Find Someone Different From You, and Other Mentoring Advice From Lawrence David

What’s the secret to balancing support and candor as a mentor? How do you find a mentor who truly challenges your thinking? How much can a mentor really shape your success? 

Lawrence David is associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology. He spoke with Maria LaMonaca Wisdom, assistant vice provost for faculty advancement, about his perspectives on mentoring.

Across your academic career, who influenced you most as a mentor, and what made them such a good mentor for you? 

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Probably my Ph.D. advisor, because he had such a unique way of seeing the world and thinking about things… I could never predict how he was going to respond to something. It was always so surprising to me, and it took me years to figure out how his brain was working. 

What made him — and all the mentors I’ve had and really valued — so great was that he was so different from me. I think a good mentor is different from you, because it forces you to grow and see the world through someone else’s lens. I couldn’t imagine how their minds worked, and it took years of training myself to think the way they think about things. So find a mentor who pushes you and is not similar to you.

Aside from thinking differently from you, was there any particular thing your mentors did that contributed to your success and the strength of the relationships? 

There’s no substitute for time. The mentors I’ve really valued, they all had this in common. I just spent hours with them on a daily or weekly basis, and I realized that for a couple of them, I caught them in a stage of their career where they just had a lot of time. And they would be accessible in the sense that I could see how they honestly operated — they were heavily unfiltered. 

For example, one of my mentors and I were working on a science paper and someone was contesting our findings. It later turned out that they were wrong, but they were doing it in a way that made us look potentially very, very wrong, very, very publicly. My mentor at the time could have chosen to appear to me as confident or bulletproof, but it was the complete opposite. I remember him receiving me in his office — the shades were drawn and it was very dark. He wasn’t presenting a very optimistic view of what we were going to do, but it was very real, and I learned a lot from that kind of vulnerability. It made me take very, very seriously, rigor and scientific research. And again, we were right; we had been rigorous, but at the time, it really reinforced how much this stuff really matters. And it made it clear to me that he was very human and that it’s okay to be stressed out. Had he put out a more confident front, I’m not sure that would have helped me, actually. 

What have you found challenging as a mentor and how did you address that challenge? 

Striking a balance between candor and support. Almost by definition, the person being mentored is in a more vulnerable position, so it’s important for there to be a sense of trust that the mentor has respect for the mentee. So make sure that you’re cultivating that, and at the same time providing enough candid feedback so that people learn and get to where they want to go. And sometimes you want to help someone get to a certain place, but they might not be ready to get to that point. So it’s a balance. Because if you go too fast, then there won’t be enough trust, but if you go too slow you can be very supportive but arguably they’re not going to grow.

What advice would you have for Duke faculty and grad students seeking to develop as mentors? 

One thing is practice. You learn a lot of stuff by what works for you, trial and error. Also you can set limits on the expectations of how much influence your mentorship can have. In the beginning, if I thought things weren’t going well — or if I was hoping someone would get to a certain stage — it was a failing for me if I couldn’t help them get there. 

But if you’re dealing with graduate students or postdocs, people who are in their mid to late 20s at this point, you can only shape them so much. You can just nudge. There are limits to how much impact I can have so I don’t internalize the outcome. It’s not that you don’t care, but people are going to do their thing.

What advice would you give for mentees who want to get more out of their mentoring relationships? 

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It’s not easy to get negative feedback. But negative feedback is basically the most valuable thing you can be getting as a mentee. In sports or athletics, I’ve noticed, there’s a different level of comfort with negative feedback, and I think it often comes after loss. If you lose at something, most people don’t expect to be told that what they were doing was working. And obviously some [mentors] are probably more gifted in making it seem less hurtful or threatening. But try to bear in mind that the vast majority of the time, people are just trying to help. As soon as [a mentor] makes time in their schedule to be with someone else, the generosity has already started. And then everything downstream of that is already a gift, in a way.

Is there anything else about mentorship you’d like to share? 

I don’t think I expressed gratitude enough to my former mentors. It just occurs to me that I should text my old mentor, “thank you for what you’ve done.” And so, what’s going through my head is that I owe a couple of mentors a thank-you note.