Our Approach

We took on a team mentoring approach to facilitate change in our scientific environment.

 

Team mentoring has many benefits, such as:

  • Affording an organization the opportunity to extend its mentoring efforts and reach more people in a time-efficient manner.
  • Solves the dilemma of mentoring many people when there are not enough qualified mentors in an organization to make one-to-one mentoring matches.
  • Honors and shares the knowledge and expertise of individuals and to provide other employees with exposure to their specific know how.
  • Avoids the perception of favoritism that can result when there are limited numbers of mentors and many potential mentees.
  • Welcomes an alternative to combat mentor fatigue and burnout.

Our approach includes: 1) providing a strong foundation of mentorship skill development for the mentors; 2) provide specific training to mentees in how to develop IDP/iMAP using highly tailored educational tools; 3) promoting a culture where new and early- career scientists are optimally equipped to benefit from and have access to a structured network of multiple cross-disciplinary senior-level mentors, within and outside the institution, who are prominent in their respective field of research and have sufficient social, technical and scientific capital to help them achieve career success; 4) leverage diverse mentor teams and community engagement resources to address health disparities research; and 5) combine a retention tool to create a platform where scientists see the value of team science and are in a supportive culture to execute their research. 6) create a self-sustaining since the former mentees, upon further mentorship training, are expected to assume the role of mentors to junior faculty as soon as they successfully complete the initial cycle. 

 

Learn more about additional professional development opportunities at Morehouse School of Medicine.