Making Mentorship a Team Effort
The traditional mentor/mentee model needs an update; while one-on-one mentoring remains critical, mentees also need mentoring teams that evolve over time. To that end, mentees need three different types of teams which come into play at various career stages: the launch team, cruise team, and boost team. This article examines each.
Over the past decade, we have mentored hundreds of doctors in training, and learned lessons that apply to many settings. Key among these is that the traditional mentor/mentee model needs an update. While one-on-one mentoring remains critical, mentees also need mentoring teams that evolve over time. These types of teams were important in our own career journeys, and we’ve reworked the mentoring programs at our own institution to leverage them.
In our experience, mentees need three different types of teams which come into play at various career stages: the launch team, cruise team, and boost team. Let’s look at each.
The Launch Team
This team is the first and arguably most critical one for any mentee. Its goal is simple: help launch a mentee’s career by making sure that he or she meets short-term milestones. In academia, these milestones commonly include defining a niche or focus area, developing and attaining early metrics of success, and being socialized to an organization’s culture and norms. Launch teams meet at regular intervals (commonly every other month) and have limited life spans – often just two to three years.
These teams are led by a primary mentor who is the most responsible for overseeing a mentee’s success and growth. The rest of the launch team is hand-picked collaboratively by the mentee and primary mentor. Most launch teams consist of three to five people, each of whom brings unique perspective and skillsets to the table. In our Michigan Medicine programs, launch team members often include the primary mentor, a content expert in the mentee’s area of focus (such as clinical or basic scientific research), a technical guru, and a member who provides guidance on career strategy. Ideally, one member of the team comes from outside the mentee’s focus area or scientific discipline so as to nurture a broader perspective. We also try to assure that the gender and cultural mix on the team is a good match for the mentee, thus fostering an environment that the mentee is comfortable with and membership that can relate to and share a mentee’s personal experience.
Let’s illustrate how launch committees work by introducing a mentee (a surgeon we’ll call Cara). Cara’s launch team consisted of a primary research mentor, a senior surgeon from the same clinical discipline, a mid-career surgeon who had just received tenure as a health services researcher, and a physician from internal medicine who was a senior leader in the organization. The team consisted of a mix of men and women from different departments with expertise across clinical, research, and work-life balance. During Cara’s first meetings, an interest in pursuing health services and writing a career-development award (a grant that would support five years of Cara’s time) surfaced as a goal. Her team was well equipped to focus on this goal, as members had successfully prepared for and written similar grants. Other members facilitated her building a clinical practice and helped her find balance between work and family. Over the course of three years, Cara successfully published several articles in her area of interest. In her second year, Cara obtained a career development award. By the time she was in the third year of her launch, Cara was publishing, writing grants, and had built a clinical practice – her career was successfully launched.
The Cruise Team
Once a mentee is launched, he or she needs a maintenance – or cruise – team, whose goal it is to ensure that progress continues. Sometimes, the launch team has the right mix of expertise to serve in this capacity, shifting the nature of its work with the mentee while retaining its original members. But often the mentee’s needs in this phase are distinct enough from those during launch that they need new expertise on their team.
Because cruise teams come after launch and its attendant professional successes, they typically include more visible experts in the mentee’s field; people who can serve as sponsors to make a mentee more visible within an organization’s walls or across national and international boundaries. Cruise teams not only ensure that a mentee’s work becomes more widely recognized, they make sure that a mentee is on track for promotion (which may include tenure), grants or other requirements for expanding a robust career. In doing so, cruise teams safeguard the mentorship pipeline by transforming mentees into mentors that can join launch teams.
Consider how our mentee Cara’s team evolved as she moved from launch to cruise phase. Cara had an excellent group of advisors for launch, but she recognized she needed prominent experts outside her department to help her gain visibility and secure independent funding. She also wanted to focus more on healthcare spending and policy, a topic that none of her mentors were well versed in. Working with her primary mentor, Cara identified an expert from an on-campus institute who specialized in this area and had received substantial federal funding to evaluate the impact of policy changes at the state and national level. Her mentor reached out to the expert and asked if she would be willing to join Cara’s mentoring team. To make room for her new mentor, Cara thanked the internist who had served on her launch team for his counsel over the years and promised to remain in touch.
Over the course of a few years, Cara worked with her cruise team to submit two academic papers examining the effect of emerging payment policies on surgical outcomes and costs. She also submitted an independent grant to evaluate the effect of Medicaid expansion policies on bankruptcy among acutely injured patients. The newest member of her mentoring team – the institute director – recommended Cara for a talk at a national meeting and invited her to co-author an editorial in a high-impact journal related to her now more-refined research niche. Cara thus metamorphosed with the help of her new team to better defining her field of interest and increasing her national visibility. She was solidly in her cruise phase.
The Boost Team
Boost teams help further advance the mentee’s career and prevent it from plateauing. The work of a boost team is to define novel leadership or career goals and map out a trajectory for achieving them. For example, clinicians interested in moving into healthcare management or administration may seek out hospital chief executives or senior operating officers for their boost teams. Those interested in moving up the academic rungs may reach out to include former deans or current department chairs as part of their team. Many programs exist to support development of boost teams. For example, the Global Business School Network program aims to connect new and aspiring business school deans to others who are well-established in this role. In the Department of Surgery at Michigan Medicine, recently appointed Associate Professors (mid-career faculty) are offered boost teams to support their advancement towards longer-term career goals.
Boost teams differ from cruise and launch teams in several ways. First, they are often composed of connectors – senior individuals who can help mentees associate with leaders outside of their immediate social and professional networks. This is particularly important for helping the mentee find, or even create, roles that provide leadership opportunities. Second, unlike launch and cruise teams that seek mentors from within institutional boundaries, boost teams often include people from different institutions. Third, these teams encourage and, in fact, require openness to change, innovation, and risk-taking in mentees. Boost teams typically push mentees in ways that may be uncomfortable but are necessary for further advancement. In his book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” Marshall Goldsmith wrote: “All other things being equal, your people skills (or lack of them) become more pronounced the higher up you go.” Thus, members of the boost team hone people and leadership skills. Finally, while mentees have only one launch or cruise team, some need more than one boost team if they pursue a continuing professional evolution.
Returning to our mentee Cara, she is now a seasoned academic at the tail end of her cruise phase. She had received independent funding, has a track record of publishing impactful research, and has a national reputation in payment policies. While Cara enjoyed academic life, her interests began to shift from simply studying policy to creating it. With the help of her cruise team, Cara identified fellowships that would allow her to work alongside policymakers. She identified mentors and sponsors in the government and private sector and created a boost team with these new individuals. Even though her primary mentor’s work was now substantially different from hers, she recognized she needed continued strategic guidance and continued to work with him. She was now established in her own right and no longer needed a member of her department to be a voice of support. Rather, Cara asked if she could join a launch team herself – to pay forward what she had received over the years from the Department.
The three teams we have described above have helped us re-think what it means to mentor individuals across a continuum of growth. Whatever the stage of your professional journey, you will likely benefit from a team. Launch, cruise, and boost teams are three types that have helped us – and others – succeed in our career. We encourage you to build the appropriate one for yourself.
Vineet Chopra, MD, MSc is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Michigan Medicine. He co-directs The Patient Safety Enhancement Program at the Ann Arbor VA Medical Center. Follow him on Twitter @vineet_chopra
Justin B. Dimick MD, MPH is the Frederick A. Coller Distinguished Professor of Surgery at the University of Michigan, and Chair of the Department of Surgery at Michigan Medicine. Follow him on Twitter @jdimick1.
Sanjay Saint, MD, MPH is the George Dock Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, the Director of the VA/University of Michigan Patient Safety Enhancement Program and the Chief of Medicine at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. Follow him on Twitter @sanjaysaint.
Making Mentorship a Team Effort
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