Lies my mentee told me…

[heathpack]

So I have a mentee assigned to me at the University. This individual is a trainee that I need to work with on a daily basis. She’s in a one year position that’s meant to prepare her to apply for a more competitive 3 year position which would start next year. I have successfully mentored 17 individuals through this process over my career, with only 1 of my mentees not successfully achieving the next step. I’ve possibly had more success mentoring young veterinarians to this next step than anyone else in my field. I fully know what it takes.

Right now, my mentee is so frustrating to me that we’re going to switch her to a different mentor. My issue is that she is foreign and it turns out her prior training was inadequate for her current position. She’s in over her head. That actually isn’t the issue- we have the resources to get her up to speed.

The issue is that she cannot admit a mistake and lies to cover her mistakes. Even when the mistake is obvious to all, she will make up some elaborate story the gist of which is that it was all a misunderstanding. If I was not fully involved with every aspect of the mistake, now I have to contact multiple involved parties, find out what happened, try to talk to mentee, who will be outraged and hurt by others’ versions of events differing from hers.

IMO absolute honesty is essential for a veterinarian. First you have to be honest with clients on ethical grounds. Next you have to be honest with coworkers because you need to work successfully as a team. But most importantly you have to be honest with YOURSELF. Being a veterinarian is a constant self-assessment: did I handle X wrong, could I do better, what do I need to get better, does this new publication mean what I’ve understood about disease Y has been wrong all these years? It’s a tricky thing to be constantly self-assessing but to also understand that becoming a better veterinarian is a life long process and you can’t feel crushed if what you’ve learned today suggests what you did yesterday wasn’t completely right.

So here’s my problem: I can solve the issue of not being this individual’s mentor. I can do my part in protecting the American pet owner by not recommending her for the next step training program (because she’s not eligible to work in the US as a veterinarian unless she’s in a training program). But I have to work with her nearly every day and I cannot stand the lying.

It’s better for our program if we have her finish out the year, and we’ve not started the disciplinary process yet. She’s on a path that could result in her getting fired but so far she’s lying about things we can’t prove. ”This client declined test Z” when client can’t remember it being offered. “I didnt miss this shift, I signed up to work a different shift, I don’t know what happened that I was still on the schedule”. I could go on and on. One nationally-published outcome metric of our program however is how many trainees complete the program. Last year we fired the person who was in this position for openly talking about how she cheated on a final exam. Interestingly from the same country- honesty must not be big there. So- we will fire her if necessary but it is strategically better for the program for her to finish the year.

I am hoping that some of y’all can give me practical advice for dealing with someone like this. I’ve done all the standard things- written reviews, in person face to face private mentoring conversations, a stern close-to-formal-discipline talking-to with multiple others present. All of those things have failed, and now I just need daily coping strategies. Because I find myself simply not wanting to even talk to her, which is ok this week with all the $hit she’s done and the formal meeting in which she knows I’m displeased. But I need to put my big girls pants on a figure out how to deal with her for the next 7 months.

Input?

 

[callwill]

"we will fire her if necessary but it is strategically better for the program for her to finish the year." I dont understand nor have the working knowledge of what strategically better means in this situation, but: Do it now.
A person like that destroys morale among others and destroys credibility. Its a life sucking force she has and will drain everyone around her.
This will also be a moment for her to possibly learn from (doubfull but there is a chance).
Get all those ducks in the row and then can her.

 

[WorldT]

I would tell the person the consequences of continuing on this part in black and white. If the individual continues, then you guys just need to follow through and dismiss her.
You can guide a horse to the river, but you can't force it to drink.
I know the completion metric is important (based on your statement ) but is it more important than wasting everyone's time and resources accommodating the behavior that shouldn't be happening. She might actually cause real harm during the accomodating period.

 

[mcara00]

So I have a mentee assigned to me at the University. This individual is a trainee that I need to work with on a daily basis. She’s in a one year position that’s meant to prepare her to apply for a more competitive 3 year position which would start next year. I have successfully mentored 17 individuals through this process over my career, with only 1 of my mentees not successfully achieving the next step. I’ve possibly had more success mentoring young veterinarians to this next step than anyone else in my field. I fully know what it takes.

Right now, my mentee is so frustrating to me that we’re going to switch her to a different mentor. My issue is that she is foreign and it turns out her prior training was inadequate for her current position. She’s in over her head. That actually isn’t the issue- we have the resources to get her up to speed.

The issue is that she cannot admit a mistake and lies to cover her mistakes. Even when the mistake is obvious to all, she will make up some elaborate story the gist of which is that it was all a misunderstanding. If I was not fully involved with every aspect of the mistake, now I have to contact multiple involved parties, find out what happened, try to talk to mentee, who will be outraged and hurt by others’ versions of events differing from hers.

IMO absolute honesty is essential for a veterinarian. First you have to be honest with clients on ethical grounds. Next you have to be honest with coworkers because you need to work successfully as a team. But most importantly you have to be honest with YOURSELF. Being a veterinarian is a constant self-assessment: did I handle X wrong, could I do better, what do I need to get better, does this new publication mean what I’ve understood about disease Y has been wrong all these years? It’s a tricky thing to be constantly self-assessing but to also understand that becoming a better veterinarian is a life long process and you can’t feel crushed if what you’ve learned today suggests what you did yesterday wasn’t completely right.

So here’s my problem: I can solve the issue of not being this individual’s mentor. I can do my part in protecting the American pet owner by not recommending her for the next step training program (because she’s not eligible to work in the US as a veterinarian unless she’s in a training program). But I have to work with her nearly every day and I cannot stand the lying.

It’s better for our program if we have her finish out the year, and we’ve not started the disciplinary process yet. She’s on a path that could result in her getting fired but so far she’s lying about things we can’t prove. ”This client declined test Z” when client can’t remember it being offered. “I didnt miss this shift, I signed up to work a different shift, I don’t know what happened that I was still on the schedule”. I could go on and on. One nationally-published outcome metric of our program however is how many trainees complete the program. Last year we fired the person who was in this position for openly talking about how she cheated on a final exam. Interestingly from the same country- honesty must not be big there. So- we will fire her if necessary but it is strategically better for the program for her to finish the year.

I am hoping that some of y’all can give me practical advice for dealing with someone like this. I’ve done all the standard things- written reviews, in person face to face private mentoring conversations, a stern close-to-formal-discipline talking-to with multiple others present. All of those things have failed, and now I just need daily coping strategies. Because I find myself simply not wanting to even talk to her, which is ok this week with all the $hit she’s done and the formal meeting in which she knows I’m displeased. But I need to put my big girls pants on a figure out how to deal with her for the next 7 months.

Input?

Our profession has enough problems with immature young veterinarians who are too fragile for the rigors of veterinary medicine. This is obviously someone who is so insecure about their own abilities that they are incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions and mistakes. You definitely need to take the proper steps to document the problems so that this issue can be resolved via the processes that should be set up within your organization. If this is either Auburn or Tuskegee universities, I wish you will have to document, document and document the issues some more because taking difficult steps to address student failures is definitely not the strong point of most universities today.

 

[DrQ]

If your mentee is not being truthful, document, document, document. Then she needs to be disciplined and cashiered.

 

[klpca]

I don't understand keeping her either. When she is out in the real world, lying her way through life, it will reflect poorly on your university. And it sends the wrong message to the other people that work there that poor behavior will be tolerated.

I worked with a liar once, and I had to do it for about 3-4 years. It was honestly the worst time of my entire career. For a while, I kept my mouth shut when I discovered her lies, but after a while, I ratted her out every single time. Nothing happened, because everyone else at the office thought she was "charming" and couldn't believe that she would make the mistakes that she was making so believing her lies was easier than accepting that they had hired someone who was both incompetent and a liar. It was absolutely infuriating. In the end, she started getting caught by people higher up than me, but she was actually fired for something that happened after work hours. I could never figure out how that worked, but I didn't care because I was so relieved that she was gone. She of course, went to another company and is still there (in a leadership position!) as far as I know. As a co-worker, it was terrible to see her getting away with her lies. I would have quit, but I had a pretty sweet deal working part time, so I stuck it out.

I think that the reason that you are having such a tough time with how to deal with her on a daily basis is because you know in your heart that she should not be part of your program at all. There's no way to make that feel ok. She needs to go.

 

[DrQ]

I don't know what your situation is, but I inherited a crap show project where the project head was south asian. He had entered into a contract to deliver a Java based platform to the customer. He was of an upper caste (and made no bones about it) and hired a group of developers all of a lower caste from the same part of the world. They would not push back if they could not accomplish a task. The project lead was a complete jerk and was developing in Visual Basic in an IDE and then within their IDE took the VB and used a humongous Java virtual machine to transmogrify the code. Additionally, they were loading the ENTIRE database into memory which worked fine for demos but was unsustainable.

When management found out what he was doing, he was shown the door and I inherited the mess. The developers, all south asian, would always say "yes". when we would have meetings to set goals. I had the company's top Java developer on board to help me with the design of the database and I designed and built out the infrastructure. Every time we would ask for a status, we would see the same Visual Basic stuff that they had worked on before that would take 45 minutes to load, was slow, and would crash frequently. We would ask them if they could write the code directly in Java and they would always say "yes", but we always got the VB IDE junk.

We had to fire all but one developer and hired a contractor to develop the code in Java.

 

[VacationForever]

I would start the disciplinary process now, with documentation and reviews and get her out of the program and door. I used to work in mega corp and it was a set process. I hated doing it whenever I had an under performing staff. It's no good for you and everyone involved in trying to mentor her. She is simply too immature and dishonest to be successful in any job for that matter, let alone to be a vet which carries a ton of responsibilities where integrity is must.

 

[jp10558]

I don't know about the requirements for keeping or getting rid of someone, but I have had to work with someone who for years would take more effort for everyone to lead them through doing a task vs just doing the task ourselves. I.e. it was a net negative. No one wanted to deal with this except management. I guess it eventually caused enough obvious issues for the managers that they had a number of meetings and this person managed to sort of turn around and focus on tasks they could do and do correctly. Like others said, this was frustrating enough - but someone who just lies is even worse.

 

[DaveNV]

No new advice, but a virtual hug. I dealt with people like that for years, in the military and afterwards. It was agonizing, because I was the one left accountable, as the liars stood in my shadow, making sure they were not held responsible. I never understood how those people got along, until I saw it was because they were passed from one supervisor to another, who just wanted them out of their hair. It was tough.

I'd suggest registering your (valid!) concerns with your managers, and strongly recommend the mentee be given her walking papers, the sooner the better. Part of a training program is to weed out those who are unsuitable, no matter how painful it may be. The woman sounds like she's not in the right profession, or at least needs to learn to admit her shortcomings. If she can't do it, how long will it be before she contributes to the death of someone's animal?

As a consumer on the other side of the examination table, the care my pets receive is critical to the quality of life in my household. I've had an incompetent vet practically kill my pet, forcing me to switch to a different veterinarian, at great expense after paying an emergency vet in the process. I was shocked to think any vet could be so cavalier, and so forcefully wrong in their handling of my pet's health. The second vet was shocked to learn the treatment plan the bad vet was doing.

I know you pretty well, and know how dedicated you are. So I know how this is weighing on you. I say it's time to rip off the bandaid, and get the liar out of your organziation. Just reassigning her to another mentor is not going to make her any better. She needs to go somewhere else, where she can't hurt someone's precious family member. Make sure the reasons for her dismissal are thoroughly documented, so there is no doubt to another organization why she was discharged.

Good luck!

Dave

 

[clifffaith]

I don't know what your situation is, but I inherited a crap show project where the project head was south asian. He was of an upper caste (and made no bones about it)

The female version of this was exactly what I pictured while reading heathpack’s post. Possibly wealthy parents pushed her into being a doctor when she doesn’t have what it takes in practice, even though she could get through the book learning.

As far as other sorts of cultural differences— I was at UCLA (go Bruins!) with a Samoan girl my first year. She COULD NOT tell you she couldn’t meet you somewhere or participate in an activity. She was not a flake, just beyond her upbringing to outright say NO she couldn’t be somewhere.

 

[Superchief]

Having recently retired in the corporate world after 50 years, I finally had enough of lying and cheating people who would do anything to get ahead and had no qualms about taking credit for coworkers accomplishments. This has gotten worse over the last several years and now these people are in key management positions. It got to the point that I had to keep printed copies of email communications and other documents to 'protect' myself and get recognition for my work. This behavior is likely much less common in your profession, but will become worse as private practices join large corporations. (My 3 private practice vet clinics are now part of large groups and we are trying to find another independent). You are doing the right thing in holding this person to be accountable at least while she is in your program, and I hope you are able to discourage her from pursuing the profession.

I think that some people come to the US business world thinking all of us are wealthy and they want to get their share no matter what. I had a Russian Marketing Research intern in the early 90's who was extremely bright and an excellent worker. He did a great job for his first year and we were able to extend his work permit for another 2 years. He then became more interested in making money rather than doing the right thing for his company and coworkers. I could no longer trust him, had to cover myself in communications with him, and he spent all of his effort on office politics rather than doing his job. We were fortunate that he decided to pursue his MBA and ended up in investment banking which better suited his priorities and ethics. Perhaps this mentee will realize she can't continue this type of questionable ethics in your profession and will pursue something else. Good luck!