image from Dall-E via Bing Chat. “2 physicians with a hilarious and terrifying mentor experience.”
This is an interview between Dr. David Bar-Shain, originator of the PACmentor program. The PAC is the Physician/provider Advisory Council comprised of physicians who attend the Epic User Group, and Dr. Bar-Shain is a senior informaticist at MetroHealth in Cleveland, Ohio. I took the transcript of our 30-minute conversation and broke it down into 2-minute reads.
- I. Find a mentor. Mentor’s job. Confidence. Curiosity. 1-pager. Stories.
- II. Book club. Being Boring. War Stories.
- III. Is Mentorship = Therapy? The Psycho 80.
- IV. Meetings. Coaching. Peer Mentors. Networking. Blind-spots. Listening.
- V. Lateral thinking. More Book Club. Persistence of Memory. Stumbles.
- VI. Failure Resume. CT ruined healthcare. Mentor a mentor? Downstream.
Ready? Here’s part 3 of 6. If you have time to listen, the full 30-minute audio interview is here. Here’s the audio-only interview (33 minutes).
Is a mentor a therapist?
CT: Sometimes being an internist ends up being a therapist. I had a student who was shadowing me who then went back to their program director and said “I’d like to be reassigned. Most of Dr. Lin’s practice is psychiatry and I’d like an internal medicine experience please.” I thought to myself: “Well in about 20 years come back and tell me what you think about internal medicine then.”
But I really enjoy hearing and letting people vent. And sometimes they talk enough that they solve their own problem. And boy, what a jujitsu move that is, to just be quiet and say “Huh, and what do you think about that?” or “How did you approach that?” or “What are you thinking about it now? And what ideas do you have now?” And eventually they get to a solution for themselves. Then they say: “Oh, thanks for this great advice.” And all I did was ask questions.
DB: Well, but how do you avoid becoming the person’s psychiatrist? Because sometimes mentees come with a tremendous need. They may have experienced trauma, or they may be experiencing trauma now that they might reveal to you. How do you put the brakes on that kind of content for the mentee -mentor relationship so that you can be professional and not be their psychiatrist?
CT: I don’t have any. any hard and fast rules. I mean, we can always say, I’m sorry to hear that. Let’s move this back to informatics and how does that apply to what you’re doing now?
80 / 20 rule, or the Psycho 80
CT: I always come back to the 80 /20 rule. Some people believe, as I did in my early career, that Informatics is about IT design and where you put the button and what kind of analytics and did you get the P-value up to a certain level?
However, 80 % of successful informatics is the socio-political skill of the folks doing the work. One might call it the Psycho 80. The 80% of the work that is NOT technical, it is instead psycho-social skill.
And even if you have the predictive model exactly where you’d like it, did you talk to the right leader about it? Did you tell the right story? Did you convince the right clinician to convince their colleagues that they should be looking at the score? How do you do that on an interpersonal level?
To some degree it is psychotherapy, it is confidence boosting, it is interpersonal relationships and then bringing that back to what you’re trying to accomplish. I’ll also say that one of the books, I don’t know where this came from, probably from my daughter who wants to go into psychology, a book called The Gift of Therapy where a psychologist reflects on 30 years of their practice and boils their 50 chapters of lessons down to three things.
Therapist skills for mentorship
CT: And I find that really applies to mentorship. And the three things are accurate empathy. I love that. Accurate. I’ve heard of empathy, I’ve heard of accuracy, but never the two words together. Accurate empathy is understanding correctly what the person is telling you. Accurate empathy.
And the second one is unconditional positive regard. Huh, I think, unconditional positive regard. I happen to do that. It’s not my intention to do that. But whenever a mentee approaches me, I always think, well, you’re doing great work. How can I help you? I never say: “I’m not sure that thing is a good idea.”
In fact, one of my colleagues who I’m trying to coach into being a mentor says, “why is it that after two or three meetings, they never want to meet with me again?” And I ask him, “What do you talk about?” And he says, “Well, they bring me projects and I tell them that the reasons it’s not going to work.” And I say, “Ah, maybe the first thing you ought to say is, good job for coming up with that idea, that I can see where you’re trying to go with it. Tell me more about that.” And then that way you can problem solve together rather than, “All right, here’s the five reasons that your approach is wrong.”
No one wants to come and just be battered over the head with why their pet project is never going to work.
And unconditional positive regard is one of those things I hold unconsciously as you’re coming to me. The point is, how can we make it go, whatever you’re trying to do? How can we make it go? And sometimes you have to pivot and sometimes you have to drop it because it’ll never work, but I’m not the one to do that. I’m the one to say “What you’re trying to do: And why is it we get getting stuck here?” And let’s ask about that. Let’s be curious.
DB: And what’s the third thing?
CT: And the third one is genuineness. Because if you’re doing accurate empathy, but in the back of your head, you’re thinking, “This is idiotic, why am I here?” The nonverbals leak across. So, I always come with curiosity.
Also, I’ve been lucky. Thank you for always sending me fantastic mentees. I think that’s part of my success is that the people I mentor with are hardworking, they’re enthusiastic, and they always have great ideas. And it’s easy to come to the meeting and say, “I’m really curious. What’s happening? What are you working on?” And, “What have you been successful at?” It’s easy to do that. And if you come with that attitude, it’s always a pleasure.
When I look on my calendar and see mentorship meetings, I think, “This is going to be a great day” because unlike other informatics meetings, where CT is assigned 17 tasks, and I’m gonna have to work all night on this project, in contrast, mentorship meetings are light workloads for me and so enjoyable.
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK