Transforming the Postdoc-Faculty Mentoring Relationship

Postdoctoral training aims to develop independence in recent doctoral recipients, preparing them for the career of their choice. Postdoctoral researchers have primary mentors who help them foster this independence, whether in research, teaching or other scholarly pursuits, by providing discipline-specific experience and support. As is true for all mentoring relationships, the postdoc and the primary mentor each have their own expectations for the relationship. While one might assume these expectations mostly align, this is not always the case: Explicitly setting expectations at the beginning of a relationship can help avoid frictions in the future.

To promote skill development and invite reflection on mentoring relationships, the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs (OPA) at Washington University in St. Louis has led three sets of mentorship workshops for postdocs and faculty members since June 2023. Developed from the Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experiences in Research’s “Entering Mentoring” materials and in collaboration with the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences and the Office of the Provost, the all-day workshops covered mentoring skills and strategies to address topics including equity and inclusion, effective communication, alignment of expectations and the articulation of a mentoring philosophy.

We purposefully separated postdocs and faculty members into different sections to reduce power dynamics and create inclusive spaces for sharing. We asked the groups about the expectations they had for the postdoc-faculty mentoring relationship. Their responses reveal major misalignments between mentors and mentees in distinct dimensions. In this article, we share what we learned for the benefit of faculty mentors and career development practitioners.

Professional Development Dimensions

Each faculty and postdoc group brainstormed and generated a list of their expectations for the mentoring relationship that they felt was relatively comprehensive. Inspired by the National Postdoctoral Association’s core competencies for postdocs and the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ career readiness competencies, we categorized the responses into the following six professional development dimensions:

1. Research skills and discipline-specific knowledge development involves the methods, concepts, relationships and thinking specific to a discipline.
2. Communication skills include professional networking, public speaking, academic writing, negotiation and engaging different audiences. This also includes proficiency in English language for nonnative speakers.
3. Leadership and management skills encompass people and project management, identifying and clarifying team goals and motivating and inspiring others through action.
4. Diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) focuses on inclusive behavior and discipline-specific professionalism, emphasizing the importance of working in diverse teams, valuing different perspectives and interacting with others respectfully.
5. Career planning involves career exploration, professional networking, conducting informational interviews and setting career goals. It also involves self-assessments and bundling career and immigration planning.
6. Teaching and mentoring skills include guiding and advising colleagues, students and mentees, listening actively, giving feedback, and aligning expectations.

What We Noticed in Our Data

Our analysis of the responses provided by faculty and postdocs during the mentoring workshops reveals significant misalignment in expectations regarding the mentoring relationship. Both groups briefly mentioned skills related to research competency, but there was a notable lack of emphasis on discipline-specific knowledge development. This either suggests that this competency is too obvious to mention, or it reveals a disconnect in how specialized expertise is valued during postdoctoral training. If it is the latter, postdocs with low discipline-specific knowledge when they start their appointments may see more obstacles to advancing their career in a timely manner.

Additionally, postdocs expect their faculty supervisors to help them develop a broad range of communication skills, including abilities for professional networking, public speaking and science communication. However, faculty supervisors tend to focus narrowly on grant writing and conference presentations. This discrepancy highlights a need for a more comprehensive approach to communication training that aligns with postdocs’ professional needs for transferable skills.

Likewise, postdocs desire specific leadership and management training to prepare them for principal investigator roles. Faculty, on the other hand, expect postdocs to demonstrate accountability and project management skills but do not provide the necessary training or opportunities for growth in these areas. Relatedly, both groups mentioned very little about DEIA skills. The gaps in these two competencies point to a need for structured inclusive leadership development programs that can prepare postdocs for current and future leadership roles.

The career planning category also shows a disconnect. Faculty appear eager to assist postdocs in setting career goals and connecting them with relevant contacts. However, they report a lack of knowledge to support career exploration beyond academia or the integration of career and immigration planning for their international postdocs. This highlights the importance of incorporating discussions and resources to support career exploration and international postdocs’ needs into faculty development training.

Conceptualizing Mentoring Relationships

Besides the six professional development dimensions discussed above, an additional topic came up during the conversations with postdocs: the nature of the mentoring relationship. This refers to the characteristics that postdocs attribute to their ideal mentoring relationship with their faculty supervisor. Postdocs have high expectations for their faculty mentors in terms of openness, transparency and advocacy for their working conditions and success. They would like to have mentors who provide a friendly environment for their training, allowing them to grow toward independence and make mistakes without fear of repercussions.

However, postdocs report that their faculty do not articulate clear expectations for the mentoring relationship, which leads to unmet needs and frustrations. Interestingly enough, faculty in our workshops did not mention any characteristics of an effective mentoring relationship, which reveals a profound misalignment in the way mentor-mentee relationships are conceptualized.

Taking Action

Addressing these misalignments requires a fundamental shift in how we conceptualize postdoctoral mentoring. Our findings at WashU demonstrate that while there are significant gaps between faculty and postdoc expectations, there are also clear pathways for growth. Below are the actionable lessons we learned at WashU to promote effective mentoring far beyond research supervision.

First, institutions can foster more meaningful and productive mentoring relationships by implementing structured mentoring training and giving faculty mentors communication strategies to identify and align expectations. A simple activity like asking faculty and postdocs to generate lists of expectations, as in our WashU experience, could be an eye-opener for both mentors and mentees, especially if they have the opportunity to discuss and reconcile the lists.

Second, we learned that exceptional faculty mentors go beyond the traditional roles of adviser or teacher—they create supportive spaces for learning from mistakes, advocate for their mentees’ success and actively support work-life harmony. They help postdoctoral mentees create their own vision of success, ensuring reasonable availability for mentoring interactions and encouraging them to build networks of multiple mentors who can offer diverse perspectives and expertise. For this reason, the WashU OPA is developing a more advanced level of faculty mentoring training that will focus on supporting mentees’ goal setting and career exploration.

Third, our experience suggests that a comprehensive approach to mentoring needs to incorporate intentional support for the personal development and well-being of the mentee. This holistic perspective is precisely the focus of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Mentorship, Well-Being and Professional Development. By viewing mentorship as a relationship-centered practice rather than just a means to research productivity, we can create more supportive and effective postdoctoral training environments.

Finally, this experience has also shown us that postdoctoral mentees need explicit training to make the most out of their mentoring relationships. Mentees will benefit from learning how to “mentor up”—that is, understanding how they process mentoring, identifying their mentoring need(s) and designing a mentoring plan together with their mentor. This approach can complement the mentor-oriented efforts listed above to achieve mentoring success.

The future of postdoctoral training lies not just in developing excellent researchers, but in nurturing well-rounded professionals who will thrive in their chosen careers. This is only possible through relationship-centered mentoring, where expectations are openly and easily communicated. Faculty mentors and postdocs can benefit from intentional, institutionally supported mentoring training focused on aligning expectations, promoting career development and well-being, and educating the mentee to mentor up. With relationship-centered mentoring, we can contribute to transforming the postdoctoral experience.