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Mutual Mentorship Model

Mutual Mentorship Model

What Is Mutual Mentorship?

Mutual mentorship is a reciprocal mentoring style in which both parties in a mentoring relationship are considered as teachers and as learners at the same time. There is no designated mentor or mentee, and information flows in two directions (1).

Additional Resource – extra materials, guides, or tools for further learning and support.
Discover how DM3P utilizes mutual mentorship to create a supportive, inclusive community in medicine. Learn about shared learning, peer support, and collaborative professional growth.

How Does DM3P Use Mutual Mentorship?

DM3P’s model of mutual mentorship combines conventional mutual mentorship principles, group mentoring practices, and social network theory (2,3) to generate a vibrant learning community. In this community, clinicians at all stages of training can organically establish their own mentoring relationships tailored to their needs.
DM3P does not use a top-down approach to assign its members into mentoring partnerships. Instead, we empower our members through two parallel approaches:

  • Build community by convening small and large groups to learn, co-create, and apply practical methods to confront problems encountered while navigating medicine with a disability.
  • Encourage participants to forge as many one-on-one connections with each other as desired, and in whatever capacity is most helpful - including mutual mentoring dyads, traditional advising relationships, friendships, or something else entirely.

Why Has DM3P Adopted a Community Learning Approach to Mutual Mentorship?

Owing to their underrepresentation in medicine (4,5), disabled clinicians and trainees have few local role models or tailored mentorship opportunities to help them navigate their professions. Mutual mentoring group networks like DM3P are highly effective at creating “trusting and supportive environments” for underrepresented minorities to obtain the core mentoring functions of career enhancement and psychosocial support (6-10).

Learn why DM3P has adopted a community learning approach to foster inclusive, supportive, and collaborative mentorship in medicine. Explore the benefits of shared knowledge, peer support, and collective growth.
Benefits of Mutual Mentorship – fostering collaboration, support, shared learning, and professional growth through reciprocal mentoring relationships.

Benefits of Mutual Mentorship

Mutual mentorship is an ideal form of information exchange for our community of disabled healthcare professionals because disability lived experience often does not track with stage of training. Flattening the traditional mentor-mentee hierarchy elevates disability lived experience as a source of wisdom of equal importance to professional experience.

For example, compare a faculty level clinician who just acquired a disabling medical condition with a health professions student who was born with a disability. The newly disabled clinician may have decades of healthcare experience but may also need help advocating for herself while adjusting her workflow to efficiently care for patients. Conversely, the health professions student may be an expert on how to fight for their rights in university settings and workplaces, but they may also need coaching on how to best support the healthcare team during clinical rotations. In a traditional mentoring relationship, information would flow only one way, from the clinician to the student. In a mutual mentoring relationship, professional hierarchy is abandoned, enabling bidirectional information flow. Now the clinician and the student can fully share their complementary knowledge bases, which boosts learning and empowerment for both parties.

Benefits of Group Mentorship

In group mentorship, three or more people support each other’s growth. This flexible, inclusive approach to mentorship offers many advantages over one-on-one mentoring:

  • More effectively reaches people who lack local access to quality one-on-one mentoring relationships (11)
  • Enhances knowledge sharing through multidirectional information exchange (11)
  • Supports multiple perspectives, thus embracing the diversity of disability lived experiences (11)
  • Provides multiple potential relationships to meet members’ differing needs, an effective strategy to foster interdependence (11) and mentor for diversity (12,13)
  • Enables stronger and more holistic psychosocial support through friendships, widened social networks (11), and a safe space to resist stereotypes and develop culturally affirming identities (14,15)
Discover more about DM3P’s Mutual Mentorship Model, an initiative fostering inclusive, supportive, and collaborative mentoring relationships within the disability in medicine community. Explore resources, community forums, and success stories.

Where Can I Learn More about DM3P’s Mutual Mentorship Model?

To learn more about DM3P’s approach to mutual mentorship, please refer to our YouTube video on mentorship (1) and DM3P’s presentation (16) at the 5th annual Stanford Conference on Disability in Healthcare.

References

  1. Disability Med Mentors. 2022 03 Tom Caruso [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/9XDQmKmMOYE?si=gj5okHDbhbuIjTsm. Published August 19, 2024. Accessed February 6, 2025.
  2. Edberg MC. Chapter 5: Social, Cultural, and Environmental Theories (Part I). In: Edberg MC. Essentials of Health Behavior: Social and Behavioral Theory in Public Health. 3rd ed. Jones & Bartlett Learning; 2020:51-64.
  3. Dahlberg ML, Bryars-Winston A. 2 The Science of Mentoring Relationships: What Is Mentorship? In: Dahlbeerg ML, Bryant’s-Winston A, eds. The Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM. National Archives Press; 2019.
  4. Nouri Z, Dill MJ, Conrad SS, Moreland CJ, Meeks LM. Estimated Prevalence of US Physicians With Disabilities [published correction appears in JAMA Netw Open. 2021 Apr 1;4(4):e2110025. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.10025.] [published correction appears in JAMA Netw Open. 2022 Aug 1;5(8):e2232194. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.32194.]. JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(3):e211254. Published 2021 Mar 1. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.1254
  5. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Prevalence of Disability by Occupation Group - United States, 2016-2020. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. May 19, 2023. Accessed February 6, 2025. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7220a1.htm
  6. Petersen S, Pearson BZ, Moriarty MA. Amplifying Voices: Investigating a Cross-Institutional, Mutual Mentoring Program for URM Women in STEM. Innovative Higher Education 2020;45:317.
  7. Yun JH, Baldi B, Sorcinelli MD. Mutual Mentoring for Early-Career and Underrepresented Faculty: Model, Research, and Practice. Innovative Higher Education 2016;41:441.
  8. List K, Sorcinelli MD. Increasing Leadership Capacity for Senior Women Faculty through Mutual Mentoring. Journal of Faculty Development 2018;32:7-15.
  9. Kram KE. Phases of the Mentor Relationship. Academy of Management Journal 1983;26:608-25.
  10. Kram KE. Mentoring at work: Scott, Foresman, Glenview, Ill, London, United States; 1985.
  11. Mullen CA, Klimaitis CC. Defining mentoring: a literature review of issues, types, and applications. Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2021;1483(1):19-35. doi:10.1111/nyas.14176
  12. Sorcinelli MD, Jung Y. From Mentor to Mentoring Networks: Mentoring in the New Academy. Change 2007;39:58-61.
  13. Yun JH, Sorcinelli MD. Chapter 19: When Mentoring Is the Medium. To Improve the Academy 2009;27:365-84.
  14. Jayakumar UM. Why are all the Black students still sitting together in the proverbial college cafeteria? A look at research informing the figurative question being taken by the Supreme Court in Fisher. https://www.heri.ucla.edu/PDFs/Why-Are-All-the-Black-Students-Still-Sitting-Together-in-the-Proverbial-College-Cafeteria.pdf Published October 2015. Accessed February 6, 2025.
  15. Tatum BD. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race: Revised and Updated. Basic Books; 2017. 16. Stanford Medicine ADIE. Session 5 - Mutual Mentorship: An Accessible Tool to Navigate an Inaccessible World [Video]. YouTube
  16. Stanford Medicine ADIE. Session 5 - Mutual Mentorship: An Accessible Tool to Navigate an Inaccessible World [Video]. YouTube https://youtu.be/dWR2zIy54lc?si=lZGi89VwbvyliSBu. Published June 18, 2024. Accessed February 6, 2025.