Dr. Greg N.: Why don't we go ahead and get started on today's workshop on ethical issues in mentoring relationships. Delighted to have on board with us today Dr. Brad Johnson.
Couple of housekeeping things before we get going. I'm Dr. Greg Niemeyer. I direct the Center for [inaudible 00:00:16] Career Development here at the American Psychological Association. On behalf of the Center, on behalf of the Education Director, and on behalf of the Center for Learning and Career Development, welcome aboard to today's webcast.
We strongly encourage you to ask questions throughout the webcast at any time you'd like. If you're joining us live online, you can do that simply by looking in the bottom left hand side of your screen and you'll see a tab marked "Questions." Click that and you can email your questions in to us at any time. We will forward those onto the presenter to respond to them. Just be aware that if you ask questions, your question is going to be presented and it's going to be recorded so you, too, will have made a contribution to this recording in perpetuity. Thanks in advance.
Without further ado, let me introduce you to today's presenter, Dr. Brad Johnson. He is a Professor of Psychology in the Department of Leadership, Ethics and Law at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, and also a faculty associate in the graduate school of education at Johns Hopkins University. A clinical psychologist, Dr. Johnson is also a fellow of the American Psychological Association, and he's the recipient of the Johns Hopkins University Teaching Excellence Award.
He is also the author of numerous publications and 13 books in the areas of mentoring, professional ethics and counseling. His most recent book is Athena Rising: How and Why Men Should Mentor Women.
Today, he's going to talk with us about ethical issues in mentoring relationships. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Brad Johnson.
Dr. Brad J.: All right. Glad to be back with you again for Part Two of this focus on mentoring. If you missed it, you can check out the earlier webinar on becoming an excellent master mentor.
For Part Two here that we're kicking off right now, this is going to be an exclusive focus on the ethical issues, intentions, and considerations that great mentors have to consider when doing this important work of mentoring. I'm going to cover the whole landscape of things that mentors wrestle with.
I encourage you at any moment in this hour we have together to go ahead and send in questions. I'll go ahead and pause any time your questions will be read out loud, and I'll respond to those for everybody, so feel free to do that. If you forget, I'm going to remind you a few different times to go ahead and send in questions.
I'm going to include a number of vignettes in my comments today, and I'll read those with you. Have you think about those. I want you to know these are amalgams of different cases I've been familiar with, so none of them is based on an actual case in and of itself.
Let's go ahead and start with this. I think I want to be thinking about the ingredients of being an excellent mentor, and one of the key ingredients is undergirding virtues as somebody brings to this task. I love this quote by Norman Schwarzkopf that mentorship "is a combination of character and strategy. If you've got to be without one, be without strategy." He actually said this about leadership, so I've swiped his quote and modified it. I hope he doesn't mind. I really think this is accurate.
We want to begin with fundamental character virtues and commitment to certain ethical principles when we're mentoring. The skills are great, but I think if we don't have the virtues, we can get into trouble.
One of the earliest people in our discipline to look at mentoring relationships, Daniel Levinson, in his studies of adult development claimed that these relationships were some of the very most important that a young adult can have, and especially important that a mentor is helping you unearth a dream. Steven Duck, who has really researched interpersonal relationships more generally says, "Yeah, but remember, relationships of any kind can be messy and difficult. They can be full of tensions that can be problematic," and that is certainly true with mentorship.
In this hour together, I want to highlight some of the key tensions that we're likely to face when we're having a mentoring relationship, either with a trainee or somebody junior in our profession. I'm going to really begin by just talking about some of the qualities of mentorship that maybe heighten the probability for ethical issues.
These relationships are somewhat unusual in that there's very little training for these relationships. We take it for granted that they're going okay, but they have some qualities that might breed tensions that have an ethical quality down the road.
Number one, these relationships when they're at their very best are often long in duration. Some of them go on in perpetuity. These are relationships that may last until the death of the mentor, and even after death the mentor may continue to influence the mentee. As time goes by, these relationships become more reciprocal naturally. More bonded, more mutual, and so there is a deeper connection as these relationships go on. I think that can create certain kinds of ethical dynamics.
Another interesting thing about many mentoring relationships is they are informally formed, meaning they don't come from a formal mentoring program. They come not from a formal match, but they begin organically. You'll hear words used like chemistry and shared interests and other kinds of relational terms, and we shouldn't be surprised when people do find chemistry might create feelings of attraction at times. I think that is another issue.
There is always a power dynamic. In most relationships, there is a formally assigned role, maybe an advising or a supervisory relationship. At the very least, there is a power dynamic in terms of years of experience and the mentor always holds some power over the mentee, at least early in the relationship. We've got to be aware of that.
There are naturally multiple roles involved, and so if you happen to be a faculty member, for example, engaging in mentorship, you're also going to be teaching. You're going to be doing advising. You're going to be writing letters of recommendation. There are going to be a number of roles involved for the mentor, so we've got to be aware of that. They're always changing. They're fluid, they're evolving.
In the earlier webinar, I talked about a way of understanding mentorship as a quality of relationship, and I would just reiterate on this mentoring relationship continuum, as you move along any relationship continuum and you get to that really connected, a bit more intimate and committed relational end of the continuum, you increase the probability of certain kinds of ethical tensions. I think we've just got to be aware of that, and I think good mentors are aware that some of their very best mentorships may come with some ethical dynamics we've got to be conscious of.
I want to address this issue. The more you hear about mentoring and the more we talk about mentorship, there can be almost an implied message that faculty and other psychologists might be getting that everybody should be mentored. Everyone is entitled to a mentorship. I just want to suggest to you that that may not be true. You may have trainees and you may have junior folks working in your area that are not particularly receptive, not interested in mentoring for different reasons. I want to suggest maybe placing a stake in the ground early that we shouldn't be forcing these relationships on folks, nor should it be an indication of pathology if somebody is not particularly receptive to mentoring. There can be different personality reasons for that. Someone mentioned in the earlier webinar, I could be a second career student and I just may not feel the need for all the guidance and support that somebody junior might require.
Let me just get you, wherever you are, to do a little bit of reflection on mentorships that you've had and particularly times maybe when you've been in a mentoring role what have been the major ethical tensions that you've faced. Have there been any? What are the tensions? Have there been any ethical quandaries specifically related to mentoring that you've done? Most of us can think maybe about an uncomfortable moment or a difficult conflict that occurred in some relationship with someone who may have been in a mentoring role. These are not atypical. I will tell you that academic leaders sometimes get embroiled in issues that really relate to a mentor relationship when things are not going well.
We are going to see these cases. I'm going to share with you a few cases that have been changed in various ways that really came directly from those kinds of settings. Let's start with the first. I've got a top ten, in my view, of primary ethical tensions that mentors may face. Let's just start going through these. I'll pause with a couple of vignettes as we're going along, and again, if any of these issues jog particular questions or thoughts or experiences you want to offer or ask, feel free to send along your questions.
Number one, the level of relationship formality, I think, creates some ethical issues we have to be thoughtful about. If you are formally paired in a mentoring program, or if you're formally assigned to a student to mentor, there's a certain level of formality that creates some contours and creates some boundaries on the relationship that we don't have with the relationship is organic or informal, and we want to simply be thoughtful about that.
Formal relationships, those in which somebody is matched or paired, come with certain characteristics. Number one, they're high visibility. Everyone knows that you're paired. Everyone knows that you're mentor and mentee. Everyone is aware that there is a specific focus to that relationship. Maybe it's getting you through to graduation. Maybe it's helping you through a first year of work. There's a particular focus usually. We also have some boundaries on the duration. We know how long the relationship is going to go. If it's a formal program, usually there is some expectations.
Let me just say in informal relationships, those things are not true. There may not be any deadline or expiration date on the relationship. There may not be a particular focus, and there may not be any particular starting date or matching that occurs. These relationships occur largely under the radar. Nobody is watching. It really is up to me, the mentor, to make sure that the relationship is professional and appropriate, but it lacks the formal scrutiny that goes with formal relationships.
The other piece of a formal matching program is some process of discussing mutual expectations, and sometimes that is spelled out. There is a contract. We agree on a plan for development for the mentee. When it's informal, there really isn't that moment for what I describe as informed consent. We never really discuss, as a mentorship is beginning very gradually and organically, where the relationship is going, who expects what from the other, what the best outcomes might be of the relationship. So I think those relationships that are organic, and I think that encompasses more relationships than those that are formally matched ... I think they require more thoughtful deliberation on the part of the mentor. I've got to really be thinking about expectations the mentee may have. If there are some things the mentee should know early, I probably need to talk about that.
I don't know how you feel about this issue, but the competence matter. I've been having some conversations with folks here at APA today about the fact that we really, in psychology and I think in other fields, don't talk much about competence. We don't do much training for mentors. We don't teach mentors how to do this work. There is no assessment or evaluation of mentor competence along the way. We're pretty good at competence in clinical areas and other areas of practice. Not so much in mentorship.
So, here is the classic definition of competence that we see applied in various areas: "The habitual and judicious use of communication, knowledge, technical skills, clinical reasoning, emotions, values, and reflection in daily practice for the benefit of the individual and communities served." That sounds so easy when you look at it here. My question is, when you translate that to mentoring work, what does competence look like? I've got some thoughts for you, but I can tell you just based on my experience in training mentors that we really don't have a nice approach to evaluating mentorship competency. We don't do that. We don't do it in academe very well. We don't do it in psychology particularly, so we're often hoping that people that we assign to mentor roles or that take on mentoring duties have some competence. I think we've got to be thoughtful about what the implications of that may be.
Here is a first vignette, and I'd like to ... You've got it on the screen before you, but I'm going to go ahead and just read it with you, and then let's just think out loud together about what some of the ethical issues might be. This is based loosely on a case that came before an ethics body, and so let's just look at this together.
A graduate student in her fifth year of doctoral training files an ethics complaint with a university ethics committee claiming that her dissertation chair and adviser, [Dr. [Porus 00:15:03], abandoned her, leaving her emotionally distressed. It appears the two developed an unusual level of attachment due to frequent socializing and development of a personal relationship that many at the university described as intense. The student had several life crises and emotional problems during her training, and Dr. Porus would frequently provide what amounted to psychotherapy sessions that were as frequent as three to four times a week. He encouraged her to contact him by phone after hours, and often invited her along to events with his family. The student became quite distressed when, on her graduation, Dr. Porus attempted to terminate the relationship.