Q&A: Frank J. Lexa on the ‘virtuous circle’ of mentorships in radiology

Finding the right mentor can be one of the most important steps in a young radiologist’s career.

Frank J. Lexa, MD, spoke with RadiologyBusiness.com at length about the mentor/mentee relationship in radiology. Lexa gave a presentation about the topic last year at RSNA 2015 and is the medical director of the American College of Radiology’s Radiology Leadership Institute. He also currently works as an adjunct professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and is the Spain and East Asia regional manager for the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum.

RadiologyBusiness.com: What are some of the reasons a more experienced radiologist may want to become a mentor?

Frank J. Lexa, MD: One is personal satisfaction—the satisfaction of helping someone advance in their career. Part of it is also keeping an eye on the whole house of radiology. Not just people at your age and people at your stage of the career path, but also young folks coming up.

Mentors sometimes mentor people who are at their own age or above their age, but most of the mentoring is experienced people helping out people who are getting started or who are on their way.

RB: What does it take for someone to be an effective mentor?

It’s helpful if you mentor more than one person. If you’re mentoring just one person, you may be good, but you may not be good. If you mentor several people, you start to see the same things cropping up with all of them, you get feedback about what’s helpful and what isn’t.

I think you need to have a pretty deep experience yourself, and you should also have a pretty extensive network if you’re going to be a mentor. A lot of times, what your mentee needs from you isn’t just for you to talk about your own experience, but it’s to connect them to people, to give them advice. It’s rare they are going to want to do exactly what you are doing.

Typically, mentors are going to come to you with questions about, ‘Should I go to this place or that place?’ So obviously, you need to have a level of experience or a deep enough network that you can draw on that to help them ask the right questions and try to figure out what the right choice for them is going to be.

RB: Do you typically find that the mentor/mentee relationship is one that lasts throughout both individual’s careers?

It’s interesting you ask that, because I did a literature review on this for a talk I was giving last year. It’s interesting to look at the literature and then to compare that with your own experience and what people share with you in radiology.

I think, in medicine, it often is long-lasting. I have friends who have had mentors for 20 or 30 years. And yet, the business literature suggests that is rare. I think that is partly because medicine is different, especially academic medicine. I think in medicine and science, we often have very long relationships with mentors. I just had lunch with one of my mentors yesterday, and I met him in about 1990, so that’s over a quarter of a century. And I hope he is my mentor for years to come.

RB: That’s great to hear! So after all these years, you two still have that mentor/mentee relationship? Or is it more of a traditional friendship now?

He’s still somebody I can go to ask for help, somebody who can give me a sanity check about something that seems crazy to me. He is a very dear friend, but he’s still available as a mentor.

RB: Is anything about mentor/mentee relationships within radiology different now than it was, say, 5 or 10 years ago? So much else in the industry has changed in that time.

I haven’t seen a survey to back it up, but I think there’s a notion that more programs at the resident level have structured mentoring. You’re assigned a mentor or told to seek out a mentor. I don’t know if that means there is “more” mentoring now than there was, but it is certainly easier to find each other. Technology has broken down the notion that you have to find a mentor in your program, in your institution, or in the same city as you. Technology knocks that wall down.

But the best mentoring has always been, and still is, looking for your own mentor as opposed to someone being pre-assigned to you based on where you are in the alphabet. In the time I spent in the business world, one of the places I worked had that kind of mentoring, and it didn’t work very well. People knew they needed mentors, but they tended to find a real mentor who was different than the person they were pre-assigned to.

Some of this is chemistry, and there has to be a great deal of trust. There has to be a genuine commitment to each other. People aren’t always best friends, but usually they are friends. Just assigning someone on day one of their residency and saying, ‘This is your mentor’ ... that has good intentions, and I’m sure most people would say they like it, but you often have a much richer mentoring experience if you take that a step further and develop a strong relationship.

RB: Is there anything else about mentoring you would like to discuss?

I would just emphasize that it should be an ongoing process. You should be mentoring people and being mentored. And it should be going on throughout your career.

It’s part of giving back. Just as those of us who are in the middle of our careers are mentoring younger radiologists, that’s something they should be starting to do with medical students. And as they get their own jobs, they should be mentoring residents. It should be part of a virtuous circle.

This text was edited for clarity and space.