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Podiatry's Tradition of Mentorship
Part 1 of 2
By Alan Sherman, DPM
CEO, PRESENT
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very nature of career advancement has changed dramatically as the history of
western civilization has evolved. Prior to the industrial revolution of the
late 19th century, and long before the information age of the
last 20 years, it was very hard to break into a field without a personal
connection to it. Most sons took over the trade of their fathers.
If your
father was a miller, a blacksmith, a woodsman, a merchant, or a barber surgeon...you
were expected to follow in his footsteps. It was highly unusual for a young
man (sorry, ladies…the choices for your ancestors were even more limited) to
decide that a particular field suited him, and to pursue it…regardless of
the potential or talents that he demonstrated. It really wasn’t until the
rise of public education that the concept of the ”career choice” was born.
In rare cases, a father who
could not provide a viable trade to his son would find an “apprenticeship”
situation for him. In these cases, the son was basically sold to a tradesman as
a slave, in exchange for the tradesman mentoring or teaching the boy his trade.
It sounds medieval and crude, but in essence, the same type of arrangement
exists in almost every trade, and profession, today. Nutritionists do an
“internship” at a hospital in which they are underpaid in exchange for the
opportunity to learn from more experienced Nutritionists. Law students do
“clerking” under the same arrangements. Architects spend years working at
prestigious firms for little pay, just to gain experience.
Podiatry is no different.
Despite spending 4 years at a professional school, at a cost of over
$100,000…graduating students then go on to do residency training. Our
conception is that the 2-3 years of residency training are done to learn
surgery, to have more hands on patient encounters, and to hone our academic
knowledge to be able to pass the exams for board certification. But after all
of that time and effort, you STILL have not completed the education that is
needed to run a successful practice.
The last part of the
education to become a successful podiatrist, as ironic as it may seem, goes back
to the traditions that formed the sole means for career advancement hundreds of
years ago…the apprenticeship or as we like to call it today, mentorship.
Every
successful podiatrist can list for you the men and women who mentored s/he
during their years of training, and the first few years while they were building
their practices. What is it that is left out of the official “curriculum” of
podiatry school and residency that is so essential to practice success ?
Much of it falls under the
broad category of “intangibles”, and it is the nature of these intangibles that
makes them so difficult to teach in a classroom setting. In fact, these
intangibles are generally only learned by witnessing first hand the day to day
behavior of a mentor. What cannot be easily taught in a classroom can be
learned by a “fly on the wall”, by having the opportunity to observe a master at
work, for these behaviors comprise all of the
personal to person interaction skills,
diagnostic, treatment, management, organization and planning skills that
separate a good doctor from a great doctor.
Next week, I’ll go into the
specifics of each of these skill areas, and give examples of how they are best
learned in a mentoring situation.
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