Optimizing the Practice of Mentoring

Not Following Advice

Challenge:

Your mentee seems to be ignoring your suggestions (e.g., for advancing the research project, preparing for next career steps).

Self Reflection:

  1. What am I feeling?
    • I don’t want to waste time with a mentee who doesn’t listen.
    • I think I know what’s best in this situation.
    • I’m frustrated that my mentee is so stubborn and not willing to follow my recommended approach.
  2. What do I need to learn about my mentee’s perspective?
    • Maybe my advice was unclear or misunderstood.
    • My mentee may have a good reason for not taking my suggestions.
    • Maybe my mentee did take my advice, but got a different result than I predicted.
  3. What outcome(s) do I want?
    • I’m eager to know whether my advice was helpful.
    • I want the time I spend with this mentee to be worthwhile, and vice versa.
    • I want my mentee to benefit from my experience and insight, but still feel independent.

Conversation Openers:

  • When we last met, I suggested you work on completing these new analyses of your data. But it looks like you’ve moved in another direction. Can you tell me about this? What was your thought process in making this decision?
  • I know where you are coming from. When I first started working in the laboratory, I liked to independently complete a lot of experiments, but then I realized there was a lot benefit in getting advice from my mentor and refining my ideas first.

Tips and Tools:

  • Offer a couple of alternatives when giving advice, and let your mentee choose the approach that best fits his or her needs.
  • Keep a shared, written log of your meetings — ideas discussed, actions items agreed to, etc. Ideally have your mentee draft the log and send it to you soon after each meeting.
  • If you’re worried that your mentee is getting off track, have a conversation to explore how well their current activities are aligned with their research goals or training objectives.
  • Be willing to let your mentee learn from mistakes.
  • Recall your early developmental stages as a scientist and how you felt when given advice that you didn’t always agree with.
  • Ask your mentees whether your advice was helpful – and graciously accept when it was not!