Let’s ALL make mentoring better

Well Happy New Year and welcome back to ‘Making Mentoring Better’ for 2013 – the year of more and better mentoring.

Before we start looking forward though, I just want to back-track a little to September 2012. At the start of that month I attended the Vitae Researcher Development International Conference in Manchester. This is an annual event focussing on professional and career development for researchers in higher education. Earlier in the year I had submitted a workshop proposal for the one of the breakout sessions. And guess what theme of the workshop was… yes, correct, ‘mentoring’.

Vitae, the organisation hosting the conference asked me to partner up with another Scottish HE colleague who had proposed a similar workshop theme. I duly met up with Gillian Johnstone from the University of Strathclyde, and together we developed an 80 minute workshop session about setting up mentoring schemes, based on the experiences from our own institutions.

I am pleased to say that the workshop was well attended and was great fun – and even better, we got terrific feedback from participants. This workshop was a great opportunity for Gillian and I to share some of what we have learned about setting up and managing mentoring schemes to other colleagues in higher education, and to try to communicate our enthusiasm for mentoring as a really effective way to support staff in their career and professional development. As well as pointing out how mentoring schemes are cost effective and can achieve profoundly positive outcomes for participants, we were able to provide some simple ‘top tips’ for setting up and maintaining mentoring schemes. I was also able to include a brief section about data handling and management, which as you know is a subject close to my (and this blog's) heart.

Gillian and I noticed that throughout the conference other contributors repeatedly referenced mentoring as something that we (in Higher Education) should be doing more of to support researchers. This observation, together with the high level of interest and positive reaction to our own contribution, gave us (or more truthfully Gillian) a great idea – what we need is a dedicated conference specifically about mentoring in the Scottish HE sector. And thus was born the concept of Mentoring Scotland 2013. 

We have subsequently developed a conference proposal and sought reactions from our colleagues in other institutions. Based on their very encouraging responses we have now gained support from both Vitae and the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and are delighted to announce that the conference will take place on 7 May 2013 at the Stirling Management Centre.

The conference fee will be £62.00 and it is open to practitioners in researcher development, support staff and academic development from across the Scottish HE sector, and booking will soon be available via the Vitae website.

We are also calling for contributors, so if you have expertise or experience in any aspect of mentoring, including development of mentoring skills, running different types of mentoring initiatives, mentoring in other sectors, evaluating mentoring or mentoring qualifications that you could share - or anything else you think will be a helpful addition - then please get in touch. 

See you there.

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.