Welcome everyone, I'm Joanne Kamens,
Executive Director of Addgene.
And today I'm going to be presenting
the Mentoring Master Class Part 2,
the Logistics of Forming your Own
Peer Mentoring Group.
I'm hoping that in part one
of this series,
I convinced you how great
and important it will
be for you to form
your first peer mentoring group,
or maybe it's not your first.
And now I'm gonna talk
about some of the best practices
and logistics for doing
that so that you have
a successful experience.
So the first step to getting
a peer mentoring group
is just assembling one.
Remember you wanna all
be getting together regularly.
So I recommend five or six
people is kind of the max
to make this work.
Could be a little smaller, little bigger.
The group can be all the same.
You could be all from one department
or all the same career stage,
maybe you're all third year scientists
or first-year postdocs
or just at your first new job.
Or it can be a difference of perspectives.
Some people who are in certain
types of roles
and some in others at different
stages of their careers.
There are different advantages
to each of those.
It's worth thinking about a little
bit what you want your group
to be based on the things
that you wanna accomplish.
Sometimes it's good to find
peers that share a similar
problem that they're trying to solve.
So the very first
Massachusetts Association for Women
in Science Mentoring Group
was as I recall,
five women who wanted to transition
from academia to industry
and their advisors were blocking them.
So they had a very,
very similar barrier,
advisors that wouldn't write
them recommendations or refuse
to support their exploration.
And all five of them ended
up with jobs in industry
and are now wildly successful
some 15 years later.
So that very first group
was a group formed to solve
a specific problem.
So assemble your list
and start making the asks,
be prepared to explain
the things I'm going to tell
you about logistics,
because people will wanna
know how much time
is it gonna be?
What are you asking of me?
And one thing I will mention
is that if you choose people
within your department
or your lab to do this,
confidentiality will be a little
bit different because
there will be, you might
not wanna cry in front
of those people.
You might not wanna
admit that you're struggling
with some thing.
Whereas if you have a group
of people who are perhaps distant,
we're really good
at zoom meetings now
you can have people
in other cities,
you can have people
in other countries.
If you wanna form a virtual group
video wise and do it through
a virtual peer mentoring,
then you may be able
to get people from very,
very different places,
which will allow you an added
level of confidentiality
to your discussions.
There are benefits
to both approaches.
So okay. You have your committed people,
maybe you have at least
four to get started
and you can add a few
as you're going along the way
get yourselves organized.
How are you going to meet?
I look forward to the day
when I meet in person
with my mentoring groups,
but I will tell
you that I'm mentoring a MASS
AWIS group this year.
I am working on their Healthcare
Business Women's Association Program.
They are entirely virtual
and they have been very successful.
It's actually something that seems
to work on video
with the same people
over and over again.
You get used to each other's
video quirks and the longer
the group meets the better
the meetings get even virtually.
So, oh we all look forward
to having a martini someday
together in a bar.
But my groups that are meeting
virtually are actually
doing quite well so, okay.
Decide what your rules
are gonna be about meeting.
You wanna commit
to a meeting schedule.
Most of the groups
I'm involved in meet monthly.
That may be not enough for you.
If you're meeting virtually
for an hour, you might
be able to do it twice
a month at lunch,
or when is that gonna be?
What is it gonna look like?
Most groups, most programs
have a scheduled eight months
or a year that you're committing
kind of committing to the group.
I will tell you that about
half of the groups
that I'm involved in continue
to meet indefinitely,
maybe not every month,
but irregularly because
they just want to.
Actually, one of the first places
I heard about peer mentoring
was in a book called
Every Other Thursday
by Ellen Daniell.
Which is a group
of women in California,
group of women scientists
who met every other Thursday
for 18 years or more,
probably more at this point
when the book was written
just to support one another
through all of their career changes.
And there are huge benefits
that I read about in that book
is one of the things that really
turned me on to this model.
So okay. But that's a lifelong commitment.
That sounds a little scary.
So stick with the eight months
and get people interested enough
to that one part of the commitment.
So you really wanna talk
with the group about really
committing to making the meetings.
It's the success of mentoring groups
is directly correlated
and I mean scientifically
because we have a lot
of data on this, directly
correlated to actually meeting.
Almost no other criteria is important.
Who's in the group,
what they talk about,
none of those things matter,
what matters is that they actually
get together every month,
so that by month four,
they know one another
and they can start even
doing better work
and supporting one another even better.
So I'm not talking about
if you have a health emergency,
or I actually had one mentoring
group where our second meeting
was disrupted because one
woman had an early delivery
of her baby.
Okay. We don't kick people
out of the group for those things.
We adjust but we try really
hard to have the meetings
on the schedule day.
If one person can't make
it meet anyway.
Power through, keep going.
So you also wanna decide
how you wanna communicate
again, we've gotten so good
at remote communication.
There's so many great tools.
I have a WhatsApp group
with my current group.
We have Google docs that we share,
and we'll talk more
about content later.
We put our agendas
and we have folders of content
and things to read.
All of those things can help
you just have to decide
what the rules are.
If we email one another,
how long should
it take before we respond?
It's really important
that you kind of set
these ground rules,
write them down,
put them in that Google doc.
And so that everybody knows
what they're committing
to and you can pressure
one another to do it well.
Some groups actually
have a signed commitment
in some programs I've been in.
They make a document
where they actually create
a mentoring contract
if you will.
If that seems like
it's gonna work
for you I can provide
you a template
that's a great idea,
but even just saying
it out loud,
what you all agree
to is probably enough
and recording the rules
and the norms of the group.
So then you wanna plan
for success because as I mentioned,
chances are, this is gonna be successful,
is a very high rate of success
if everyone meets those
first two criteria,
they're interested and they're willing
to commit some time.
So what I think really works
best is that each meeting
has one leader and maybe
not the first meeting
or the second,
but then you assign a leader
for each meeting
who's responsible for the topic
for the discussion,
maybe provides reading material
or other exercises to be done.
And kind of not just everyone
to remember them to show
up and prepare.
Rotating that responsibility,
it's a leadership management
type role, it's practice
in that job
is another benefit
of the mentoring team.
Usually in the first meeting
or pre meeting the group
will discuss their general
areas of interest and figure
out what they wanna cover.
One way to do that is to have everyone
bring three topics
that they're interested in.
And you can see
if there's commonality
or you can have a vote
or some topics are so popular
that there's clearly
the first ones to start with.
And some topics may take
more than one meeting.
It's your journey to design,
but I definitely recommend
that you design it with some
structure as opposed to just
getting together and having beers
even virtually, you can do
that with your anybody.
That's not what the peer
mentoring group is for.
You really wanna use
the group to drive change.
I always recommend that mentoring
groups work with agendas,
a little bit of a structure
maybe they start every meeting
with a half an hour
of catch-up get that out
of the way over the first drink.
But then dive into content
that's been prearranged
and even curricula.
So I actually have a associated
with my LinkedIn profile.
I can also send you example
curricula that you can use
for your group that choose
your topics and set that up
so that you have it really
kind of hardwired.
Of course, you can change
it as you go along
if things come up
and things happen,
but setting a planned agenda
for your meetings can really
help drive learning
and knowledge and just,
doing things more productively
as it were.
Maybe you wanna write development
plans together over many months
setting concrete goals
and tracking each other's progress.
Maybe you wanna practice speaking,
scientists very rarely
get enough practice speaking.
I do this once
or twice a week.
So I get a lot of practice.
It makes it much easier
for me to speak.
If you are doing a job talk,
that's the first time
you've ever given that talk
I guarantee you it's going
to be much harder
than if you've had at least
even a few run throughs
with your mentoring group.
Maybe you wanna go to a seminar
together virtually or in real life,
someday, debrief on the topic
or watch a scientific talk
and debrief on what went well
and what didn't go well,
maybe why it was such
a bad talk.
That can be fun as well.
Maybe you wanna invite guests.
People have more experience
in a topic that you're interested in.
They can be mentors
for a minute or for an hour
and enjoying your group
in that way
and change things
up a little bit.
Go to a networking event together,
have a competition.
Who's the fastest person
who can get a new
acquaintance that they wanna
have coffee with at that meeting.
Whatever I'm sure you can think
of many fun things to do.
So consider this especially
after yours group has met
for a few times
and is well-formed
and well on its path.
In the third part
of this series,
I'll talk a lot
about how to use content,
to set goals and reach goals.
And that's really
what you wanna do.
You wanna change something
during this year.
You wanna make a move.
And so just sitting around
complaining about how bad
things are today
is not gonna get you there.
You wanna do some learning
and teaching of one another
and experiment with the process
have fun with it.
This really can be
a really fun experience.
The last step
is really to celebrate.
So hopefully during your journey
in a year,
you will have many successes along,
I'm sure with struggles
and you wanna celebrate
those things together
and whatever works
for your group chocolate, wine
I don't know
what it is, but there will
be something that you will all
be excited about maybe virtually,
or maybe in person.
And stay in touch
because whether or not you keep
meeting regularly as a mentoring group,
these certainly will be part
of your network for years to come.
And the peers that you have now
will be your boss,
or you will be their boss someday.
I can tell you that's actually
happened to me.
So stay in touch with people
and use these relationships
for people that know
you and that now you can trust
in the way that they're meant
to enrich your career
and your journey
and your learning.
So thank you so much
for joining us for part two
of the Peer Mentoring Master Class.
And I look forward
to having you join
me for part three,
where we talk about
more mentoring best practices.