Developing faculty leadership from ‘within’: a 12-year reflection from an internal faculty leadership development program of an academic health sciences center

ABSTRACT

Most academic health sciences centers offer faculty leadership development programs (LDPs); however, the outcomes of LDPs are largely unknown. This article describes perspectives from our 12-year experience cultivating a formal faculty LDP within an academic health center and longitudinal outcomes of our LDP. Responding to faculty concerns from University of California San Francisco’s (UCSF) 2001 Faculty Climate Survey, UCSF established the UCSF-Coro Faculty Leadership Collaborative (FLC) in 2005. The FLC focused on building leadership skills using a cohort-based, experiential, interactive and collaborative learning approach. From 2005 to 2012, FLC has conducted training for 136 graduates over 7 cohorts with 97.6% completion rate. FLC faculty participants included 64% women and 13% underrepresented minority (URM). The proportions of graduates attaining leadership positions within UCSF such as deans or department chairs among all, URM, and women URM graduates were 9.6%, 33.3% and 45.5%, respectively. A 2013 online survey assessed 2005–2012 graduates’ perceived impacts from 8 months to 8 years after program completion and showed 91.7% of survey respondents felt the program both increased their understanding of UCSF as an organization and demonstrated the University’s commitment to foster faculty development. Qualitative results indicated that graduates perceived benefits at individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels. Though we did not directly assess impact on faculty recruitment and retention, the findings to date support cohort-based experiential learning in faculty leadership training development.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership development
• faculty development
• health sciences center

Acknowledgments

The authors thank UCSF leaders Eugene Washington and Sally Marshall, and Coro leader Maureen McNutty, for their collective vision and foresight in initially creating the collaboration. The authors also thank Susan Shain, previous CEO of Coro, Nancy Schemick, Coro Adjunct Faculty, and Melanie Fisch at UCSF for their contributions to earlier phases of the collaboration, Janice Cheng for her contribution in the initial phase of qualitative and quantitative analyses, and Genanne Walsh for editorial reviews of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

University of California San Francisco Institutional Review Board approved the study.

Previous presentation

A preliminary version of findings was presented at 2017 Western Group on Educational Affairs (WGEA) Regional Meeting, Salt Lake City, 26 February 2017.

Additional information

Funding

None.