Nature's guide for mentors

“M, without any doubt, sees all his interactions with people as lifelong. He always keeps in touch with ex-students, postdocs and so on after they have moved on. Even if he is not directly helping them, he keeps himself aware of their activities and at times informs them of things he believes would be of interest or useful, to them. He genuinely treats his ex-students and postdocs as part of an extended family.”

Many of the proposing mentees started out as students of the mentors but later became well-supported colleagues. But a distinctive feature of a great mentor as opposed to a great supervisor seemed to be a special focus on helping to build the mentee's career. A natural consequence of the care and effort the mentors put into supporting the careers of their students/staff was that the majority of them became mentors for life: their advice continued to be valued, friendships grew and the links were maintained.

“For me there is a difference between a supervisor and a mentor. With the latter you find that you are not simply a student with a research project, but a student with a career in front that the mentor helps you start.”

Enthusiasm

“First and foremost, M is incredibly passionate about science. She eats, sleeps and breathes science. Her enthusiasm is absolutely infectious, and it creates a wonderful atmosphere in her laboratory.”

“It is the nature of supervision that you have to explain/teach some key concept time after time as each new student arrives. Each time I had to make it feel to the student postdoc that it was the first time I had ever explained the concept; each time I had to tell it with sparkle to help inspire them to seek to know more. At times it was hard to stay 'inspirational'; but to fail would have meant to me that I should quit as a supervisor. You need to understand, as an old and wise friend once said to me, 'Remember, they stay the same age, you get older!'”

Passion, enthusiasm and positivity were words dominating the majority of the mentee reports. Whether these are traits we can cultivate or create is debatable. The lesson seems to be that it is very important to be as enthusiastic about your students' research as you are about your own. If you are not, then the question becomes: is the student working on the correct project? If you are not passionate about their project, how can you properly support them? This should also be a lesson to administrators, who may sometimes allocate students to projects and supervisors for expediency rather than a genuine concern for the student or indeed the staff member.

Sensitivity

“When things go wrong, it is important to find out why things happened the way they did. There could be personal factors (sickness, relationship break-ups) that contribute to unhappy decisions or results. Although I may not be able to provide the solution to personal problems, I can provide a sympathetic ear as well as advice or direction to support services.”

This quote speaks for itself but there were a number of examples in which mentors were very sensitive to their charge's circumstances and showed compassion and understanding. When a student or colleague exhibits unusual behaviour or lack of progress there will be a reason. Mentors need to listen, hear and support. Also, many mentors were sensitive to mentees' needs that were not strictly professional, such as finding the right balance between work and family responsibilities; coping with cultural transitions after a move from a different part of the world; developing confidence in a culture that may not be welcoming; or opposing ethnic or gender bias if it arises.

“M also knows that it is important to have a work–life balance. He's made it easy for a postdoc with young children to return to the lab part time. It's encouraging as a young scientist to see that there are lab heads who are supportive of people being able to spend time with their family but still have a chance to develop their careers.”

Appreciating individual differences

“Again it is important to cater for personal traits. Some of my student colleagues need to dot every i and cross every t as they design a set of critical experiments that we have all agreed are important. Others, with, I suspect, an equal success rate, need to jump in, risk making a mess of a few highly critical experiments but gain an instant understanding of either what not or what to try. Allowing both approaches is sometimes difficult, but necessary.”

We are all different in how we work and in what motivates us. The mentees were clearly very appreciative of an ability to carefully craft development activities to enhance and extend personal strengths. Special effort is needed to try to understand all those in a team and deal with them differently. And however much you want that student/colleague to work on that project, sometimes you have to help them make decisions about their career directions.

“Not everybody wants to be a leading researcher and some have skills that make them better suited to other occupations. There is little point in encouraging young people to take on a career to which they may be unsuited or that they will find stressful or uninteresting. So I believe it is necessary sometimes to encourage them into other directions.”

Respect

“She treats her colleagues, regardless of whether they are doing a PhD or if they are a fellow professor, with the same high regard. In doing so, M inspires confidence in her collaborators.”

It is sadly true that laboratories exist where the PhD students are seen as extra pairs of hands rather than genuine collaborators. Although the supervisors may well be successful and grants be funded courtesy of those extra hands, they will never have the satisfaction of working in the stimulating environments described in all of the applications for the mentor awards and will never truly be respected themselves.

Unselfishness

“His magnanimity in sharing his own ideas and delight in seeing others succeed has also been an inspiration, not just for myself but for a whole generation of younger scientists.”

“Most importantly, M has no intellectual jealousy. She was always happy to see others succeed, pushing them forward into the limelight while standing back in the shadows herself.”

There are leaders of some big and important groups who are more concerned with using group members to promote their own scientific standing. Letting your students/colleagues take your ideas and run with them, and being free and willing for them to take credit is not always easy but is always appreciated. What do you lose by allowing them to be lead authors even if the idea was yours?

“His lack of defensiveness was very important to me. On several occasions I've published papers that were critical of some aspect of his work — and he helped me to articulate the issues and supported me in getting them published.”

“I believe that it is too easy for mentors to create grand (manipulative) plans for their younger colleagues. I believe it is important for mentors to suppress the desire to paint the grand picture, instead it is imperative that they learn to understand their colleagues and how to assist them to fulfil their dreams.”

“It was not uncommon to hear that she had lobbied for an opportunity for a postdoc to speak at a conference rather than doing so herself because she recognized the value of becoming known, especially given our distance from North America and Europe.”

Support for other than one's own

“M is just as diligent in fostering careers of people who he thinks can advance science as he is at fostering his own students. This action is consistent with a motive that goes beyond mere ego and represents service to the advancement of science.”

The impact of a good mentor goes far beyond his or her own boundaries. Within the applications were many examples of support outside the mentor's group. Indeed a number of the mentee support documents were from those who had never actually been in the mentor's laboratory but whose lives had nevertheless been touched.

“M's enthusiasm was infectious for many undergraduate students, and I have no doubt in saying that her delivery of the subject matter was instrumental in fuelling my interest in X as a subject.”

The tension between research and teaching remains at all universities. Success in both is not mutually exclusive and it was striking, but not surprising, that many of the exemplary mentors were exemplary teachers. Many of the mentees who themselves have gone on to very successful careers and have international reputations in science would not have gone down that pathway if they had not been exposed to their future mentor as a teacher.

Those who work in university administration need to remember the benefit of exposing undergraduate students to top scientists to increase the number of graduate students. Up-and-coming young scientists should put effort into their teaching in order to inspire and interest their future mentees. Good mentors encourage their students to teach as soon as they start their PhD, not only to supplement their income but, more importantly, to develop skills that will benefit them in the long term.

Also, many of the great mentors were great communicators, not only of science itself but also of enthusiasm for it to diverse audiences such as schools or local societies. This is not a universal talent and can even be damaging to all concerned if done badly. The good mentors appreciated that such activities can be very valuable training for the communicator and encouraged their students and younger colleagues to develop these skills.

“I first encountered M as a year-11 high-school student in a small country town. The Royal Australian Chemical Institute had commissioned M to travel to regional Victoria and put on a 'chemistry show'. I remember the explosions, the foam tower spilling its contents over the stage, and M pretending that he hadn't noticed the chemical mayhem around him. And I remember that it was about this time that I became interested in chemistry.”

“Students need experience talking about their research in many different forums. Conference attendance is crucial so that they have the opportunity to discuss with other researchers and to develop new ideas. But it is equally important that students have the opportunity to discuss their work in lay terms, whether it is being presented to parents, teachers, or to doctors and nurses as S has done.”

Throughout the mentees' reports and the mentors' reflections on their mentoring styles were descriptions of activities used by the mentors that contributed to their success. A number of these tips are reproduced here for those readers embarking on a scientific career — or those in full flight — in order to stimulate thinking about mentoring. There is no magic formula; these are simply examples of what the mentees thought worked for them.

Availability: the open door

“First, her door is always open, even now in her retirement she can never say 'come back later'. I now greatly admire this skill for I find myself struggling with administration and feeling guilty in making appointments to see students. M always put scientific discussion first.”

“I cannot remember him ever cancelling an appointment with me despite the tremendous demands on his time (he was head of department for some of the time that I was his student).”

“M was always accessible, and she always made it abundantly clear to her students that she would rather talk about science with them than do just about anything else.”

If there was one theme that came through all the reports it was this one. Availability is the standout quality appreciated by the mentees. Despite enormous workloads and responsibilities, the mentor was always there and the door was always open. They never failed to respond to an urgent request immediately. Mentees marvelled at e-mails answered in 20 minutes, responses made to drafts in two days and the willingness to listen to their problems

An enabler of good science is keeping abreast of the literature. A defining characteristic of many of the great mentors was wide reading outside their field. Mentees appreciated sharing in this reading, and also the deliberate strategy of using key papers as a base for discussion either at group or individual meetings or by the casual dropping of reprints as described above. Again, time-consuming but valued.

“For a rigorous scientist of international acclaim, I found her to be very open-minded, and she encouraged my exploration of different avenues of research, even when these fell outside her direct expertise (if need be, M was very willing to study new areas of enquiry in order to provide appropriate intellectual support).”

Most researchers have a pet hypothesis and an individual approach to their particular area of science. Sometimes that dogma and limitations in breadth may be exposed and challenged by students or colleagues. As a result, you need to be open to ideas and solutions from all other disciplines. You need to be ready to accept that you might be wrong, to acknowledge and study new directions you have never considered, and to congratulate your mentees for taking you down that pathway.

The initial project

“Ensure that all students have projects with at least some guaranteed biologically relevant results. Risky work (such as making a knockout mouse) should be balanced with other work that will ensure some results.”

This is related to getting the balance right, but a number of comments highlighted the fact that, in the beginning, students do not have the experience to make a decision on the first project. One mentee drew attention to the fact that, at the start of a PhD, it is the supervisor who has the knowledge, but as the PhD draws to a close, it is the student who has the knowledge and who becomes the teacher. Those readers who are on graduate-student committees will probably have seen instances in which the initial project was a key question to be asked in the supervisor's research programme, but was simply too hard to be the basis of a starting-out project. Many mentees identified being given the right kind of project as a key factor in their ultimate success.

Life after science

“M has always encouraged me not to forget to smell the roses. I will always remember him telling me as a first-year PhD student that I needed to take up other activities besides science. My life has been a lot more fun because of his advice.”

This was not a widespread observation but was clearly a positive feature to those who received this advice.

Celebration

“The first time a person comes up with a novel idea or experiment of their own. This should be an occasion for public recognition within the lab as it is a milestone of great significance for most young scientists.”

The importance of celebration and rewarding successes, large and small, is often neglected. Yet it can be highly encouraging to individuals and can contribute to the building of communities. It is a strategy that all mentors can introduce, although the extent of the celebration will vary depending on personalities and level of extroversion.

The guiding principle is that celebration, however large or small, is a powerful motivator. The range of celebrations mentioned in the awards nominations is worth listing here as a challenge to your imagination: off-campus lunches, the weighing of the PhD thesis on submission, cakes at morning or afternoon tea, barbecues at the mentor's home or cocktail parties on graduation.

A constant theme from the groups supporting their mentor was the sense of community. The successful mentors realized the need to build communities to create an environment where all under their care could flourish. They all had deliberate and varied strategies to build these communities. How often have you experienced the negative impact of silo-building within departments? Positive and sustaining communities do not just happen, they have to be nurtured.

Of scientists

“M takes an inordinate amount of trouble to involve all the people around her in all aspects of the life of the lab, such as seminars, research-planning meetings and informal meetings with outside visitors. All these make you feel a valued member of the research team from the outset.”

Regular meetings have been commented on before. They include: whole-group planning meetings; meetings with external visitors; subgroup meetings with a specific task to report to the whole group; group-writing tasks; assigning a new junior staff member or student to a senior staff member or student mentor.

Especially important meetings were 'journal clubs', which many team leaders set up but often do not sustain.

“The journal club helps to make sure all of us read something other than immediately relevant research, at least once a week. The menu wanders around, sometimes classic papers, sometimes high-impact pieces in Nature or Science, sometimes chapters from a popular-science book, sometimes philosophy or psychology of science. Over time we have evolved the practice of going round the table first with each participant speaking for 3 minutes. There are always some people who have intelligent comments, but would never put them forward if it were left to them to find the right time to speak. The 3 minutes also restrains the talkative.”

Of people

“The most useful single thing I've learned is that chocolate biscuits do more for everyone's good humour and enthusiasm than any amount of feel-good talk. The role of blood sugar should probably have been obvious to a biologist from the outset, but I only learned this by experience. Mind you, cheerful and encouraging conversations are good too, as are gin and tonic.”

Again some mentors' disposition might not always lead to easy support and nurturing of a social group. But there is no doubt about how much such social activities were valued. Activities can be as simple as the chocolate biscuit or more adventurous, for example 'Shakespeare under the stars', wine tastings, ethnic dinners, dinner parties with visiting scientists, bird-watching days, video nights or celebration of every birthday at morning or afternoon tea. One group formed a jazz band, but commented that their gigs were not as favourably reviewed as their articles. One successful mentor noted that, having initially created the social events, he/she now left it to the group, with a resulting range of events that reflected their interests from canoeing to cake-baking to karaoke.

“M has focused on equipping people with the skills to be fully functioning members of the scientific community, able to prepare grant applications, review manuscripts, speak at conferences and engage with scientific administrators in a constructive manner. Such a holistic approach to running a scientific group will ultimately bring enormous benefit to the group's alumni, giving them all the skills necessary to carve out their own niches in the academic world.”

It is clear that successful mentors work hard at developing the scientific skills of their charges. Again this depends on deliberate strategies and activities rather than leaving the outcome to chance. Not surprisingly, the following three skills were the ones that were most often commented on.

Criticism

All successful scientists have extensive networks spread across the globe. But do they all link their students into those networks as actively as they could? This was another of the standout attributes of the Nature finalists and, as commented on above, is one of the distinguishing features of a mentor over someone who is simply a good supervisor. Good mentors saw it as their responsibility to share their network.

Use their contacts and promote their students/young staff

“M always made a large effort to develop the scientific careers of his students. He would actively encourage his students to attend national and international conferences and at these conferences would make a significant effort to introduce his students to other researchers in their field. He would also make a great effort to make sure others were aware of his students' achievements and work. When it came time to leave his laboratory and develop links with others, M was a great source of contacts and ideas.”

All the mentors made special efforts to ensure that their charges were exposed and introduced to visitors who came into a laboratory. And they encouraged collaboration by introducing their mentees to potential collaborators. This was never left to chance but was planned.

“Similarly another practice was to try to secure a few hours of time from visiting international scientists during which students would present their work. This practice has a number of benefits. First it provided good-quality feedback and a range of helpful suggestions on the direction of particular pieces of research. Second, and perhaps of particular importance to Australian trainees, this practice gave an insight into the way some of the world's outstanding researchers think and helped demystify the work of such researchers.”

Departmental tradition often expects the visiting scientist to present his or her findings to the department. Good mentors ensure that the visitor also gets to hear of the work of their students and staff.

As support for those who have left the laboratory continues, the advice of one mentor rings very true:

“Write only honest references. One slanted recommendation will damage the prospects of all that follow, because the writer's credibility goes out of the window.”

Send overseas

“With the wisdom of hindsight, I think the single most important thing I did as supervisor of PhD students was to send each one of them overseas at least once in their candidature.”

Another recurring theme was gratitude from the mentees at the special efforts their mentors made to allow them to travel overseas to conferences and/or visit the laboratories of colleagues in their networks. Some unselfishly suggested that their protégés should go instead of themselves. Others, when overseas, ensured that they arranged exposure of the work of their charges to world experts. Hence:

“She would attend conferences with her students and at such events would always make a point both of introducing her students to the leaders in the field, and of actively encouraging anyone to whom she was talking to go and see the students' work. She was renowned for arriving at her students' or postdocs' posters with a bemused world-expert in tow and then encouraging the student to explain the poster, letting the student do the talking but with M adding encouraging and supportive comments from the sideline. This is another practice I have adopted from M.”

Once aspiring young mentors appreciate just how important it is for all their students/staff to have opportunity to travel, it is important to negotiate financial support from the department or professional society or elsewhere. There are sources of funding available, and good mentors seek these out, just as they actively look around to find the best match of conference and/or laboratories for their mentees.

Advice on career decisions

“But perhaps the most important thing is his tireless attention to the needs and in particular the career development of the younger people around him. M always finds top placements for his students and postdocs.”

Perhaps a defining feature of the Nature nominees was that the goal of networking was not simply linked to their own research progress, or to ensure that the PhD was successful, or that the work of the postdoc or research assistant moved their projects forward. Rather, there was evidence of extensive communication, discussion and negotiation behind the scenes to ensure that when the student or colleague left the group they could travel along a pathway that was most likely to set them on a successful career. All the supporting mentees had successful careers and in all cases their mentor had helped them with their career.

“Having a good mentor early in one's career can mean the difference between success and failure in any career.”

“Those who are good mentors get incalculably more out of it than they put into it.”

This article concludes as it starts, with reference to just how important mentoring is to those under your care. The second quote highlights the positive satisfaction of being a good mentor.

From the entries we have read, it is clear that there are second generations of mentors now out there who learnt from their own mentors how to provide superb support for the scientists under their charge. Many reading these pages will themselves have been privileged to have been mentored by those applying many of the strategies described. Indeed, in the pages of nominations that was the inspiration for this article, it was also clear that the proposing mentees had taken on board the behaviours of their mentor and were themselves well on the way to being the next generation of successful mentors.

Our purpose, based on the rich resource provided by both mentees and mentors, is to challenge you to reflect on how you are currently mentoring those under your charge. Is there anything you can learn? More importantly, can you improve what you do? What examples of exemplary mentoring activities do you use?

Equally important, for those young scientists newly embarked on a career in science or about to start building a research team: can you plan your approach to mentoring that team by including strategies, processes and behaviours described here that clearly work? If so, you will not only influence the next generation of scientists but also increase your own satisfaction by being in charge of a productive, enthusiastic, challenging and fun team.

As a stimulus to these reflections, we have drawn up a simple table designed to aid your reflections. Whether you are setting out on a mentoring pathway or simply want to see how your mentoring strategies stand up, we encourage you to fill out the table. It asks for the provision of specific examples: we consider this to be the best way to stimulate reflection on your approach to scientific mentoring.