Developing excellent leaders - the role of Executive Coaching for GP specialty trainees

Given an increasingly complex healthcare environment, doctors need to rise to the challenges of leadership. Executive coaching offers innovative and workable means of realising excellence in leadership. Coaching creates an empowering, ‘high challenge, high support’ environment for significant growth. This study sought to determine general practice (GP) specialty trainee (ST3) knowledge of coaching, views on leadership training, and reflections on the experience of receiving coaching. All GP ST3s in one UK region completed a questionnaire about coaching and developing leadership abilities. Six received professional coaching sessions, followed by a semi-structured interview. Baseline knowledge of coaching was sparse. Trainees felt under-equipped for leadership, but were keen to develop themselves. The short intervention appeared to result in a shift in leadership mind-set in four key areas: courage, passion, impact, and vision. A new enthusiasm was apparent, as well as a willingness and desire to increase leadership responsibilities. This is the first UK study examining professional executive face-to-face coaching as an educational method for doctors. Coaching helps provide leadership ‘language’ and ‘identity’. It appears to ‘name’ clients as ‘leaders’ and challenges ‘imposter phenomenon’. Coaching provided bespoke, deep, experiential learning, with transferable benefits not otherwise available in the Specialty Training programme.