How to Sponsor, Coach, and Mentor: A Qualitative Study With Family Medicine Department Chairs

The goal of this study was to explore how to use sponsoring, coaching, and mentoring (SCM) for faculty development by clarifying the functions embedded in SCM. The study aims to ensure that department chairs can be intentional in providing those functions and/or playing those roles for the benefit of all their faculty.

We used qualitative, semistructured interviews in this study. We followed a purposeful sampling strategy to recruit a diverse sample of family medicine department chairs across the United States. Participants were asked about their experiences receiving and providing sponsoring, coaching, and mentoring. We iteratively coded audio recorded and transcribed interviews for content and themes.

We interviewed 20 participants between December 2020 and May 2021 to identify actions associated with sponsoring, coaching, and mentoring. Participants identified six main actions sponsors perform. These actions are identifying opportunities, recognizing an individual's strengths, encouraging opportunity-seeking, offering tangible support, optimizing candidacy, nominating as a candidate, and promising support. In contrast, they identified seven main actions a coach performs. These are clarifying, advising, giving resources, performing critical appraisals, giving feedback, reflecting, and scaffolding (ie, providing support while learning). Finally, participants identified six main actions the mentors perform. The list includes checking in, listening, sharing wisdom, directing, supporting, and collaborating.

We present SCM as an identifiable series of actions that need to be thought of and performed intentionally. Our clarification will help leaders purposefully select their actions and allows opportunity for evaluating their effectiveness. Future research will explore developing and evaluating programs that support learning how to provide SCM in order to enhance the process of faculty development and provide it equitably.