Mentorship: A Professional Obligation

Robin Gallardi, DDS, MS, FRCD(C), Dip ABOMS 6/9/2025

Leaving residency and entering private practice is a daunting transition often met with fear and insecurity. Residency provides the clinical skills we need, but it is difficult to find training to prepare you for a successful career in private practice.

Mentorship can fill in the gaps where training falls short. It is the guidance and expertise of our mentors that lead to our growth as individuals and the creation of a successful career.

The Importance of Mentoring

Mentoring is a reciprocal and collaborative at-will relationship. According to the Harvard Business Review, mentorship is a relationship with another individual who provides guidance and shares knowledge. It is a reciprocal and collaborative, at-will relationship. 

It is not just about developing the leaders of tomorrow, but it is the foundation of all organizational progress and development. Whether your organization is a solo, private practice like mine or a large multi-clinic conglomerate, your career success may depend on mentorship.

For example, business intelligence in medicine has shifted from being a taboo concept to an essential part of practice management. Each practice deals with HR, compensation, billing practices, overhead management, and long-term strategic planning. Without mentorship, managing these aspects can lead to stress, burnout, and career dissatisfaction.

As another example, mentorship can guide surgeons on maintaining a healthy work-life balance, offer healthy marriage or partnership advice, and provide tools for finding joy and reward in our careers. Mentorship enhances patient care, improves staff performance, and encourages advancement of the medical profession.

Mentoring benefits go well beyond our clinical practice and, maybe more importantly, help us develop our own personal identity — something that is often lost during residency. Mentoring can boost motivation, enhance empathy, build trust, and inspire continuous personal growth. Direction in areas of value, work-life balance, advocacy, and technology can provide clarity to our career path.

Mentoring can have several styles:

• Formal Mentoring: Structured engagements designed to meet certain development objectives.
• Informal Mentoring: Natural interactions with peers, senior partners, friends, or others.
• Multiple Mentoring: Being mentored by several different mentors simultaneously, each facilitating the development of a specific area or skill.

Consider which style works best for you.

Finding Mentors

The literature indicates that mentoring becomes less common upon completion of formal training and significantly declines with age (Entezami et al.). However, I believe mentoring is even more essential and valuable as our careers mature, particularly for solo practitioners who may no longer have daily interactions with colleagues or professionals within their specialty. A lack of mentoring can lead to:

• Feelings of isolation
• Lack of confidence
• Loss of skills
• Stress and burnout

Mentors in private practice should come from various disciplines. Your life outside of residency is multifaceted, requiring constant growth and nurturing. It is a misconception that mentors must come from within your past or current organizations or even from your peer groups. Mentorship outside of familiar training circles can be valuable in providing novel ways to expand our practice. Consider:

• Local Community: Reach out to like-minded colleagues or professionals nearby.
• Professional Organizations: Become a member of a professional organization and network with professionals there, identifying contacts and mentors.
• Online Platforms: Social media groups have proven invaluable for mentorship development. Connect with surgeons in other areas with appealing practice patterns. Mentors who are competitors or follow alternative career paths offer differing perspectives on practice, helping you identify your own true values. Online networking opportunities are particularly important for male-dominated specialties such as oral surgery, according to a recent study (Growing in Dentistry). Social media creates a neutral environment where women can expand their professional networks, validate social identities, and obtain social support.
• Reverse Mentoring: This form of mentoring occurs when older professionals seek younger mentors. It’s a bidirectional process that creates work environments with broader perspectives and appreciation for both older practices and modern innovations. It narrows the gap between older and younger generations, developing a mutually inclusive work environment with cross-generational learning.

Private practice requires lifelong mentoring for all stages of your career. The needs of younger surgeons differ from those of senior surgeons. The former often requires some grounding coming out of training, while the latter may feel the need for stimulation from a possible stagnant career.  Younger surgeons may be navigating contract negotiation, case selection, managing a team, or fiscal responsibility. Senior surgeons might be navigating midlife crises, illness and overall health, changing practice patterns, and determining when to stop practicing or retire.

While connecting with more experienced mentors can be valuable, you might find equal value in seeking a young mentor, perhaps with a dual goal of mentoring them.

• Diverse Perspectives: The majority of female surgeons are mentored by men due to the lack of women in senior positions. However, it’s been shown that having female mentors increases the number of women entering surgical specialties and faculty positions. Diversity in mentorship, including having mentors of differing cultural backgrounds, is equally important. Mentoring from different perspectives helps us better understand and lead our diverse communities.

The Mentorship Lifecycle

Maintaining and maximizing mentoring relationships involves:

• Constant Collaboration: Keeping the relationship productive.
• Open Conversations: Essential for a healthy learning relationship.
• Recognizing Lifespan: Mentoring relationships may end and be replaced by new ones.

Although maintaining a mentoring relationship long-term can be valuable, it is also natural for a relationship to fade and for it to be time for a new one.

Mentoring has several stages:

• Creation of the Relationship: Building trust and setting goals.
• Development of New Skills: Mentees begin to see changes within themselves.
• Maturation of the Relationship: Mentees connect to a larger network and may become mentors themselves.
• Separation and Redefinition: Mentors become more confident and self-reliant, recognizing the need for new mentors.

Mentorship as a Professional Obligation

It is a fundamental obligation as professionals to provide mentorship to strengthen surgery as a discipline. This will automatically contribute to the well-being of our patients and society in general. The finance world has been discussing mentorship benefits for years. What we can take from the business world is that our environment is forever changing, and we must adapt. New standards include leaders as mentors regardless of the size of your organization. This form of leadership raises the standards of excellence of your whole team and, subsequently, patient care. Shifting to a mentorship model of practice will have a powerful impact on you and your overall career success.

References

Enani et al. Med Ed 2023:1-8

Growing in Dentistry: Mentoring the Dental Professional. British Dent J. Vol: 232, pages 261–266 (2022)

J.A. Edwards. Am J of Surg 221 (2012)768-769

Ksoper GJ. Mentoring in the Military: Overview and Recommendations for the Individual. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University; 2002

Luna, GK. Mentoring the General Surgeon. Am J Surg 2007;193(5):543-546

Mentorship in surgical training. Entezami et al. Hand(2012) 7:30-36ffddd

Harvard Business Review. (2021, October). What's the Difference Between a Mentor and a Sponsor?