How to Be a Good Mentee

There is no shortage of advice on how to be a good mentor. Whole conferences are built around it, every leadership track has a session on it, countless books have been written about it, and do not get me started on how many mentoring posts show up in my LinkedIn feed.

But mentoring is a handshake, and a handshake takes two hands.

We talk far less about the other side of it. What makes a good mentee. And I think that is a mistake, because the mentee is the one who walks away with the skills. The mentor is investing time. The mentee is investing in the rest of their career. If only one hand is doing the gripping, it is not a handshake. It is you holding onto someone.

I have mentored a fair number of people over the years, and when I think about the ones who got the most out of it, three things separated them. Curiosity. Humility. Honesty. It was never talent or class rank or how much they already knew when they walked in the door.

Curiosity

Curiosity is what gets you into the room.

Back in my day, when I wanted to learn a new skill, sometimes the only way to get it was to come in on my day off. That was when a particular surgery happened, or when a particular person with a particular skill was in the building. So I came in, and I never experienced that as an imposition. I wanted the skill, and I understood that acquiring it was me investing in my own career. I will also admit that it never occurred to me I was allowed to ask for anything different. I was not being noble. I was being twenty-six.

Somewhere along the way, that mindset shifted. There is a real and legitimate expectation now that the employer invests in the people it hires, and I agree with it. Practices owe their doctors training, time, and coverage. But there is a version of that expectation that goes a step further and assumes the practice will also deliver every opportunity inside a schedule that never asks the learner to bend. That part does not hold up. You have to meet in the middle, because at the end of the day you are the one walking away with the skill in your hands.

I once had a newer graduate tell me she wanted to learn a certain surgery. The problem was that it was always scheduled on her day off. Not because we were plotting against her. The surgeon with that skill worked on her day off, so that was when those surgeries landed on the board. I offered to switch her day off for that week so she could be there. She did not want that. She wanted the surgery to happen on a day she was already scheduled to work.

I have thought about that a lot. She wanted the skill, but she wanted it delivered on her existing terms. That is where a lot of good learning dies, and not from any lack of talent, but from an unwillingness to compromise.

Curiosity also means being interested in the whole job, not the highlight reel. Most days are not made of the exciting cases. Most days are the emergency Bordetella booster and the ear recheck and the anal glands, and you do those the same as everyone else who came before you. Nobody put anal gland expression on their vet school vision board. And yet. The mentee I want to teach is the one who is just as engaged for the routine booster as for the cystotomy, because the routine visit is where most of the medicine actually lives.

And curiosity means doing your own homework before you bring something to your mentor, so the conversation starts somewhere past square one. It also means embracing the idea that medicine has more than one right answer. There is rarely a single correct path to solving a case. It is not black and white. It is shades of gray, and the sooner you make peace with that, the better a clinician you become.

I once had a mentee who wanted every answer spoon-fed. A drug dose here, a differential list there, then again, then again. After one too many, I started asking her to look the doses and differentials up herself before coming to me. She looked at me, genuinely confused, and asked where. In my day the answer would have been a shelf of very heavy books in the back, which tells you something about how long I have been doing this.

I still do not know what I was looking at. Whether she truly did not know how to research, or whether asking me was simply faster than finding out. Either way the curiosity was missing, because a curious person who does not know where to look figures out where to look. She had a mentor standing right in front of her, and the question she never asked was the useful one. Not “what is the dose,” but “where would you have gone to find it.”

Humility

Curiosity gets you in the room. Humility keeps you teachable once you are there.

You are going to make mistakes. Good. This is the time for it. This is the entire point of having someone standing next to you while you learn. When you make one, it is not the end of the world. Your mentor is not sitting there in silent judgment. They want you to learn so you can improve and become better than you were. That is the whole reason they signed up. A mistake in front of your mentor is not a failure. It is the system working exactly as designed.

I know the pull in the other direction. After being in school for that long, you are desperate to get out and show everyone what you can do. But you are not quite there yet. You still need the practical setting, the real patient, the real room, the real decision. That is precisely what a good mentor helps you build. You do not need to have all the answers, and you do not need to be right all the time.

Humility also determines how you treat the people who are not doctors. Respect your non-DVM team members. The technicians, the assistants, the front desk. They have saved my butt more times than I can count, and they will save yours too if you let them, and if you treat them like the professionals they are. A new doctor who talks down to the team is not demonstrating authority. They are demonstrating that they have missed the single most important relationship in the building. The team knows things you do not. Learn from them.

Honesty

Honesty is what makes your mentor trust you enough to keep pouring in.

If you do not know something, say so, and then follow it with “I will go look it up.” That sentence has carried more careers than any amount of bluffing ever has. Nobody expects you to know. Everyone notices when you pretend.

Honesty also means being present, not just physically. You can stand in a room all day and absorb nothing, and your mentor will figure that out around the third time you ask the same question in a row. Take the note the first time and write it down if you have to. If you genuinely did not retain it, say that out loud rather than asking again as though it is new. There is a real difference between “I need to hear that again” and hoping nobody is keeping count.

And be honest about how you learn. If you need to see one before you do one before you teach one, say so. If your brain works differently, say that. Your mentor cannot teach to a learning style you have kept a secret. The same goes for how the two of you stay in touch. Daily check-in, email, text, a quick phone call. Find the channel that works and then actually use it. Most mentorships that fall apart do not fall apart over skill. They fall apart over silence.

Be honest about what you actually need from a given conversation, too. Sometimes you want to be taught and sometimes you just want to vent, and your mentor cannot tell the difference unless you say so. Tell them which one it is and you will both save an hour.

One more piece of honesty, and this one is a favor to your mentor. If you are bringing a problem, bring a solution with it. Come with at least a first attempt. “Here is what is wrong” is a complaint. “Here is what is wrong and here is what I think we might do” is a mentee.

And a Word for the Mentors

Because this cuts both ways.

I loved my new graduates, and not only for the reasons you would assume. I loved them because I could quiz them on what they were teaching in school now, since I have been a few years removed from that. A few. Wink, wink.

The good mentee is open to learning. So is the good mentor. Some of the best updates to my own knowledge came from a brand new doctor who had just sat through the current version of a class I took a lifetime ago. Stay open to what the new kids know. They are carrying things you have not seen yet, and if you are not asking, you are wasting half the relationship.

The mentor holds out a hand. The whole thing only works if you actually take it.

— Dr. V
The Gray Oak Journal

Dr. V is a veterinarian with over twenty years of clinical and operational leadership experience. She has owned and operated several veterinary hospitals, weathered many shifts in the industry, and served on advisory councils. She writes The Gray Oak Journal at grayoakjournal.com.