Setting Expectations and Boundaries
Bethany Brookshire (00:11):
With any new relationship, it can be intimidating to know what to expect of the other person or of the relationship overall. It's no different when it comes to mentoring relationships. If mentoring relationships are meant to be mutually beneficial, the relationship needs to work for all parties. Sometimes this means that the best thing to do is to set parameters, expectations, boundaries. This is The Science of Mentorship podcast from the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine that explores the mentoring skills that can and should be learned to unleash everyone's potential in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, or STEMM careers. I'm your host Bethany Brookshire.
In our last episode, I got to hear from students who told me how they found their mentors, and how in turn those mentors helped them find their way. Something stood out to me about these conversations. It seemed that a lot of students felt like they needed to set specific expectations for their mentoring relationships and even set boundaries. And that is a pretty particular skill that can take some practice. Carey Schafer, the science policy fellow I spoke with last episode found that if she wanted to benefit from a mentoring relationship, she needed to communicate exactly what she needed.
Carey Schafer (01:31):
So I think something that's helped me from my previous mentoring experiences, definitely coming in with clear expectations and yeah, understanding what I have wanted and what I've needed to add out of that mentorship experience. I was very forthright with my advisor in graduate school saying, "I need someone who can meet with me more often, there is going to be available to have meetings with me and to answer questions. I want to make sure that the time that we're spending together, an hour every two weeks is well spent." And so I'm structuring that time to make sure that we have something to talk about, whether it's performance reviews or job interviews or something like that. Because I have this brain trust that I get to tap into so I want to make sure that we're using that time well. And that we do have the clear expectations about what I can get from them, but also what I can contribute to that relationship as well.
Bethany Brookshire (02:31):
Sometimes students aren't sure what they should be expecting from their mentor. Carey initially felt this way but she learned a lot from her past experiences with mentorship.
Carey (02:40):
And I think it's just over time being in those mentorship type relationships, you start to understand, what do I need out of this relationship? And also what can I bring into it as someone who's being mentored?
Bethany Brookshire (02:52):
Carey also discovered that when it came to boundaries, each mentoring relationship was different. Some relationships had stricter boundaries.
Carey (02:59):
So I think as a result of being a woman, my graduate mentor always wanted to make sure that that professional line was never crossed. And so that was always very academic, professional. Certainly we would have personal, funny conversations, but it never crossed into that personal level that I've had with some of my other mentoring relationships.
Bethany Brookshire (03:30):
Other relationships had softer boundaries and were more personal. Carey found this kind of relationship with another mentor.
Carey (03:37):
So we think it's much easier to bridge that divide and cross that professional, personal boundary and still not have it feel unprofessional in any sort of way, and be able to talk about things that are going on in your life and have them provide their life experience and everything.
Bethany Brookshire (04:01):
Even though the expectations and boundaries varied, each mentoring relationship served its purpose and pushed Carey forward in her career. Expectations and boundaries can allow the mentoring relationship to thrive. They can create a safe environment with guidelines on how much the mentee is willing to share and how their mentor is expected to respond. Some students might feel like it's awkward to set expectations and boundaries at the start of their mentoring relationship, especially students who are new to academia or early in their career. Because of this, I wanted to find out what students do to formally set expectations in their mentoring relationships.
Speaker 4 (04:43):
Before I arrived to the lab, we had about three phone conversations that were like an hour to two hours long about my life, what didn't work at Yale, what worked in undergrad and so on. And then he assigned me my mentor.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
I feel like it definitely depends on the mentor and how they're vulnerable with you at first. They are the mentor so I let them take the lead as to what kind of boundaries they want to set. But if I feel like I'm comfortable enough, I might ask slightly more personal questions. But again, it depends on the person and what I want from that relationship.
Bethany Brookshire (05:22):
In some cases, the mentor may ask the mentee to let them know what it is they expect of them. Sometimes the mentee has to bring up expectations and boundaries on their own. Dr. Andrew Sabelhaus is a postgraduate fellow in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon who wanted to help the students he's mentoring establish their own parameters. As I talked with Dr. Sabelhaus, I understood more and more why establishing boundaries is so important for mentees.
Dr. Andrew Sabelhaus (05:49):
Especially for underrepresented students, it cannot be taken as a given that faculty members or mentors or supervisors are trustworthy people. And there's a little bit of that danger in going and committing to a personal relationship on top of a professional relationship.
Bethany Brookshire (06:07):
Dr. Sabelhaus knew from his own personal experiences how uncomfortable students could feel in a new mentoring relationship. They might not know how much they should share about their personal life. They might not know if they can even trust their mentor. If they're in a mentoring group, they may not know how to engage with others and what's expected of those interactions. So when Dr. Sabelhaus started his own mentoring group with undergraduate researchers, he wanted to make sure his mentees felt safe to set their own expectations and boundaries.
Dr. Andrew Sabelhaus (06:36):
I now do not expect students to share all of their lives with me. I do not expect students to, for example, trust me [inaudible 00:06:46], because this is the kind of thing where I know now that there are power structures involved here. And so I set this expectation very implicitly while we have these interactions of I'm open, here you can come in and join me here, but I also don't push very hard. I know that we can form a perfectly fine, very professional relationship that still preserves students' sense of you could think about it, maybe of self protection.
Bethany Brookshire (07:16):
To help the students establish their own expectations and to set boundaries in the group, Dr. Sabelhaus set up a formal method to make sure that everyone was on the same page of what's expected of them and what's expected of their mentor.
Dr. Andrew Sabelhaus (07:29):
If I have a group of three people or more, we will spend time doing ground rules and expectations and a community agreement. In my experience, having some of this more formal, hierarchy, maybe a little bit of you can think about it as, standards or expectations among a group of people, has made an enormous impact on inclusion, diversity and success of a more diverse group of people in the teams that I've mentored.
Bethany Brookshire (07:55):
Even though the process of setting guidelines is formal. It's a collaborative process where everyone gets a say in what's expected of each other.
Dr. Andrew Sabelhaus (08:02):
And it's not just a list of things to do. It's a list that we all agree on. Right? That's the big difference. Is that if someone says, "Here's how you should talk to other people." It's kind of like, well, fine. But if it's something where we've all talked about it and we all know why this is important, and it's something that everyone has input on, then it's more empowering than top down rules.
Bethany Brookshire (08:32):
Dr. Sabelhaus realized that the goal of boundaries and expectations wasn't to force the rules that he wanted, nor was it just a way to bond as a group or make sure everyone felt close and buddy, buddy with each other, if they eventually got there, that was fine. But at first, the goal of the boundaries was to make sure everyone felt comfortable and safe co-existing in that group together. Some mentoring relationships will use what's called a mentorship compact or agreement, where mentees and mentors co-create and write down structured expectations and consistently check in to see if they are being met. In my conversations with students, I realized that the ability to set these guidelines in a mentoring relationship, well, it really depended on the mentor. Trevonn Giles is a PhD student who at one point had two mentors that had different sets of boundaries and expectations for their students. His first mentor was open to getting really personal with her students.
Trevonn Giles (09:29):
When lab meeting starts, she will ask every person in lab how their day's going, and we will not start lab meeting until she gets an answer. And if you're like, "Oh, I'm fine." She'll be like, "No, what's really going on?" And it will get personal. Whereas Dr. Nester sort of leaves an open space and lets you decide how far in you want to come about things. And so I can just say, "Hey, something personal is going on. I need to take a week." And he will say, "Okay, let me know if you need anything." But I can also say, "Hey, I'm not feeling good or my mom's not feeling good or whatnot." And he's able to navigate them as well. And so he doesn't pry, but he's also fully responsive whenever you need it.
Bethany Brookshire (10:13):
What's important is that the mentee decides the boundaries for themselves and isn't pressured by their mentor or program to put those boundaries down for the sake of their career. But I also learned in these conversations that unfortunately boundaries are often breached.
Speaker 8 (10:30):
[inaudible 00:10:30] where there was an expectation that my PI would say, "I expect you to work on the weekends." And that blew my mind. If I designed my experiments appropriately I shouldn't have to come in on weekends. But she expects us to be there. And that didn't sit well with me or my family.
Speaker 9 (10:53):
The goal of an advisor is to guide you through the process of getting your PhD. But that doesn't give you access to me as a human being. Right? As someone who works for you, sure. But not as this emotional being that I am. I have wants, needs, desires. I have family. I have things that are personal to me that I don't have to share in my workplace and the expectation that I should is wrong.
Speaker 8 (11:26):
Another story from that book lab was actually with COVID and since they'd shut down, I'm in New York City. New York City shut down in general. There's an expectation that we would come into the lab to check on things and we were uncomfortable with that. And so we needed to voice our opinions with our PI that we don't want to do this. And we could tell that in our conversation that it wasn't well received. And it was a little shocking to see that the priority was the research and not our safety and wellbeing.
Bethany Brookshire (12:05):
When students told me about moments when their boundaries were breached by their mentor, I had to wonder, how might this impact their career? It seemed that when a student's boundaries were disrespected, it made it really difficult to thrive in STEMM. Anthony Keyes is a PhD student who saw his peers suffer after boundaries were disrespected. His peers had moments where they thought they were safe revealing personal information to their mentors, but it didn't always go as planned.
Anthony Keyes (12:31):
I've seen multiple people in groups I've worked with where revealing parts of their life ended up hurting them. So like a lot of my female colleagues when they opened up about like, "Oh, I'm going to get married." A lot of professors saw them as less than now. Like they're no longer committed to the work, they're just going to be a wife now. And this would be from both male and female PIs that I've worked with.
Bethany Brookshire (13:06):
This really troubled Anthony. And even though these faculty members never treated him in this way, it set him on edge.
Anthony Keyes (13:12):
So I definitely feel like my boundaries are very dependent on the people around me and how they're treated as well. So I hold my mentors to a high standard, not just for how they treat me but people in the lab as well. When I saw a PI that I was working with treat someone like that, I would definitely shut off from them. So it doesn't even have to be someone necessarily directly influencing you, but if I see you treating people around me in negative ways that's going to make me pull up my boundaries or even challenge your own, like calling it out and stuff like that.
Bethany Brookshire (13:49):
With the students I talked to, it seemed common that they all wanted to feel free to make personal life decisions without the fear that their academics or career would suffer should their mentor not agree with their decision. This is where boundaries help. And if the boundary is disrespected, the student should feel safe in acknowledging this to their mentor. Anthony learned that expressing his desired boundaries was a necessity.
Anthony Keyes (14:12):
Some professors might make it clear how much they want to know. And I respect that. If other professors I've worked with don't make it clear, I try to set the boundaries myself then.
Bethany Brookshire (14:23):
At first, the idea of setting expectations and boundaries seemed a bit restrictive on mentoring relationships. But like we learned in the last episode, mentoring relationships can vary. As students told me about their varied experiences it became evident, that when all parties in a mentoring relationship know what to expect of each other that relationship can be more collaborative and mutually beneficial. Respecting boundaries can actually help the mentee to feel safe as they establish their STEMM identity and integrate it with other aspects of their life. Dr. Mkyel Green, who we heard in our last episode felt like it was a game changer when his boundaries were respected.
Dr. Mkyel Green (15:00):
Finding someone who had a sense of importance of family or boundaries was a big deal for me. And so the example of my current PI saying, "You take the time off, take what you need, I mean, you just started but that's fine. Just talk with me." Was when boundaries are beautifully respected. And I really appreciate that flexibility that she's able to have.
Bethany Brookshire (15:25):
When Dr. Green's mentor respected how much he valued family, it gave him the freedom to focus both on science and his loved ones without feeling like he was expected to sacrifice one for the other. Mentors often set the stage for how boundaries and expectations will be respected. Expectations can be set at the beginning of a relationship, but they should also be acknowledged and even altered throughout the entire mentorship. And as expectations are made and boundaries are respected, students have the opportunity to reach their full potential in STEMM.
In our next episode, we're going to hear more stories from students on how mentoring relationships can impact a really important part of students' lives, and that is family. Until then, you can learn more about the science of effective mentoring in STEMM at nas.edu/mentoring. If you're enjoying The Science of Mentorship, please tell your friends, colleagues, students, teachers, and of course, your mentors and mentees about our podcast. And help others discover it by giving us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Thanks for listening.
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