A successful professional career evolves through a long process of adaptation and maturation. Often the demands of the moment exceed one’s preparation for it. A gap between expectation and attainment can be traversed with the help of a coach.

Areas in a physician’s career in which coaching can help include:
 

Performance Coaching

Expectations of practicing physicians have always been high. Individual doctors may have trouble meeting them, and may have various experiences of exhaustion, burnout, unsatisfying collegial relationships or patient disconnection. In this time of rapidly changing expectations, such discontents are common. Doctors have attained strengths of curiosity, self-discipline and empathy in the process of becoming clinicians. Building upon these, coaching offers ways to explore and test new ways of better self-care, and enjoy a more satisfying presence in clinical encounters, more efficient practice organization and more successful engagement with colleagues.

Role Transition

Professional careers rarely run straight ahead. Opportunities may beckon from outside of one’s intended path – or setbacks may necessitate a different course. Movement into a new role calls for reflection about what has preceded the change, exploration of the possibilities ahead, and then expansion of one’s capabilities to fit the new professional world. Coaching can serve to organize the assessment of personal strengths and needs for growth, the search for new situations, the engagement with new colleagues and solid grounding in new responsibilities.

Leadership Coaching

Becoming a leader in healthcare asks the expansion of the skills one has acquired as an individual clinical contributor. The leader must now also master abilities to lead other professionals and collaborate with other physician and non-physician leaders across disciplines and functions. This is a worthy and challenging shift for from one’s clinical origins to the leadership/managerial role. Successive advances in position call for enlarging areas of responsibility ultimately beyond one’s historic experience and toward a greater role in the shaping of strategy and culture. Coaching can serve the emerging leader to explore and consolidate those capabilities needed for organizational effectiveness at each level of leadership.

Team Coaching and Facilitation

Physician leaders may also benefit from coaching in team development and integration with teams with changing goals, composition, or leadership. Coaching can be the most efficient and effective way of bringing a team together to ensure the best balance in individual, team, and cross-team collaboration. Coaching may also include facilitation of key meetings or events, with the coach serving as an objective process guide or sounding board in discussing and making collective strategic decisions.