How might mentor/mentee pairs get more out of their relationship? Learn something in 2 minutes! VI. Failure Resume. CT ruined healthcare. Mentor a mentor? Downstream.
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 6 of 6. If you have time to listen, the full 30-minute audio interview is here. Here’s the audio-only interview (33 minutes).
Failure Resume
David: Right tell us about your CV of failures!
CT: I love talking to my daughter who is reading about psychology and she’s actually pointed out to me this to this idea of writing a failure resume. At the time there were not that many references to it but I decided,why not?
I was thinking about writing one page version of my regular CV,so I built that: a one page summary, because as a professor and being in this field for 20 years and I see these go into the 20 and 30 pages and frankly it’s hard to consume.
I read other people’s CV’s and these they’re hard to read, but just like with one pagers or summaries of projects, a one pager or summary of your CV forces you to tell a story “what do I highlight, what’s important about my career that I want you to know?”and maybe it’s a different CV for every job type I’m applying for, but at the same time I write my failure CV and here are my top dozen failures and this came out of a conversation too with one of my colleagues, only knowing me as a full professor, saying “Well everything you do works.
David: “You’re a golden child.”
CT: Right,“What do you know about failure?” Oh, ho. I have 20 years to tell you about: the things I flubbed at.
One of my favorite stories is “Indications of use for radiology” and we tried to do this 7-8 years ago before the federal mandate that’s coming, where we partnered with a company, but the idea that for a CT of the head there are the only a certain number of approved reasons and for the CT of the head there about 80 of them and we thought: we’ll just alphabetize them and put them in a long scrolling list, and how hard it could be? It’s less typing!
Come to find out a week later after we turn it on,“Why is there an outbreak of acromegaly in our organization?” Because that’s the easiest thing, it’sthe top thing, don’t bother me, click acromegaly, it’s approved, right?
And so we had to turn it off. This is not what we intended,and we probably should rethink what we’re doing. There are a number of these failures on my list.
At one point I was accused of collaborating with Eastern European hackers to take down our dictation system because “CT Lin wants to force us to type in his f—ing EHR, we’re pretty sure he just turned the switch off.
“Really, no,this is national news,this is not just me on a whim trying to force you to type.” So there are all sorts of these rumors. “We should get him out of there because he’s just he’s just moving buttons around because he can.” So,fine.
Being able to tell these stories and have people realize “yeah, that was a really dumb move CT.”
Mentor a Mentor
Yes,I’ve done that. We’re all human. Being able to connect with another person on a human level, I can tell my mentee, “Hey these are the things I’m still struggling with, and I still meet with my own mentor.”
“You meet with a mentor?!”
“Yes I struggle with stuff all the time.”
So that’s kind of fun to connect in that way, it keeps the excitement going.
David: Yeah
CT: Along the same lines, grow the relationship. It’s not just about the job.
Mentees will listen more, I think, if you’re a human and not just come across as the perfect exemplar of informatics. It’s something that you tried, something that didn’t work. OK, chalk up another thing to learning, and pivot.
Rowing Downstream
The final thing, make sure you’re rowing downstream.
This actually comes out of some of the work we did with interviewing patients, is this idea, an interview acronym that we used at University of Colorado, ILS: invite, listen, summarize. Then do it again: Invite, listen, summarize.
So many med students come out of second year with 10,000 new words and they wanna use all of them with patients.
“Here’s my 30 questions for you: Fever? Chills? Nausea? Vomiting?Diarrhea?
No. Instead, ask an open ended question. “How can I help you today?” “Tell me more about more about that.”
We called that “rowing downstream” as opposed to rowing upstream.
If you have 30 questions and people who answer yes or no, that’s rowing upstream. That’s hard work!
Students with lots of yes/no questions say “This patient is really hard to interview: they only say yes or no!” That’s because you taught them how to say yes or no rather than asking open-ended questions!
Similarly the mentor-mentee relationship ought to be rowing downstream: how can I nudge you a little bit, how can I ask an open question, then have you talk about it, and then we both get to a better place.
David: That’s fabulous. Well, CT, I really want to thank you for engaging in this conversation and being a mentor in the program.
CT: I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you.
David: Thank you everybody for listening and we wish you a good mentorship experience.
END OF CONVERSATION.
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