By Matt Skoufalos
Health care leadership requires decisiveness, confidence and a deep knowledge base that spans any number of constantly evolving, technically complex and abstract principles. And amid the pressure to access and harness it all in a meaningful fashion, good leaders have the responsibility to know how to get the best out of the team they’re overseeing.
Those skills are neither innate nor easily developed. To support the next generation of imaging leaders, professional development programs like the Association for Medical Imaging Management (AHRA) Mentoring for Success Program help medical imaging professionals learn not only how to build up their teams’ confidence and skill sets, but also how to deepen their own relationship with what it means to be coachable.
Mentoring for Success is offered as an AHRA member benefit with support from GE HealthCare. The program facilitates mentors and mentees in creating a partnership to bolster their professional growth and the expansion of their collective knowledge base. By connecting across the broad spectrum of their individual experiences, the entire 5,000-member AHRA network can leverage the opportunities of its community via connections hosted in an exclusive online forum.
Mentoring for Success program coordinator Jessica Harju said that the program has facilitated AHRA members matching with one another to define the nature of their mentor-mentee relationship individually and mutually, based on their experiences, locations, familiarity with specific imaging modalities, or connections to a specific project.
“It’s meant to be member-driven, so the members themselves are able to define what their mentor relationship will be,” Harju said. “They might be looking for advice on an immediate challenge or opportunity, or they may be seeking a longer-term relationship about their overall career path and development. Members have the opportunity to select a mentor they feel is the best match.”
Now, on the cusp of completing its first year, Mentoring for Success, is beginning to gather initial feedback on how the program has functioned. The early adopters seem pleased.
“We often survey our members about programs and services they want to see us offer. A mentoring program was one of the services that they most requested,” Harju said. “Offering this mentor program directly aligns with our mission to mentor, support and develop leaders.”
As relationships within the mentorship program have deepened, so has the affinity of AHRA members for professional coaching and guidance, as well as learning how to share thoughtfully the first-hand knowledge that they have from years into their own medical imaging careers. Some are working with multiple partners over various areas of interest. In its earliest days, Harju said AHRA is most interested in seeing how to enhance the program going forward.
“I think the goal is to have our members really connect, not just online, or just through the forum, but also in person, ideally at our annual meeting! This will allow them to expand their networks, and deepen their relationships,” Harju said. “AHRA is all about the connections that our members have, and the energy that they can get from each other.”
By basing the program upon the AHRA member forum, organizers were seeking to capture the dynamic spirit of the online community its users had already created. Harju said that feeling of activity and engagement underpins the most successful mentorship experiences.
“They say it’s one of the best benefits of our membership,” Harju said. “[Mentoring for Success] is a community that they can take offline, and take the relationship to the next level, whether virtually, in person, or through phone calls. We’re watching careers move in different directions.”
Of course, not every mentorship relationship blossoms into greatness, or even grows beyond an initial, topic-specific request; some, seem to fizzle after their initial interactions. To that end, Harju said AHRA staff are working on some educational material “to help develop relationships beyond the first question.” Some of that work might also go into reframing some elements of the program to enhance overall ease of use.
This program is intended to help develop the next generation of medical imaging leadership,” Harju said. “The core purpose of AHRA.”
Freelance imaging consultant Russell Cain is a past AHRA Board Member and U.S. Navy veteran who, with a few others, helped to facilitate the establishment of a mentorship program that would help discharged and retired military personnel establish their bona fides in a new, civilian enterprise – namely, imaging leadership.
“I came into health care in 1962, as an orderly, worked for 11 years as a Navy hospital corpsman, and then picked up a commission as a healthcare administrator/medical planner in the Medical Service Corps,” Cain said. “I loved every minute of it, but there’s not a day that goes by that there’s not something I can learn.”
Cain observed that many of the AHRA members who are voted into leadership roles within the association primarily hold supervisory positions in their workplaces, and many of those were earned through careers as technologists.
“Technically, the skill set is there,” he said. “Unfortunately, as is typical in health care, the challenge is that you know your skill set, but often, there has been no development of leadership skills. When there is failure as a leader, instead of correction, promotion to the next level continues to occur.”
“Pretty soon, we’ve got a group of leaders at every level, without leadership skills,” Cain continued. “AHRA said, ‘Let’s get these people the opportunity to work with experienced leaders and learn from them.’ That’s the concept.”
Cain helped contribute to the development of the current AHRA Mentoring for Success program only a few years ago when he took his own advice. After having received an invitation from a colleague within the organization asking if he would mentor her, Cain’s response was to turn the question on its head.
“I said, ‘I’ll be your mentor if you’ll agree to be mine,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter how much experience you’ve got; sometimes you learn something new. We are such a technically oriented group that you can’t know it all.”
Cain said that matches are often made within the program among AHRA members who would like to develop a specific professional skill – like team-building, capital planning, or staff engagement – from a peer with that expertise. They look to match on areas of interest, or strength, or availability, and connect periodically for coaching and counseling.
Again, Cain uses his own experience as a point of reference. While consulting on the design of a new MRI suite, he will occasionally rely on established relationships with a colleague who is an MR safety expert to glean contemporary advice on solving a problem or dialing in an answer to a question he’s been asked.
“Every once in a while, there is something,” Cain said. “Even though I design MR suites and am an MR tech, there are still things that come up that are a little bit new to me. I learned an awful lot about MR safety from Tobias Gilk, and the key rules of MR safety; things that some of us have never thought about.”
In turn, Cain said he’s been able to offer guidance to other of his mentees on how to improve staff engagement, which is a core strength of his. By learning about “listening with intent,” managing tone in conversations, and studying body language, Cain said he has been able to help staff refocus from preparing their own part of the conversation into understanding how their colleague is communicating.
“Staff engagement leads to patient engagement,” he said. “Staff who listen with intent do a better job of working with their patients; in turn they can pass that process along to different groups within the hospital.”
Comparably, Cain would like to see Mentoring for Success become more of a pay-it-forward proposition, if it can’t be a two-way street in every circumstance: those who’ve benefited from the program should find ways to help grow it.
“It’s there for the benefit of all of us,” he said; “those who are experienced, inexperienced or new to leadership roles.”
Beth Allen, director of clinical operations at Banner Imaging, endorses the skill set of professional mentorship as a critical component of effective leadership in the medical imaging space. The process of being mentored not only helps refine the leadership approach to staff development, it also leads to greater self-examination among decision-makers in the workplace.
“It’s not just that you have a great leader, it’s that you have a great leader that takes the time to invest in you as well, and give you that great guidance,” Allen said. “They’re guiding you to work on your own, and not just telling you what to do next.”
“A good mentor sees potential in you, is willing to invest that time in you, understanding that you have a potential to be a great leader, even if you are just on the cusp of it,” she said. “They’re willing to take that time and offer advice, and still allow you to grow yourself and learn on your own.”
For someone who describes her ascent into management as almost happening against her will, Allen said she’s grown into the role under the support of thoughtful leaders who guided her with the presence of a mentor. That approach was instrumental to her continued development as an imaging leader who learned to recognize similar aptitudes for leadership among her own staff, and who could in turn foster its emergence, even if only in fits and starts.
“I think probably everybody in imaging has a specific experience within an imaging department where you have somebody in a leadership position with great technical ability, who for that reason was promoted, and they realize this is not what they’re best at,” Allen said.
“I sort of came into management kicking and screaming,” she said. “I was a CT supervisor, and I really loved being a tech, but you get to a point where, even though you still enjoy doing it, it’s not challenging anymore.”
“Our senior director of operations has been instrumental in helping me take that next leap,” Allen said. “I know CT, but now I’m responsible for everything else. What don’t I know? That was where allowing me to make those mistakes and not lose all confidence in my ability helped. Being mentored, you also need to be open to critique.”
While Allen said she was still developing confidence in her new role, her mentor and supervisor Kara Mayeaux demonstrated confidence in Allen’s ability to make decisions, and even to recover from mistakes as she learned. The grace that was granted to her as she worked through developing her own leadership style is something Allen remembers well, and summons in her own interactions with her team.
“She is an important person in my life in and outside of work, and I am proud of what we have accomplished together,” Allen said of Mayeaux. “I try to do the same thing she did. I try to be a good listener. I try to not just give an answer, but to talk through what their thoughts are. The most important thing to me is to be supportive and help them understand that they can really come to me with anything. We’ll get through it together.”
That idea of responsive, collaborative, mutually beneficial skill-building is at the core of professional mentorship, and it’s what helps create teams where individual employees are valued, supported and elevated to a position of strength that informs and improves their performance.
“In just about every scenario, we are stronger as a team than we are alone,” Allen said. “Whether it’s through mentorship, or just being a good, supportive peer, the more support, the stronger we all are, the better decisions that we make, the more difficult problems that we can solve.”
“By either allowing yourself to be a mentee or being open to mentoring, that’s beneficial,” she said. “By understanding who you’re mentoring and what their gifts are, and making the most of them, we all learn something on either side of those positions.”
“Mentorship really is one of the more rewarding things that you can do, and a great way to build a relationship that can last for years, even as people progress and move on,” Allen said. “Knowing yourself as well as knowing that person you’re trying to mentor really sort of helps you skip ahead and get there quicker.”
