Mentoring partnerships - the same but different

Last week I participated in a mentoring briefing session for our Early Career Academics’ Mentoring Scheme, which we run cross-institutionally with the University of Dundee.

This year our mentor pool has been under pressure from REF, retirements and relocations – resulting in a reduction in the number of available mentors. As the number of researchers looking for mentors has remained at around the same level as last year, this leaves us struggling to make suitable matches and the 2012-13 cycle is therefore getting off to a slow start.

Once of the effects of this is that our scheduled briefing sessions have had much smaller numbers of participants than in the past. The session I attended last week, for example had just 5 participants, compared to the 15 or so attending each of our sessions last year.

Nevertheless it was a great session. As is usual with these sessions, we had invited existing mentors and mentees along to talk about their experience with mentoring, address any concerns and answer any questions from the new participants joining the scheme.

On this occasion we had two mentors attending. On the face of it they had a lot in common, both being from the same institution and the same school. However, everything else about their respective mentoring experiences was different.

One of the pair, Linda, had quite a formal arrangement with her mentor. Meetings were planned and scheduled in advance. They always took place in her mentor’s office. They ran strictly to time. An agenda was agreed in advance of each meeting, and a set of summary notes exchanged afterwards. Very organised. And very successful. Outcomes included collaborative working, grant funding and joint supervision of PhD students.

The other mentee, Oliver, approached things with his mentor differently. Meetings were set up when Oliver felt he needed one. They always met in a café. No agenda was agreed and Oliver decided what he wanted to discuss and announced this at the start of each meeting. No notes or minutes were made. Very informal. Also, very successful.

Both of them were so pleased with the experience that when we asked for volunteers to talk at the briefing session they both said they felt it was something they must do, and they really communicated their enthusiasm for the scheme.

The theme of mentoring being a flexible and adaptive relationship, based around the needs of the mentee was reinforced by the mentor  in attendance – a very senior academic and an experienced mentor. He talked about the half-dozen or so mentees he had supported, and how each one of them was different in terms of their objectives, the kind of support they were looking for and the nature of the mentoring relationship that developed.

Although successful mentoring does respect some fundamental features, mentoring is not a prescriptive process based on a set of rigid principles, and the experiences expressed at the briefing session last week was a powerful demonstration of how varied  different mentoring partnerships can be and yet how well mentoring can work.

If I wasn't already convinced, I am now...

Over the last couple of months, in the middle of our project to identify ways to make more effective use of ICT in mentoring, we have entered the new cycle of our mentoring scheme for early career academics. All summer we have been promoting the scheme and recruiting new members. The forms have been drifting in and we have been trying our best to match mentors and mentees. How am I doing this? With a spread sheet and a file full of pieces of paper.

I have one tabbed session for unmatched mentees. When I propose a match I move the piece of paper into the tabbed section labelled ‘Provisional match’. If the match is declined I move the piece of paper back to the ‘unmatched ‘section. If it is accepted I move it to the section labelled ‘Match Accepted’. I can then send out formal matching letters and move the piece of paper to the ‘Formally Matched’ section of the file.

So I am still, despite all our efforts over the summer, in the ‘Paper Age’. However, it is a simple and adaptable system and it works.  Up to a point. I have to make handwritten notes all over the sheets so I know when I did what, what the exact circumstances are and the current status of each applicant. This gets out of hand quite quickly, so I also have a spread sheet to keep track of the historical narrative for each applicant. And pretty soon the spread sheet will get out of hand again as well, and then I will be right back where I started from – I NEED A DATABASE!

Fortunately our ‘proof of concept’ database has now been developed into a working model and is at the stage where we can see how well it works in practice. We are now using this bespoke system to capture data on new applicants for the institutional Support Staff Mentoring Scheme, and with a few more tweaks and some data entry, we can migrate the current data for the Early Career Academics’ Mentoring Scheme from analogue to digital.

We have been communicating our experience of mentoring with colleagues across the sector, both in Scotland and more widely (including a workshop session at the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in September), and have been sharing our belief in the need to develop more effective ways of using ICT in mentoring. Along with our other messages about effective mentoring schemes, we have shown our working model database to several HE organisational, staff and researcher development groups both in Scotland and England. So far it has had a very warm reception, with lots of positive feedback and interest.

More on this and other matters soon....

The Devil resides exactly where everyone always says it does....

The summer has seen a combination of inactivity in some aspects of the project and great advances in others.

On the whole the project is producing a lot of valuable insights and helping us to understand a lot more about how we can use ICT to support mentoring schemes in a way that will be more efficient and economical for scheme coordinators and more effective for participants and their employing organisations.

In the process I would say that we are also learning a lot, generally, about how non-IT professionals (i.e. us) can define their own needs in terms of the IT tools that they want to support them and their work.

For example, if you run a mentoring or coaching scheme, you probably think you can quite quickly and easily define the scheme’s work flows and processes – and in general terms you probably can – well enough to explain it to someone else so that they could pretty much replicate your own scheme.

However, no matter how simple the design of your scheme, there will be many marginal complexities that you are not even aware of. The human brain is flexible and quick enough to respond to changing circumstances and adapt to the unexpected. Information Technology, on the other hand, is only as flexible and adaptable as you make it – and the more flexible you want it to be (the wider the range of possible circumstances and variables you want it to accommodate), the more complex it is to create, maintain and update.

So let’s say you examine the work processes in your mentoring scheme and come to the conclusion that a database would really help you manage the data and create administrative efficiencies. Then you set out how your scheme works and what you want the database to do. Easy so far. Then you realise that there is a remote possibility that someone from another institution might participate in your scheme, or that someone could be a mentor and mentee at the same time, that someone could mentor more than one mentee, or that a mentee could have more than one mentor, or that a mentoring partnership could be terminated and then reform, or that a mentee might later become a mentor, or that a mentor might leave the scheme and then re-join it later or that any of hundreds of other possibilities.

Here’s another question to consider before you make any decisions: do you think you may actually need to run more than one scheme at the same time in parallel – perhaps for different staff groups? And who will have access to the data and will you need to create different levels of access for different users, with the attendant issues around security.

….and if someone else is going to use your database, will they want to use the same terminology as you? Might they want to manage things differently than the way you have structured your database dictates?

How many of these eventualities do you want the database to accommodate? Where will the parameters of your system be? Where will you draw the line between the system adapting to differnt circumstances and requiring to user to adapt to the system?

All of this is no doubt part of the sum experience of IT systems analysts, project managers and developers. But despite the clear common sense of mapping business processes and defining work flows, non-IT professionals still do not have enough EXPERIENCE of having done this (or training) to realise how important it is to explore every eventuality of how the processes might work – even in the most unlikely, but still possible, circumstances.

The old maxim ‘the devil is in the detail’ certainly holds true here.

I suppose that is exactly why we have IT professionals to help the rest of us get to grips with these issues. Unfortunately there is often a chasm of mutual incomprehension between the owners of business processes and the IT professionals, and where the resources for IT support are restricted (which is everywhere and all the time), this leaves us underskilled and unequipped to get the best out of information and communication technology. Inevitably it it the BIG business processes that get all the attention, and all the little business processes have to make-and-mend with spreadsheets and bits of paper.

 

Matching mentoring partners - how difficult is it?

In this post I want to talk a little about the process for matching mentors and mentees to create effective mentoring partnerships.

When I first took over our mentoring scheme for early career academics I inherited quite a simple process for creating provisional matches, based on a limited set of 'core' criteria. These include which institution they would prefer their partner to be from (in our cross-institutional scheme), preferred gender of their mentoring partner and discipline (broadly grouped into four categories). By applying these core criteria to each mentee we are able to eliminate the unsuitable mentors, leaving us with a shortlist of potential, available mentors. The selection from this point is based on a less scientific process of looking at the statements of the mentors and mentees about why they wanted to join the scheme and what they hoped to gain from it, and by looking in more detail at their expressed research interests. From this we are able, in most cases, to identify what looks like a suitable match. In some cases our knowledge of the individuals concerned enables us to make a judgement about the likely 'chemistry' between the provisionally matched partners.

Once we have identified provisional matches, we then offer this match to the mentee, providing all the relevant information, including links to webpages so that the mentee can learn about the mentor's research profile.

If this provisional match is accepted by the mentee we then send out 'official' matching letters to both parties and the mentoring relationship can begin.

Our investigations seem to indicate that at least some other mentoring schemes put a great deal more time and effort into the matching process than we do. However they are doing so for far fewer participants overall, which would be impractical with a scheme involving upwards of 100 participants (in our case).

The evidence from our own experience is also that with the matching process described above, we ARE able, in most cases, to create effective and successful mentoring relationships. Our view, and this is born out by the outcomes and formal evaluations of the scheme, is that:

1. All the participants are taking part because they want to, and this creates an immediate motivation for the participants to make the mentoring relationship work

2. All the participants are mature adults, and therefore able to behave in a rational and pragmatic way. They are thus able to ensure that, regardless of the 'chemistry' between the partners, they are able to use the mentoring process to achieve some of their objectives and derive some benefit from it

3. Every mentoring relationship will be different - some will be more formal and distant, some will be very warm and informal. It is not the job of the scheme coordinators to exclusively aim to achieve the latter. Almost all relationships will work on some level, and it is the role of the scheme coordinators to find suitable matches for as many mentees as possible, consistent with the 'core' criteria. If participants love their mentoring partner and tell us that it is "the best match ever!" (as they sometimes do), then that is great and very gratifying to hear, but it is a bonus. From our point of view, we just need to know that the mentoring partnership is working and delivering some benefit.

We encourage matched mentoring partners to meet and see how things go. We are very happy to re-match if the mentee doesn’t feel that they will be able to achieve their objectives with their current mentor and there is no stigma attached to that for either participant. Having said that, once the match has been accepted by the mentee, this is not something that happens often.

In an effort to continue looking for ways to make the scheme as effective as possible we have reviewed the 'core' matching criteria. As a result of this we do now ask applicants for more information about themselves and their preferences, but these are largely 'soft' preferences

which inform the more discursive element of the matching process, rather than 'hard' preferences which produce the shortlist of potential mentors.

We are now in the process, with the help of Jordan and Andrew (see previous posts) of creating a database which will use the hard preferences to automatically generate a shortlist of suitable and available mentors, and which will present all the other relevant information to help the scheme coordinators to make a decision. Will this work? We certainly hope so, but looking at progress so far, we are certain that it will make the job of matching mentoring partners a lot quicker and easier - especially when there are 100 or so participants to match!

Forging ahead

Andrew and Jordan have made an impressive start to their summer internship. After only a week they have settled in really well and are already making a mark. So far they have held meetings with existing mentors on our scheme. These have yielded some intersting insights and helped to give them a good grasp of how the scheme works and the benefits of mentoring for early career researchers.

Jordan and Andrew are busy reviewing and evaluating a range of JISC resources, to establish what lessons we can learn that may help our project to achieve its objectives, and what tools we might be able to adopt during the project.

We have also managed to put in some intensive workshop time to analyse the data management requirements for our mentoring scheme and to draw up specifications for a database. This will be used to evaluate the proprietary solutions that may already be in the market. It will also be used to produce a model database 'as proof of concept' that we can make more effective use of ICT within our existing mentoring scheme.

Excellent start Jordan and Andrew - keep up the good work.

Progress at last

So far our project to look at ways to make more effective use of ICT to support mentoring schemes has been way behind our project plan timeline. From today, however, things will be different!

I am please to welcome two key players onto the project team - Jordan Greenaway and Andrew Wilkinson. Jordan and Andrew joined CAPOD today, and will both be here for the summer on an 8-week internship.

During the internship they will be helping us to evaluate exising resources that may contribute to achieving our project goals. They will also be exploring a range of possible solutions designed to help us create more efficient and effective mentoring programmes through better data management and resources to support participants.

Now that Jordan and Andrew are on board, we have a revised timeline and aim to deliver our final conclusions by the middle of September.

So, welcome to Jordan and Andrew! Best of luck with the internship and we hope you enjoy your summer here with CAPOD.

Some more about our mentoring enhancement project

In my last post I introduced the University of St Andrews’ Early Career Academic Mentoring Scheme, which we run with the University of Dundee, and I promised to talk a bit more about our ‘mentoring enhancement project’ and what we hope to achieve.

The idea is that this project, which will take place over the summer months, will explore ways in which we can make better use of ICT to create greater efficiency and effectiveness in our Early Career Academic Mentoring Scheme. But what exactly is the problem that we are setting out to solve?

Our cross-institutional mentoring scheme for early career academics has proved to be a successful way to support post-doctoral researchers, helping them to react to changes in the research environment, raise their research profiles, access new funding streams, build their institutional knowledge and develop networks. It is also an effective way to develop leadership, coaching and mentoring skills within the more senior academic cohort.

As a strongly research-focussed institution it is important that post-doctoral researchers receive this kind of support, that the necessary skills are propagated within the organisation and that we continue to build a culture of developing and supporting talented researchers.

However, with each successive cycle of the scheme, the cumulative amount of data on participants and mentoring partnerships increases. During the last cycle the scheme also saw growth of 60% in participant numbers, reflecting the increasing level of support required in the changing research environment. This resulted in strains on the systems, processes and resources associated with the scheme and poses a number of challenges. These can be summed up with the following question: with the same (or lower) resource input, how can we more efficiently administer a mentoring scheme, which is more effective in achieving its desired outcomes (i.e. delivers greater ‘added value’) and which has the capacity to grow in size?

We need to meet these challenges and this is the problem that must be addressed.

The project will therefore seek to provide the means to achieve:

• A fit-for-purpose mentoring scheme with the improved systems and digital resources.
• A more efficient mentoring scheme, where the processes are mapped out and streamlined to address any existing problems and weaknesses
• A mentoring scheme with the capacity to handle a greater number of participants, larger amounts of data and higher activity levels. An increase to 50 live mentoring pairs during each future cycle, for example, is quite realistic.
• Outcomes that can be applied to other non-academic mentoring schemes within the University of St Andrews, and that could also be shared with other institutions across the sector.

In order to address these goals the project will focus on two main areas:

1. Better data management and administrative processes

The project will investigate lessons that can be learned around data management, designing databases, mapping business processes as well as evaluating the proprietary database products currently available. Ultimately this strand of the project will deliver, in one form or another, a ‘proof of concept’ for a mentoring scheme database/management system.

2. Better support for mentoring scheme participants (and prospective participants)

The project will explore the concept of creating an online ‘mentoring centre’ that will bring

together a wide range of learning resources and tools in a variety of formats, that will

support the development of mentoring skills and which will be accessible via a single ‘virtual’

location. Part of this strand will revolve around investigating and evaluating open

educational resources and other learning materials which could be included, and a

further aspect will be to look at developing a ‘proof of concept’ for a site where all these

resources and tools could be hosted.

In future posts I will provide regular updates on the progress of the project, but I will also provide more information about our mentoring schemes, about some of the lessons we have learned and about the benefits that mentoring schemes can deliver.

Welcome to 'Making mentoring better'

Hi and welcome to this new blog which will provide periodic updates on the progress of our mentoring enhancement project. In this first post I want to provide a little context about what we do here at the University of St Andrews and why we are so keen to put some time and effort into trying to make mentoring better. In later posts I will explain more about how our mentoring schemes work, what the benefits are, the lessons we have already learned about setting up and running mentoring schemes and of course, about how our project to make mentoring better is going.

So, to business. For the last four years we have been running a cross-institutional mentoring scheme which we run collaboratively with the University of Dundee. This scheme, the 'Early Career Academics Mentoring Scheme' is aimed at supporting the professional and career development of research staff and academics. Originally this scheme was run as a pilot for female academics only, as the higher up you look in the academic hierarchy, the fewer women you will find. The pilot was judged to have been successful, but there was demand from academics across the board, so in the following cycle the scheme was opened to all academics and research staff - male and female.

Because our scheme originated as a way to support career development for female academics, it was recently used as a case study by the Equalities Exchange Unit and has been included in their report 'Mentoring - progressing womens' careers in Higher Education'.

The scheme in its current form is now in its fourth cycle and soon to enter its fifth. In the current cycle we have seen a 60% increase in the number of participants, and at the same time we are trying to be more proactive about monitoring progress of mentoring partnerships and in supporting mentors and mentees. This has put a strain on the scheme, generating a lot more data and requiring more resources. In the long run this will be hard to sustain, so we need to find ways to create greater capability in our mentoring schemes, so that we can provide better support, to more participants without using a lot more resources. In particular we want to look at ways to improve data management, so that data handling is easier and more accurate and so that we can automate some of the administrative processes around our mentoring schemes. We also want to look at creating an online mentoring centre, where we can bring together a range of materials, tools and resources which will make it easier for people to find out about mentoring, join mentoring schemes and get ongoing support once they are participating - either as a mentor or mentee.

In my next post I will talk in a bit more detail about the objectives of our enhancment project and the benefits we hope to achieve.