How to motivate your mentees

Everyone who's mentored has likely experienced it: Your mentee is avoiding your calls, missing deadlines, and tanking timelines. They're stuck, and it's your job to help them. But how?

To answer that question, Shannon K. Martin, MD, MS, FACP, and her colleague V. Ram Krishnamoorthi, MD, MPH, ACP Member, laid out some principles and suggestions in a recent perspective article, published by the Journal of Hospital Medicine on Aug. 22, 2024.

“We've talked a lot about not only mentoring within the bounds of our own process and projects, but what sort of things can be helpful,” said Dr. Martin, an associate professor of hospital medicine at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. “The lens that we wanted to take with it was not just project-specific, but also interpersonal skills.”

Those skills include exhibiting patience, clearly outlining a process, breaking a project into manageable pieces, knowing when to push, and demonstrating the importance of a finished product, according to the article. I.M. Matters recently spoke with Dr. Martin to learn more.

Q: You outlined three main issues that could cause a mentee's project to stall: procrastination, perseveration, and perfectionism. Do these often happen together?

A: A lot of times they definitely can happen together, and there can be elements of each found in the different kinds of categories. Procrastination sometimes is just a natural, very universal human response, but what we talked about in the article was not just procrastination like, “Oh, I'll get it done, but I won't get it done until the night before,” but also putting off specific discrete steps that need to be done before they can move forward. It's essential to tease out when procrastination is a useful motivator versus when it can be a poor coping strategy.

With perseveration, it can be helpful to try to cover the gap between a mentee's idea of how to comprehensively cover something and the limits of what's actually available to them. You may need to point out, for example, “This introduction, all you can write is three paragraphs. You can't write an entire thesis on this entire topic, even though I know you've spent multiple months going through this literature review. Obviously it's difficult to distill this down to three paragraphs, but that's what's expected.”

With perfectionism, you need a lot of experience to know when good enough is good enough. A lot of times we just think that with A+++ effort, we can make all of the challenges go away, but there comes a point at which the effort does not equal the output. That's something where I feel like a mentor really needs to be able to say, “This is going to be completely fine, versus this which really does need a lot of extra effort,” because it's really hard to see when you're in the middle of it. Mentors have to be able to see when a mentee's behavior has become maladaptive.

Q: Your article noted the importance of patience but explained that doesn't mean giving mentees unlimited time and chances. Can you describe what you meant by that?

A: I have to give full credit to my coauthor, who coined the term “emotional patience.” I love that turn of phrase, because too much patience can definitely be counterproductive, particularly with people in these exact three kinds of areas, whether they're procrastinating or perseverating or being a perfectionist. Mentors need to find that right balance between accountability and expectations but also say, “You know, I understand that this is a process. I'm going to put these bounds in place for you, because we need to have it done by this period of time.” It takes a lot of emotional intelligence to know when you can push and when you need to get a little bit of space. There has to be a lot of trust underlying your relationship too. If you're just kind of jumping into a relationship with somebody, it's very hard to know what they need.

Q: How do you figure that out?

A: I try to ask a lot of questions. What works best for you? Is it helpful for me to check in? Is it helpful for us to set deadlines? I try to get a lot of that out there at the beginning of our project or the beginning of our relationship. Obviously, you can't ask about everything, but I try to use similar techniques to those I use when I'm supervising trainees in clinical medicine, where I say what I am observing and ask if my impressions are correct. “I've noticed that you've spent a lot of time working on this part of the paper, but not that part of the paper. Tell me more about that. Are you getting stuck here?”

I try to begin with observations of what I'm noticing rather than judgments, to try to at least open up the conversation a little bit more. I hope that demonstrates patience. It's also important to show your expectations without showing your frustration or disappointment. It's OK to say, “I had the expectation we were going to be done with this by this period of time, and we're not.” That's very different than saying, “I can't believe you're not done with it by this period of time.” It really can be very subtle, but it does make a difference in your ability to keep moving forward and hopefully maintain trust in that relationship,

Q: If you try an approach that doesn't work, are there ways to course-correct?

A: I really try to be as open and transparent as I can about my own actions and my own agency, and really bring some humility to that. To use the example of deadlines, I might say, “My strategy has been to set deadlines, and I'm really noticing that it's hard for us to meet them. It seems like a lot of things are coming up. Let's talk. Is there a better strategy, or a better way we can work together?”

Sometimes, in various projects, you need to outsource things, and so sometimes I've tried to recognize that just alleviating a certain task or burden for a person might really help with their productivity. That's always a hard thing when you're first learning how to mentor, because the instinct can be just to do it all yourself, and you don't want to do that, because that's not going to help anybody and won't be good for you either. But it can help to recognize that it doesn't have to be all or nothing, to say, “OK, I see that you're stuck on this table. Why don't I work on that table and you can work on another piece.” That helps build a team approach.

Q: Your article talks about the importance of having some type of finished product, no matter how bad the first version might be. Is this a tough sell sometimes?

A: Definitely. This is often the case when the end result will be a written product. What I try to tell mentees is how much easier it is to edit something than to write it de novo. I don't care how bad it is, words on a page are so much easier than no words on a page. It's kind of silly, but I use the term “word vomit” all the time. Just get the words out.

I also encourage people to keep what I call a “graveyard document” where anything they write can be saved. If it's good, or if you think it could be good one day, just put it in a different document and we can work on it later. Or I have a lot of colleagues who use time-based prompts, just sitting down and writing for 15 minutes or 20 minutes.

Another strategy I try is to say, “Look, you're a clinician. Your whole job is putting disparate pieces of information together to create a narrative that makes sense and helps you. That, in essence, is what writing is. Let's get the narrative down, get the story down, get the sequence down, and then we'll work on the mechanics later.”

All of these things can hopefully help normalize that this is not easy for anyone. Even professional writers don't just sit down and have a beautiful document that flows from their fingertips. Just like anything in our professional career, we have to work at it, and the more you write, the better you get.

Q: How can you tell if a mentee is getting overwhelmed by a project?

A: The better you know the person, the easier it will be to tell. A person may stop responding to you or avoid getting back to you. That's something that should be kind of an early red flag that they may be getting stuck. This is also something you can ask your mentee about at the start: “What does getting overwhelmed look like for you? Tell me the kinds of things you know would be helpful for me to look out for if you're getting stuck or if you need help.”

Some people are very insightful and will be able to tell you, and others may not, but asking those kinds of questions could be useful. What you as a mentor bring to the relationship is being able to see the bigger piece of the picture, ultimately helping them so that with everything they work on, in every step they do, they can see it too. That's one of your biggest and most important jobs as a mentor, being able to give that guidance.