Does Physician Coaching Work?

October 21, 2026

Does physician coaching work? Research discussed by Dr. Stacey Ishman, pediatric otolaryngologist and founder of Academic Medicine Strategy Group, suggests coaching can reduce physician burnout and emotional exhaustion, although it does not resolve every workplace problem. This episode explores published studies, faculty retention, and practical ways early-career academic physicians and department leaders can evaluate coaching outcomes.

Key Points:

[00:00] Does physician coaching work, and why should leaders care? Dr. Stacey Ishman opens by asking whether coaching produces measurable results. She explains that academic physicians contribute to patient care, teaching, and discovery, making physician burnout and departures important concerns for academic medical institutions.

[01:44] What does research show about physician coaching and burnout? Stacey discusses a 2019 Mayo Clinic study involving 88 physicians in internal medicine, pediatrics, and family medicine. Physicians who received six professional coaching sessions over six months experienced a 17% decrease in burnout, while burnout increased by 5% in the control group, a 22-percentage-point difference.

[02:35] What are the limitations of physician coaching research? The Mayo Clinic trial found improvements in burnout, emotional exhaustion, quality of life, and resilience. However, it did not find improvements in job satisfaction, depersonalization, or engagement. Stacey emphasizes that coaching can support individuals, while institutional changes remain necessary.

[03:05] How is physician coaching different from mentorship? Stacey describes mentorship as providing guidance, sponsorship, and connections. Coaching focuses on self-reflection, goal setting, forward thinking, and behavior change through partnership. Mentors share their experience, while coaches help physicians determine how to reach their own goals.

[04:42] What can academic medicine learn from feedback and leadership coaching? Stacey reviews work on feedback in medical education, surgical coaching, and a 2026 pilot involving faculty at UCSF. The pilot combined a values-based leadership workshop, three coaching sessions over nine weeks, and a 360-degree assessment. Several measures improved, including self-compassion, work exhaustion, interpersonal disengagement, and imposter syndrome. The small study demonstrated feasibility, not definitive proof.

[06:40] Why should department leaders connect coaching with faculty retention? Stacey discusses research associating physician burnout with a greater likelihood of leaving and describes the financial costs of replacing faculty. She also highlights findings from Weill Cornell's LAMP program, where faculty who completed the program were less likely to leave and more likely to be promoted than matched colleagues.

[08:15] How can academic medical centers measure physician coaching outcomes? Stacey recommends establishing a baseline using a validated burnout and fulfillment survey, such as the Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index. Leaders can then track retention, promotions, leadership roles, time to productivity for new leaders, and training satisfaction over time, comparing outcomes with those of similar faculty who did not receive coaching.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Can physician coaching reduce burnout in academic medicine?

Research discussed in this episode suggests that physician coaching can reduce burnout. The Mayo Clinic trial found a 22-percentage-point difference in burnout between physicians who received coaching and those who did not. Other studies discussed by Stacey also reported improvements. Results vary by study, and coaching alone does not address every organizational factor contributing to burnout.

Should physicians receive coaching or mentorship?

The choice depends on the physician's needs. Mentorship can provide professional guidance, sponsorship, and connections. Coaching supports self-reflection, goal setting, and behavior change through a collaborative process. Academic physicians may benefit from both forms of support at different stages of their careers. Coaching is also relevant to physicians seeking professional development, not only those experiencing difficulties.

How can department chairs determine whether coaching is worth the investment?

Department chairs can assess coaching by measuring outcomes before and after implementation. Stacey recommends tracking burnout and professional fulfillment, faculty retention, promotion, leadership development, and training satisfaction. Comparing participants with similar faculty who did not receive coaching can provide additional context. Leaders should evaluate results over time and pair coaching with organizational improvements.

Summary:

Does physician coaching work? The research discussed in this episode supports coaching as an approach to reducing physician burnout, while showing that organizational conditions still matter. This week, early-career academic physicians can identify one professional goal they would like help achieving and explore whether coaching could provide structured support. Department leaders can begin by establishing baseline measures before investing in a coaching initiative.

Work With Us:

If you're interested in working with Academic Medicine Strategy Group, visit www.amedsg.com to learn about our programs that help academic physicians build a clear, strategic path to promotion, research, and career advancement.

Leaders can also explore the Faculty Excellence and Retention Initiative (FERI) to learn about faculty development and retention support at www.amedsg.com/feri.

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If you'd like to get in touch or suggest a topic:

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Episode Transcript

does phycian coaching work
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[00:00:00] I coach physicians. I also study coaching. So today, we're gonna put the two together, and we're gonna answer the question that every department leader should be asking before they spend a dollar: Does coaching actually work? I start every coaching call with wins. Part of it is positive framing. It's how you can look at the world that actually does improve your outlook.

Not long ago, a client of mine told me they couldn't think of a single win, and later in that same call, they happened to mention, one, that they'd gotten a couple papers submitted, and two, they got married that weekend. None of this came up at the beginning, and that's what coaching does. It helps people see what's already there and decide what to do next.

Today's question is whether we can measure it. Now, academic physicians teach the next generation. They lead discovery. They take on many of the hard cases. When they burn out and leave, we lose all three. I teach physicians in a number of different specialties. We're currently working with internal medicine, pediatrics, otolaryngology, and OBGYN.

Different set of [00:01:00] specialties, same pattern. Talented people caring too much with no one teaching them how to decide what deserves their time. Now, I think many of you know that I work with a lot of people who, I feel like many of you, like I, know people who would have liked to make academic medicine work but just couldn't figure it out. I tell you every single time I tell people what I do, somebody says, "I wish you'd been around 10 years ago, five years ago, last year." Now, people are walking out of academic medicine at a quicker pace than I've ever seen it happen, and part of what I think we need to do about it is give them a lifeline, throw them a vest, a raft, a...

What are those round things on a ship? Life preserver, that's what I'm looking for. But anyway, coaching is spreading fast for one reason, because there's a lot of people who need it, and that's why it needs to be studied. Now, some of the strongest evidence comes out of studies like this one from the Mayo Clinic in 2019 that was published in the Journal of [00:02:00] American Medical Association Internal Medicine.

There were 88 physicians in internal medicine, pediatrics, and family medicine. Half of them got six sessions with a professional coach over six months, half did not. In the group that got the coach, 17% decrease in burnout. In the group that didn't have a coach, 5% increase, so a 22-point difference between the two.

Now, in a group of 100 physicians, that's about 22 fewer who will be burned out with coaching than they would without it. High emotional exhaustion also showed an improvement of 29 points. And quality of life and resilience improved, too. Now, since then, peer coaching at Mass General looked at 138 physicians, and they cut burnout scores by 22%, and a small group trial at UCLA cut burnout by almost 30%.

A 2025 meta-analysis actually looked at 99 trials and concluded that coaching probably reduces physician burnout, especially if you look at it over the four weeks after coaching has occurred. Now, [00:03:00] the honest part of the Mayo trial is they did not see improvements in job satisfaction, depersonalization, and engagement.

Coaching does help the person, but it does not overcome the fact that we still need system fixes in order to help our physicians. You need both. Now, what coaching actually is, in a 2025 review that I carried out with Dr. Kerry Francis, we defined the difference between mentorship and coaching. And really it's about mentorship being about guidance, sponsorship, and connection, and coaching is about some self-reflection, it's about goal setting, it's forward thinking, and it's behavior change through partnership.

It is not someone giving you advice, but helping s- someone helping you figure out what are the fundamental things you want and how do you get there. So a mentor tells you how something worked for them, and a coach tell, helps you figure out how it's gonna work for you. And the equivalent is the elite athlete who have coaches at the top of their game.

We all see this, and a reader of my book picked up on that exact point in her review. But as physicians, [00:04:00] we rarely do. We tend to think this is something that happens for remediation or we're in trouble if we get the coach. And oftentimes I find that when people start working with me, they don't want anybody to know.

But by the end, it's been so useful, so fundamental, and they have helped drive what they wanted to do, that they're happy to tell everybody and tell a friend, "Come get coaching. It's really been useful." Now, I've also co-authored four peer-reviewed papers on coaching feedback and mentorship in the last decade, and most focus on otolaryngology, so I wanna talk a little bit about the lessons that we learned here 2017, we did a look at feedback review and we looked at 18 studies on teaching professionalism and communication to residents.

The ACGME does recommend specific features of a high-quality feedback, but most of these studies did not use the frameworks they recommended. Nonetheless, they did find that there was us- utility in having this high-quality feedback Now, I will also say the best feedback that I have ever gotten was on how to give [00:05:00] feedback, and I didn't learn it until the last couple years, which is to always give feedback towards the ideal.

Don't tell me, "Hey, you did a bad job," blah, blah, blah. I didn't listen to anything after you said I did a bad job. But if instead you say, "In an ideal world, we do this," then I have something to shoot for instead of you telling me what I did wrong. And so that is something I'm gonna highly recommend, and I do have a podcast and a blog in that, which I'll make sure we put in the show notes.

But we also did a 2024 study actually it was a commentary, where we worked with a number of other folks looking at surgical coaching, and it highlighted the fact that most surgeons have no coordinated system for operative feedback once their training ends. So for many surgeons, finishing training is the last time anyone is formally responsible for helping them improve, and there's a real gap here.

A 2026 pilot in The Laryngoscope with Dr. Megan Durr looked at some folks at UCSF, and they looked at eight faculty who had a three-hour workshop on values-based leadership, and then three independent sessions with a coach over nine weeks, as well as a [00:06:00] 360-degree assessment. And what they found is that self-compassion, work exhaustion, and interpersonal disengagement actually improved significantly, a little bit different from that Mayo study.

And that imposter syndrome, which screened positive in 71% at the beginning, was only present in 43% at the end. So two people are out of that group had significant improvement going from having significant imposter syndrome to not feeling that anymore. And professional fulfillment and flourishing improved, but not to a degree of significance.

Now, it's a small study, so why does it matter? One is that, it shows feasibility, not proof, and that's what we said in the paper. But pilots are where our evidence starts, and every specialty works under different pressures. In the clinic, in the operating room, in the labor floor, we need data from each setting.

So for leaders, I wanna talk about cost and retention, and we're gonna start with why people leave. There are two Stanford-affiliated hospitals that looked at burned-out physicians and found they were [00:07:00] 2.1 times as likely to leave within two years as those who were not burned out. Nationally, burnout-related turnover and reduced hours costs almost $4.6 billion, with a B, dollars a year.

And then there's the price per departure. So Shlosh and colleagues from Academic Medicine in 2009 noted that at one academic medical center, they counted what it cost to replace faculty who left. And it was about $120,000 for a generalist, $290,000 for a medical specialist, and $590,000 for a surgical subspecialist.

Now, this includes recruitment and hiring and lost clinical income, but it doesn't count what's lost in terms of teaching and mentoring and research that walked out the door, as well as the culture of your colleagues who are left picking up the slack. Now, Weill Cornell also has a LAMP program where they looked into 2021.

Noted the faculty who completed this were 77% less likely to leave and 61% more likely to be promoted than matched [00:08:00] colleagues. Now, their confidence in time management rose from 55 to 92%, and this is the part that I love because I just read a book about this, and our white paper pulls this evidence together.

Discloses upfront that we provide coaching and have an interest in the answer. But I will tell you that when we go to all the departments we work with, this is one of the biggest things that is affecting not just the chair or the division chief, but the people on the ground, whether it's the physician that works with them or the nurse practitioner that's picking up the slack or the scheduler who's trying to figure out where to put all the patients.

And when we think about what to measure, Now, before you start, I recommend using a validated burnout and fulfillment survey. I like the Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index because it includes aspects of both.

And then track t- retention over a couple of years, promotions and leadership roles, time to productivity for new leaders, and training satisfaction for faculty who teach, and then compare it to similarly faculty who did not get coaching. What this could look like is a [00:09:00] division chief coaching four faculty this year runs that survey in September, again in June, and checks to see who's still there a couple years later. Simple enough, and that's how you can make it work. Now, one of the questions I often hear isn't coaching a Band-Aid on a broken system?

And the Mayo trial probably gives us the most honest answer, because coaching improved burnout and emotional exhaustion, but it didn't change engagement or job satisfaction. Fixing the system matters, but coaching by itself is not a good enough thing to help overcome a system that is not helping the people that work within it.

Now, the strongest trial showed a twenty-two point difference in burnout for those who underwent coaching. Our pilot found similar signals in academic surgeons, although small numbers. And the key here is really that turnover is expensive and faculty development is linked to staying. So if you invest in it, measure it.

Now faculty, if you've been curious about coaching, the evidence says it's worth it. Book a call at [00:10:00] amedsg.as.me. Leaders, download the white paper and learn about the Faculty Excellence and Retention Initiative at amedsg.com. Please rate, review, and follow the show and sh-share it with anybody out there who might be able to enjoy it.

And I hope to see you again next week