Multidisciplinary Team Mentoring Posted on October 19, 2007 Charles F. Reynolds III (bio) talks about what makes a good mentor.

A good mentor is not unlike a good psychotherapist when you come to think about it. A good psychotherapist is someone who helps you to understand what your signature strengths are, what you’re really good at, and can help you identify opportunities where you can fully develop those strengths.

A good mentor, also like a good psychotherapist, will help you develop your own problem solving skills. Will help you to see the larger context of your work and your life. Will help you to understand how to set priorities, how to do good time management. A good mentor will also run interference for you and say you shouldn’t be serving on this committee. You should be writing a paper instead. That’s really key, again in terms of the issues related to time management.

Because scientific development and science is inherently a social process and it involves relationships with other people, particularly other people on the team, a good mentor will help you develop those relationships whether it’s with members of the team or, no less importantly, with other investigators working in the field outside of a particular laboratory or perhaps in another institution.

Increasingly, good effective mentoring involves multi disciplinary team mentoring. In a sense, when I was growing up professionally in the '80s, the model then I think was very much working in a single lab, having a single mentor. While that is still very important it’s probably not enough. Science and mental health particularly has become very much a multi-disciplinary enterprise whether it’s basic or clinical or services. A good mentor, I think, increasingly sees himself or herself as part of a mentoring team and putting the interests of the trainee first encourages a model of multi-disciplinary team mentoring. You could say that one of the good effects of the road map K12, the institutional K12 program that the NIH has implemented, has been to explicitly articulate a good model of multi disciplinary team mentoring.

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