Mentorship Best Practices

The Johns Hopkins Mentorship Best Practices Committee has released the following recommendations:

1. One or more mentors should be identified for each faculty member prior to the start of each new hire’s employment at Hopkins and processes should be in place, within departments and across SOM/JHU, that facilitate the ability of faculty members to add and/or change mentors as needed throughout a faculty member’s employment at Hopkins.
2. Each faculty member should be encouraged to connect to multiple mentors/advisors. Options include, but are not limited to, formal mentoring committees, designated departmental/divisional faculty development advisors, peer mentoring, alumni (Johns Hopkins Academy) and/or other mentors/advisors external to a faculty member’s home department. Processes and infrastructure are needed to facilitate the connection of mentees to multiple mentors within departments, SOM and/or JHU.
3. The SOM, individual departments and/or groups of departments should develop and support processes that enhance access of faculty to internal reviewers of their intellectual products, including, but not limited to, grant applications, manuscripts, course curricula, oral presentations, etc. Options include, but are not limited to, development of formal review committees within or across departments, organization of faculty into teams with common interests who can provide internal review of shared academic projects and contractual arrangements with external reviewers.
4. Each department should develop, and make public to its faculty, processes to formally recognize mentoring activities, including indirect payments (e.g. through incentive/bonus pay), direct payments (fee for service), access to departmental resources (e.g. internal research funding), attainment of promotional criteria (i.e. citizenship requirement), mentoring awards and/or other incentives.
5. Tools should be made accessible to faculty that facilitate accountability of individual mentors and mentees to each other. Each department should develop standardized processes and procedures to assess the quantity/quality of mentorship for each faculty member at least annually (e.g. during mandatory annual review). Departmental leaders should report to SOM leadership on their mentoring/advising programs, including metrics of engagement and effectiveness. SOM leadership should provide feedback to department leaders on aggregated metrics of mentoring effectiveness/engagement across the SOM.
6. Programs to train mentors and mentees should be made more readily available to the faculty. Mentoring resources/tools should be made available via public repository. Each department should develop, and make public to its faculty, processes that allow a mentee to seek assistance from an impartial mediator (e.g. vice chair for faculty, departmental ombudsman or standing mentoring committee).
7. Existing IT infrastructure should be leveraged within and across departments of the SOM and JHU (e.g. JHU/SOM faculty data warehouses, mentoring tools developed within Anesthesiology and Oncology) to develop and deploy tools to meet the mentoring needs of all faculty.