Mentoring as a mechanism for change: How can mentoring take your career to the next level?

The Horizons Institute International and Interdisciplinary Mentoring Programme was established to support the career development, ambitions, and confidence of all Horizon Institute colleagues — academics, professional services, and technical team members; to build interdisciplinary networks and support mechanisms to drive culture change; to provide leadership, career development and support to all.

At the heart of the scheme is a commitment to breaking down barriers and dismantling some of the challenges to participation through centring values of equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Here, Horizons Institute Manager Lauren Wray shares insights into the first year of the scheme and looks forward to another year of creating these supportive and meaningful connections.

Our first year was a learning curve in terms of the type of support our partners might need. I met with Charlotte Bonner-Evans, Mentoring Manager of the Future Leaders Fellows Development Network and we discussed how mentoring might support these needs.

What do we mean by mentoring?

“A mentor adopts a primarily selfless role in supporting the learning, development, and ultimate success of another person. As a mentor you will always benefit in some way from the relationship, but these benefits are usually indirect and not your main motivation for mentoring someone.”

The Mentoring Manual, second edition, a step-by-step guide to being a better mentor, Julie Starr.

The Horizons Institute International and Interdisciplinary Mentoring Programme aims to build a positive, collaborative research culture through:

Matching mentoring pairs from vastly different fields, disciplines, and sectors and encouraging pairs to find common ground related to their lived experiences, values, careers, opportunities, and challenges.

Seeking to disrupt senior to junior, academic to academic, Global North to Global South, discipline specific mentoring practice by inviting professional service staff, industry partners, mentors at all career stage and from the global south to be part of the mentoring programming.

Creating opportunities for different perspectives and approaches to percolate by prioritising cross-cultural, cross-discipline and cross-sector mentoring and creating a forum for mentors and mentees to come together in groups to support network and cohort building.

Developing a framework that encourages integration of disciplines, multi-directional experiential learning, and active listening and reflection.

“We need to do better at creating a safe and supportive environment that enables colleagues to flag when things are going wrong”.

Research Culture, Strategic Plan 2023–2028

In the first year of the Programme, we’ve matched 21 mentees with mentors from both academia and industry, across a range of disciplines, and from across the globe. We’ve also built our own systems and practices to support our mentees and mentors, and have created opportunities for them to connect as a group, as well as in their individual pairings through, for example, group mentor supervision sessions with a professional coach, and a mentee forum.

What do our mentees say?

“The Horizons mentoring programme has built my confidence and skills in leading large international projects. As a young female in the academy, having a female academic with vast experience in successfully managing large global research projects as my mentor is invaluable.”

Madeleine le Bourdon, University of Leeds.

“My mentor serves as an inspiration for where I aim to be in 5 years. Additionally, beyond academia, we have discussed the importance of maintaining a work-life balance, especially as both of us are fathers to young children. This discussion has added depth to our collaboration.”

Mohammed al Mosawi, University of Leeds.

What do our mentors say?

Mentoring can take mentors careers to the next level by supporting mentors to be more inclusive leaders, active listeners, and better collaborators.

When the Horizons Institute approached potential mentors and asked if they wanted to be involved in the mentoring programme, they gave several reasons for doing so in their mentoring matching form:

• To share knowledge, skills, expertise, and their career experience to support others.
• To support mentees to identify and achieve their career goals and objectives, and to gain confidence, especially in areas of interest to the mentor such as impact and understanding work through an external lens.
• To support equity and diversity in different research roles
• To gain new insights to problems and challenges and to discover new ways of thinking.
• To support mentees to draw threads between discipline-focussed work and interdisciplinary global challenges.
• To support emerging research leaders

The Horizons Institute International and Interdisciplinary Mentoring programme is in its infancy, but we asked mentors if the process of mentoring is changing the way they work, collaborate, approach their research or their careers, and if so, how?

“For me, mentoring is most rewarding when the responsibility for learning is something that is held equally between myself and the mentee. This is partly because mentoring is a mutually reflective practice, which requires me as mentor to engage with and reflect back the mentee’s lived experience and working practices for their insight; almost inevitably, this results in reflecting on my own experience and practices through the lens of insights surfaced in the mentoring space.

“Curiosity and openness to other points of view are both key to this, and this now translates into my approach to relationship-building outside of mentoring.”

Kylie Norman, University of Leeds

“From my own perspective mentoring is important to mentors because it helps me to reflect on my relationship with my own research and students. It enables me to build professional networks, offers opportunities for intercultural understanding and awareness and supports my own leadership development.

Stellah Mukhovi, University of Nairobi

“I am learning more about how Social Scientists communicate and their language and vocabulary. I listen to some sentences and share with my mentee how I would have said the same thing differently. The beauty is that she understands me the same way I understood her.”

Benjamin Lamptey, West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adaptive Land Use

Become a mentor.

We’re looking for mentors to support our next cohort of Challenge Network co-leads and Global Academy participants.

We’re particularly interested in working with mentors who are based in the Global South and/or outside of the Higher Education sector (including those who have moved from academia to industry or vice versa), and mentors working in policy or the third sector, fields our partners are keen to engage with in their research.

Why should you become a mentor?

• Mentors are discovering things about themselves; about the context their mentee is operating in and to which they need to be sensitive to when they are engaging with them. Mentoring enables them to grow as international and interdisciplinary collaborators.
• Discussing professional development with a mentee can make mentors think about their own career and leadership, through offering an opportunity for reflection.
• Mentoring provides an opportunity to practice important skills in interdisciplinary research, such as active listening; creating a more nuanced understanding of, and approach to, different challenges; and building a broader understanding of the sector, which can only be beneficial to future collaborations.
• Mentoring can also help support authentic and meaningful network building.

It has been incredibly rewarding to see the impact the mentoring programme is having professionally and personally for both mentors and mentees. For many, the prospect of engaging in mentoring is a daunting one, but don’t let that put you off.

It is not uncommon for prospective mentors to “unqualified” to work with a mentee or to feel imposter phenomena, while prospective mentees might want to run a mile from discussing career goals or feel pressed for time to pause and take stock.

However, in my experience of coordinating the programme, everyone takes something unexpected from the mentoring process and it’s a valuable opportunity for mentors and mentees alike to see where their research and career might go if they’re willing to take the leap.

If you would like to become a mentor in the Horizons Institute International and Interdisciplinary Mentoring Programme, please contact Dave Riley at horizons@leeds.ac.uk