How Should Department Chairs Offer Coaching to Faculty?

When we bring coaching into a department, the most senior faculty are often the last to sign up. Division directors and full professors tend to assume coaching is meant for people earlier in their careers. It is an interesting contrast, because many of the highest-level leaders I work with, chairs and C-suite executives, already recognize its value.

What changes their minds is their colleagues. Once they hear how much the people around them appreciate the opportunity, they engage, and some of our best conversations follow. We talk about the legacy they want to leave behind, how to develop the junior and mid-career faculty coming up behind them, and how to put their lives back into a schedule that has prioritized work over life for years, including ratcheting that schedule back on purpose. We also talk about how to hand off the programs they built so those programs keep thriving.

Elite athletes have talent, years of training, and a deep understanding of their sport. Even so, every one of them pays someone to watch them, notice what they cannot see about themselves, design their practice, and hold them to their own goals. Everyone reads that as a sign of seriousness.

In an ideal world, chairs offer coaching the way elite sports do, as a standard operating system for high performers: tied to a milestone, funded as development, and modeled from the top.

My last post was about saying no to a flattering request. This one is for chairs, and it is about how to offer coaching so your faculty see it as the advantage it is. Academic medicine has a chance to build the same culture athletes take for granted, and the chair is the person who sets that meaning.

What does the evidence say about coaching physicians?

Dyrbye and colleagues ran a pilot randomized trial of six coaching sessions with 88 practicing physicians, published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2019. Absolute rates of high emotional exhaustion fell 19.5 percent in the coached group and rose 9.8 percent in the control group. Overall burnout fell 17.1 percent with coaching and rose 4.9 percent without it. Quality of life and resilience improved too.

The largest recent review points the same way. Collett and colleagues pooled 99 randomized trials in Annals of Internal Medicine in 2025. Among physicians, professional coaching probably reduced emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Of the individual-level supports departments fund, coaching has some of the strongest trial evidence for those of us in medicine.

Why does the way coaching is offered matter so much?

Faculty learn what coaching means by watching who receives it. When the faculty who work with coaches are the department's rising leaders, accepting coaching signals that you are being invested in. Mid-career faculty who are doing well, and want the next five years to be deliberate, raise their hands.

Many of us get the most from coaching at exactly that point: talented, largely successful, and clear-eyed enough to see that something could be better. Those are also the faculty whose departure would cost the department the most.

What does a strong coaching offer look like?

• A strong offer is tied to achievement. Attach coaching to a milestone everyone wants: a new leadership role, a first R01 submission, promotion to associate professor, a new division chief seat. Within one cycle, coaching becomes something people are proud to receive.
• The funding comes from the faculty development budget. The budget line tells faculty what the money means. A development line signals investment in a trajectory.
• The chair goes first. The fastest way to set the meaning of coaching in a department is for the chair to work with a coach and mention it in passing at a faculty meeting. More than half of the chairs I know have had a coach at some point.

How should a chair think about the cost?

I recommend that you compare the cost of coaching to the cost of a departure. Coaching three faculty for a year costs a fraction of one mid-career exit, which Schloss and colleagues, in Academic Medicine in 2009, put at $286,503 (in 2004 dollars) for a subspecialist in recruitment, hiring, and lost clinical income alone. The three people most worth coaching are, by definition, the three whose departure would cost the most. We recommend starting with three faculty this academic year.

How is coaching different from mentoring?

A mentor explains how the field works, opens doors, and shares a path they have walked. That relationship is essential. A coach offers an outside view on decisions: what we want, where our time goes, what to stop, how to hold a boundary. An internal mentor has a stake in some of those answers, which is one reason the coaching conversation works best with someone outside the institution. Both belong in a well-built department.

What can faculty do if coaching sounds useful?

You can open this door yourself. Many departments have development funds waiting for a well-framed request.

Consider a simple first step: go to your chair with a short proposal that names the milestone you are working toward, what you want to accomplish in the next six months, and how coaching would get you there faster. You are giving your leader an easy way to invest in you, and you are helping set the norm that coaching is for people who are going places.

Frequently asked questions

Does coaching reduce physician burnout?

A 2019 randomized trial in JAMA Internal Medicine found coaching reduced emotional exhaustion and overall burnout, and a 2025 meta-analysis of 99 trials in Annals of Internal Medicine found coaching probably reduced emotional exhaustion and depersonalization among physicians.

Who should department chairs offer coaching to?

Start with two groups: your highest-value faculty, often at milestones such as a new leadership role or promotion, and the faculty who seem burned out or may be thinking about leaving. Offering it to both makes coaching development for everyone.

How should coaching be funded in a department?

Through the faculty development budget, which signals investment in a faculty member's trajectory.

What is the difference between coaching and mentoring for physicians?

Mentors share how the field works and open doors. Coaches offer an outside perspective on decisions, time, and priorities, with no stake in the answers.

Where to go deeper

In my new book, The Physician's Guide to Owning Your Time: Do Less. Accomplish More., Chapter 12, "Why Athletes Always Have Coaches," covers who gets the most from coaching and why it works best as prevention. Find it on Amazon.

Book a 30-minute exploratory call and leave with a plan for which faculty to offer coaching first.

Know a chair weighing a coaching budget? Forward this to them.