LEAD Program

Physician leaders need two sources of information to be successful: A mentor who makes sure that they have the required knowledge and skills of leadership as well as a coach who will use an indirect, Socratic method to help you formulate and think through your options for leading your organization. Traditionally, these have been separate processes; coaches focus purely on process and do not offer operational advice, while mentors focus on ensuring that you have the skills and knowledge you need to know to be successful.

While each of these roles can exist separately, the WSMA's new Leadership Enhancement and Development, or LEAD, Program provides an integrated model which combines both. The LEAD Program is, at heart, a coaching process that tactically injects operational mentorship advice when appropriate to accelerate your learning. The coaches are both traditional coaches as well as mentors with considerable operational experience. They have agreed to follow a model where they will stay in their indirect coaching role until they detect a knowledge or skill gap. They will then briefly switch to a mentorship role until both of you are convinced that the missing knowledge or skill is understood or mastered, and then they will immediately revert to the indirect process of coaching, allowing you to resume control of your learning and decision-making.

Program details

This program is somewhat different than the leadership coaching you may have experienced in the past. The key to this design is integrated coaching and mentoring: Flexibly moving between the two modalities as needed so that you can achieve the largest effect in a reasonable amount of time.

• Once we set a date for our first meeting, the coach will send you a preparatory exercise that you need to complete before our first session. This exercise takes about an hour to complete and provides important background information to make your first session more productive.
• You and the coach will have an initial 1-hour introductory session to set your goals.
• Following the initial session, together you will mutually determine the number of additional sessions required to accomplish your goals.
• At the final session in the series, you and your coach will discuss the evolution of your leadership development and determine next steps.

What will it cost? All sessions will be billed at the rate of $300 per hour, billed directly by the coach/mentor.

Your coaches and mentors

Edward Walker, MD, MHA 

Tom Norris, MD

How to sign up

To sign up for the LEAD Program, fill out the intake form.