Making a Mentor
Seasoned nurses talk about what it takes to be a good mentor

By Cathryn Domrose
February 11, 2002

How important is mentoring in nursing? As many nurses have long known and many hospital administrators are learning, it's vital. And not everyone can do it.

"We're beginning to see how important mentoring is and what happens when you don't have it," said Joan Engebretson, Dr.PH, RN, associate professor at the school of nursing at the University of Texas-Houston Health Science Center. "It's from your mentor that you learn the fine-tuned ins and outs of working in an organized culture."

A mentor does more than teach skills and facts, she said. True mentors serve as guardians who "bring someone into a group to become a full-fledged member of the group."

Good mentors don't preach, they listen, say nurses who have both mentored and been mentored themselves. They don't advise, they suggest various possibilities. Most of all, they don't smother.

"They don't stand in your way of getting ahead," said Katherine Vestal, Ph.D., RN, president of Work Innovations Inc., a health care consulting group. "I've had many mentors in my life. The ones who have been most effective are the ones who have shown me what to do, then shown me what I could do."

Good mentors are often the more seasoned nurses in the organization "who also have good attitudes," said Carol Ann Cavouras, MS, RN, president and owner of Phoenix-based Lawrenz Consulting, which works with acute care hospitals on staffing and scheduling issues.

But sometimes a mentor can be a peer. Marlene Roman, MSN, RN, a medical/surgical clinical nurse specialist at North Broward and Coral Springs Medical Center in southern Florida and president of the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses, remembers a fellow new graduate who supported her in her first nursing job. "She was very smart, and we helped each other," Roman said.

Vestal, Roman and other longtime nurses said they didn't find their mentors through a formal matching program. They chose them when they changed jobs, decided to go back to school or needed to learn something new. Some said they had several different mentors at the same time they went to when they wanted help with various aspects of their professions.

True mentoring relationships have to be spontaneous, Engebretson said. "You could never systemize that sort of wonderful mentor-protégé relationship." But that doesn't mean a formally assigned mentor can't help someone new to the job, she added, as long as both understand they can be reassigned if the relationship isn't working. "I think these structured programs are really good at beginning a mentoring process," she said.

"One of the things about choosing each other is that you grow to know each other," said Cecelia Gatson Grindel, Ph.D., RN, associate director for the undergraduate program at Georgia State University in Atlanta and a founding member of the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses. But taking time to get to know someone is a luxury new graduates seldom have, she said, which is why formal mentoring programs for new nurses are important.

Not everyone can be a good mentor, Engebretson said. Sometimes mentors go into the relationship with unrealistic expectations-that they will mold a new person, that the new nurse will always come to them for help. But good mentors understand that their mentees will eventually become peers and will probably go on to new mentors.

"No matter who your mentors are, you almost always outgrow them at some point," Vestal said. "Mentors may even end up working for the person they mentored."