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!
