Dr. Michael Cameron, Chief Scientific Officer of SITA Group, describes mentorship as a bidirectional relationship where mentors guide and model behavior across personal and professional life. Early mentors saved his life during a vulnerable period, while Dr. David Mustofsky directed him toward behavioral medicine. Cameron advocates building on each person's unique strengths rather than imposing preset agendas.
Chapters
I'm Dr. Michael J. Cameron, and I'm the Chief Scientific Officer for a company that's called the SITA Group. When I think of mentorship, I think of— of an individual that essentially becomes a guide for you. It's an individual that guides your professional development, but also your personal development, because I do believe they're intermeshed. You can't have professional development and have that being completely separate from how you're evolving from a personal standpoint. So the person is a guide, but At the same time, the individual is also a model. Mentorship initially saved my life because some of my very early mentors were people that stepped into my life at a very young age and at an age where there is a lot of psychological vulnerability for me. So The first mentor, or group of individuals that ended up functioning as a mentor, influenced my life as a result of saving my life. And I mean that literally. They really did. As I progressed through, from a developmental standpoint, and went through the educational system and began coming in contact with different types of mentors, The individuals ended up nudging me and guiding me in a certain direction that became career-defining for me. So it'd be an individual, for example, Dr. David Mustofsky, an individual that really had expertise in the area of behavioral medicine. As a result of his mentorship, I began getting nudged in the direction of really looking at behavioral medicine as a discipline, as a science, and then looking at the interrelationship between behavioral medicine and behavioral analysis. So for him as a mentor, he taught me things that became career-defining for me. I think my, my best piece of advice is always seeing the person in front of you, not coming to that person with your own frame of what you need to do to guide that individual. You don't come with a preset agenda in terms of what that's gonna look like and how it's gonna look and how it's going to be delivered. The way you mentor an individual involves a level of openness because it, it really is a bidirectional process. The person informs you in terms of who they are, how they learn, what their history is, what they already know, and then as a result of you understanding that, you begin connecting to their interest, their strength, their experience. It's what Israel Goldiamond called constructionalism. Mentoring is constructionalism. If you conceptualize that, you're building a person bit by bit, brick by brick, to the point where they become a defined, sturdy, robust structure that has great integrity and great strength. And when I say strength, I don't mean that in a machismo kind of way. It's just core strength as an individual and as a professional. So maintaining an openness, understanding who it is that's sitting in front of you, seeing them, really seeing them as a human being, and then developing their skills and capabilities as a result of your guidance and as a result of your modeling of what you're trying to get them to achieve.
