Mentorship

Posted by Penny Maher

For our November event, we got together to learn about what mentorship is before hearing from our speaker Dr. Rachel McInnes about her experiences with mentorship, followed by Q&A and participants sharing their experiences. Rachel is a Co-Director of the Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence (JCEEI) between the University of Exeter and the Met Office.

Mentorship is considered a learning relationship which involves the sharing of skills, knowledge and experience. The mentor uses their experience to offer guidance and support to the mentee, for example regarding career development. There are different types of mentorship including 1:1 mentoring, group mentorship, peer mentorship and reverse mentorship. 1:1 mentoring is considered the traditional approach where a senior mentor supports a junior mentee, whereas reverse mentoring typically involves a senior mentee learning from a junior mentor about their experiences in the workplace. Mentoring and coaching are considered different practices, but there is a lot of overlap between the two and they are not clearly defined. We learned that coaching can sometimes be focussed on the development of certain skills and can be more driven by the coach using approaches that can be more standardised, whereas mentorship is personalised and tends to be driven more by the mentee. Mentorship can be accessed in various ways including formal/informal mentoring schemes (e.g. at the workplace or organised by a line manager), ADHOC matching where individuals seek short-term advice when needed, or an individual might proactively find their own mentor by asking someone they feel comfortable with to become their mentor.

In the open discussion, we heard from Dr. Rachel McInnes and other participants that they have generally had very positive experiences with mentorship, both as a mentor and a mentee, and that the relationship is often reciprocal (i.e. both the mentor and mentee benefit). We also heard that it makes sense to choose a mentor that you are comfortable with and who has enough understanding of the issues you might be facing in your career to be able to offer support and advice. However, depending on the mentorship you are seeking, it might also be beneficial to have a mentor that is in a different field for a bit of a different perspective, and it can be helpful for an individual to have several mentors (at the same time) for different aspects of their career. There is no need for an individual to wait until an issue arises before approaching a prospective mentor, but it can be helpful (to both the mentor and mentee) if the mentee has a rough idea of what they would like mentoring on.

In the meeting, the Women in Climate committee also proposed to carry out a group-mentorship trial in the new year. The idea is to provide a platform for knowledge exchange and discussions about career development, with approx. 3 – 5 mentees per senior scientist as mentor, meeting monthly for 3-6 months (although groups are welcome to continue meeting after the trial finishes). The WiC committee will assist with assigning the groups based on mentees’ and mentors’ preferences, with the potential to form groups that span both organisations.