CGH faculty attended a mentorship workshop with Dr. Monica Gandhi, MD

Weill Cornell Medicine’s Center for Global Health (CGH) senior faculty recently participated in a workshop with Dr. Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH from the University of California – San Francisco on how to improve mentorship of new researchers in the field.

The workshop consisted of educational and interactive sessions dedicated to the unique responsibilities of good research mentors, how personality types can influence leadership styles, time management for physician-scientists, best practices for remote and cross-cultural mentorship, and conflict resolution with mentees. 

After taking the 16Personalities personality survey, CGH faculty collaboratively reflected on how their personalities impact their leadership styles and actions in hypothetical scenarios. Whether it be how they prepare for a research meeting or plan conference travel, the participants learned that it is important to understand and respect their colleagues’ and mentees’ different approaches to research tasks.

Further building off these reflections, CGH faculty participated in role-play activities to model difficult conversations that may arise with their mentees. These activities provided some comic relief but also taught the faculty important lessons about the balance between affiliation, democracy, vision, coaching, coercion, and pace-setting in their mentorship practices.

In the afternoon, participants also had the unique opportunity to brainstorm together about best practices for cross-cultural mentorship. Given the global nature of CGH faculties’ projects, many workshop participants had questions about how to build the capacities of mentees in low- and middle-income countries where research structures and resources vary widely. By sharing their experiences with each other and leveraging Dr. Gandhi’s expertise in training mentors, participants left with a toolkit of new mentorship strategies with which to apply in international settings.

All in all, the workshop was a great success, building mentorship and leadership skills of the center’s faculty in a fun and interactive manner.