The Lowdown on Mentoring

It’s ongoing, and not just for newbies. “Mentoring is never-ending,” says consultant Mary Schmidt, owner of EyeSystems in Pleasant Hill, CA.

Here, she answers questions about setting up a mentoring program in your practice. On the following page, Camille Cohen, O.D., who is known for mentoring students as well as optometric staffers, tells how she got involved with this kind of training—including why and how she approaches it.

EB: Can mentoring be short-term based?

MARY SCHMIDT: Mentoring is never-ending. Ongoing mentoring ensures that your team members are growing and being challenged to be their best. If they are engaged and feel you value them and are willing to invest time and effort in their development, they are more likely to stay with the practice and provide better care to patients. This is a good investment and will result in practice growth.

EB: How do you pair a staffer with a mentor?

MS: This is tricky. Your best employee may not be the best mentor or even the best trainer. You want to identify the employees who best understand your practice philosophy and are committed to you and the goals of your practice. Invest in giving them support by offering training to them in coaching and staff development.

EB: How do you train a mentor?

MS: As the leader, you should develop someone on your team to give them exposure and experience with the process. If you don’t have the ability to mentor, hire a life coach and/or leadership development person to create a plan and train by example. Once someone experiences a mentor, they can learn the process. The mentor candidate must have some innate ability to engage and communicate with people, so that you can develop that.

EB: How do you select a mentor?

MS: Watch for behaviors in your team. Who has the desire to guide and support people? Who can create two or three different solutions to a problem? Who is a good listener? Do you see any natural leader? Know that whomever you choose to mentor will also need guidance, tools, and support. Don’t expect this to come out of thin air.

EB: How do you find time to mentor?

MS: So many teams are short-staffed right now. Though the idea of adding another layer of responsibility is daunting, staff turnover is much more exhausting.

Create a schedule (once a week/month) and commit to meeting with your mentee for 15-minute sessions, on the same day of the week and the same time, so it is predictable and they can depend on it. This builds trust and allows you to follow up with questions or issues.

Also, have a development goal for each person being mentored. Know where you want to take them and be patient, start small and build over time. The bottom line? Our field must adapt to a new employee environment. We can’t keep doing what we’ve done in the past and expect a better result.

HOW I MENTOR.

Camille Cohen, O.D., understands the challenges of learning.

She began in optical as an ophthalmic tech and graduated from Pennsylvania College of Optometry in 2014. Since then, she’s participated in almost every practice format and today owns the Park Slope Pearle franchise in Brooklyn, NY. Somehow, she continues to find time to mentor both students (her passion) and co-workers.

“My introduction to mentoring was working on the board for the National Optometric Association (NOA). I was involved in community service events and would meet students at vision screenings. After publishing a post on the NOA Facebook page about my difficulty as a student studying to pass Part 1 of National Board of Examiners in Optometry (NBEO), I received a flood of emails from students and doctors who had the same test anxiety as I did and gained even more mentees.”

Fast forward to the pandemic quarantine, and Dr. Cohen recalls that “an impromptu NOA NBEO tutoring group was started to address this need.” The result? “A 78.8% pass rate for those who participated in our sessions.”

After the world opened back up, it became difficult to continue the same review sessions. “That’s why my business partner, Janis James, O.D., and I formed Eyerie Academics LLC last year,” recalls Dr. Cohen. “Our goal is to formalize what was originally done in the quarantine sessions, so that more students can access our methods of organizing materials, studying, and wellness. We are also publishing workbooks which highlight these methods.”

Her hope for students? To cultivate a great—or borrowing from Jamaican slang, an irie—mindset when learning and branching out into the professional world.

Here, Dr. Cohen shares a roundup of four mentoring tips.

1. Get involved! Most national and state-level optometric organizations have student chapters.
2. Serve your community. If you choose to do outreach locally and even internationally, you will meet an entirely different group of people who may need guidance and support. Some of my past mentees weren’t optometry students, but rather younger members from my church or high school students from my Career Day visits.
3. Set boundaries. This was a hard lesson for me to learn because I would exhaust myself trying to give every free minute to dozens of people. Your mentees have to respect and value you and your time.Last year, I held a meeting with students simply to review how to professionally email doctors and professors.
4. Remain humble. You were once a student or new doctor, working to figure out your next steps. Recall that period of your life and give grace to those who are working to meet their goals.