could actually move the needle for inclusion,
that having strong mentoring networks
within an organization helped underrepresented groups
and women move more smoothly
into leadership roles and advance in their careers.
So there aren't that many tactics
that actually do increase inclusion.
So this is a really important one to look for
in your organization and in the organizations
that you choose.
So, as I mentioned, you don't just have one mentor.
When I was applying for my job at Addgene,
I had to review the balance sheet
with the founding CFO of the company.
And I had never looked at a balance sheet in my life.
And I called out to all of my mentors in particular,
my fantastic sister-in-law who sat me down
and walked me through that thing line by line
and made sure that I understood what every line meant.
That was an important mentoring experience in my life.
And she is just one of the many mentors
that I call on when I need to learn something new
or perhaps even just need a pep talk.
Mentors also serve as cheerleaders
and they can help you get through a really rough time.
So you are forming your posse now.
And one of the great reasons to think about peer mentors
is that these people can be your mentors
for a long time and they know you well
and they're going to be able to provide
really good mentoring for you as you go
through your lives in your careers together.
As much as I love one-on-one mentoring when it works,
it pretty much is very hard to do it in an unnatural way.
So formal mentoring programs are often ask you
to be matched one-on-one with a mentor.
And unfortunately, this process is a lot like dating
which has a lot of mismatch failure.
So if you've ever been set up on a date by an aunt
or a relative, or even a friend, it doesn't hit that often,
same thing with one-on-one mentoring.
It is almost impossible to match two people
and get that spark that makes them wanna work together
for a long time.
It's a two-way thing.
It's not anybody's fault.
What happens in the group is somehow
the group works together and in 95% of the groups
that I've been involved in and that is hundreds,
somehow the group manages to find a way to work together
and be a positive experience for one another.
There's a dynamic change there
in a group mentoring situation.
So, if you're looking for a situation
that's going to have a positive outcome,
seeking group mentoring is a fantastic way to get started.
There are a lot of other reasons
why group mentoring is great.
You get to be a mentor and a mentee at the same time.
It's great leadership training.
It's great management training
and you get a lot more advice.
There's nothing like brainstorming with six or seven people
about what your next step should be in a development plan
as opposed to one person, you're just going
to get more ideas and more perspectives.
So group mentoring really works.
I'm an enormous proponent
for formal and informal group mentoring.
So one of the best ways to learn to be a good mentee,
and we'll talk about what that is, is to be a mentor.
And so in a peer mentoring group or a mentoring group,
you also get to sometimes mentor
when one of the other people needs
that cheerleading support, advice, those great questions,
you can do that and practice doing that.
It's gonna make you a better manager.
It's gonna better make you a better person working
with your colleagues for the future.
So, there are so many benefits to group mentoring
that really it stands far and above as a model
for what you wanna do in seeking mentors.
So what do I mean by being a good mentee?
I think the important thing
about being a good mentee is being willing to take advice.
It's pretty simple.
If you're not willing to hear the advice
and the feedback and the suggestions from the people
in your group, then you're really not ready to be mentored.
And so they're not gonna be satisfied
and you're not gonna be satisfied by that experience.
So the bottom line of being a good mentee
is being ready to take suggestions
and at least think about
if those suggestions are worth implementing
in your experience and in your next practice.
And that's really all it takes to be a good mentee.
When it comes to a mentoring group,
the other part needs to be
that you are engaged in the group.
So, if six people are being mentored together,
then you all need to be engaged
and make a commitment to the group to be involved.
So, two things to being a good mentee in a group,
listening and being ready to consider the advice
that is offered and engage because the more you engage
the more you're going to get out of the experience.
You know can be the really awesome mentors,
is your peers, not someone older than you
not someone more experienced, not someone more important,
whatever that means, but just the people around you,
they get you, they know what you're going through.
They know the stress that you're having
and they completely understand the situations
that you're going to be describing to the team.
So, if your first group mentoring experience
is with your peers and there isn't even a senior mentor
in that group, it doesn't matter.
There is plenty of content
and knowledge that you guys can work on
as a group together, and the group
can bond over their learning and teach one another.
So, if you don't have a great mentor as a lab head,
as a lifelong mentor that you've found in your networking,
if you don't have one of those,
it's a great time for you to think
about forming your first peer mentoring circle.
And in addition, speaking from the iBiology platform,
there's a newly launched program through iBiology
of these courses and forming a peer mentoring group
to take these courses together is going
to add enormous value to the experience.
And later on, in some of the other talks,
we'll talk more about how using content
can make a peer mentoring group
really successful and sore
and get the most of the experience.
So, really consider this,
it's a pretty easy thing to set up,
and I'm sure that you will find other people
who are wanting to go on this trip journey with you.
So why does peer mentoring work so well?
Well, the secret sauce of mentoring
is not even so much the advice and you know,
a little bit it's the questions, and a little bit
it's the discussion
but the secret sauce of mentoring is the accountability.
If you have a few other people are saying to you,
hey, Joanne, you said you were gonna
do three informational interviews last month,
how come that didn't happen?
Well, you're gonna get that thing done.
Having accountability for our personal goals,
not just our technical goals and writing papers
and the things that were in academia
perhaps that we are being forced to do,
or our deliverables in our job, those things we have to do
and people are making us do them for our jobs.
What mentoring brings is the accountability
for our own personal growth and development
and peers are great at helping with that.
If I did not have in the before times, before COVID,
four women at the gym who would text me
if I didn't show up every morning at 5:30,
there are a lot of days I would have rolled over
and turned off the alarm.
But knowing that those texts were gonna come
really brought me the accountability
to be a much more regular person at the gym exercising.
And so look for that accountability,
it's going to help you be more accomplished.
So thanks for joining us for this first part
of the Peer Mentoring Masterclass.
I hope you will join us for the rest of the series.