Gastroenterology

Gastroenterology

Volume 135, Issue 1, July 2008, Pages 13-16
Gastroenterology

Comment From the Editors
Mentoring the Mentor: Another Tool to Enhance Mentorship

https://doi.org/10.1053/j.gastro.2008.05.065Get rights and content

Highlighting in a proactive fashion the importance of mentoring and of mentoring the mentors helps enrich how our medical societies can further contribute to the well-being of society at large. Implementation of a successful mentoring program is likely to perpetuate and grow the positive effects of mentorship, and mentoring-the-mentor considerations raised herein are likely to enhance overall mentorship. Mentoring the mentors provides an alternative “top down” approach to complement the essential and more traditional “bottom up” emphasis that we currently aim to provide to trainees on the importance of identifying appropriate mentors and what it takes to be role model mentees.

Section snippets

Overview of Mentoring

Mentoring requires a desire and some effort though; like many other skills, those who do it well do so selflessly, effortlessly, and even unconsciously. For the many of us in whom such skills are not inborn, there is a basic set of information that needs to be imparted at the earliest stages so that potential mentees still benefit from the rewards of appropriate mentorship. Mentorship has no age, gender, or ethnic limitations, so anyone willing can serve such a noble role. A valued mentor is

Promoting the Mentoring of Mentors

The benefits of mentoring lend support to strategies to devise and implement tools to further disseminate and improve mentoring skills. Several measures can be envisioned to promote and highlight the mentoring of mentors. First, is to build on existing workshops such as the 2008 Academic Skills Workshop that was sponsored by the AGA Institute and the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases.22 This outstanding and long-running annual workshop, established >10 years ago by Eugene

Acknowledgments

The author is immensely and forever indebted to mentors Harry B. Greenberg, Jon I. Isenberg, Martin F. Kagnoff, David R. Powers, Wayne M. Stalick, and Ian S. Trowbridge, who have guided and helped shape his academic career. The author thanks Kim E. Barrett, Douglas A. Drossman, Gregory J. Gores, Juanita L. Merchant, Judith Podskalny, Anil K. Rustgi, Robert S. Sandler, George Triadafilopoulos, and James O. Woolliscroft for their reading of the commentary and very helpful suggestions; Anthony R.

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