Growing Our People

A Guide to Mentorship, Sponsorship, Coaching, and Leadership

Fall brings a familiar “back to school” energy, from our new residents and fellows settling in, to the new faculty and staff joining us at UCSF. As we are all learning and striving to do better, it’s a natural time to revisit one’s own professional development. Lekshmi Santhosh, UCSF DOM associate chair for people development and mentorship (pictured left with associate chair of faculty experience Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH), reviews the exciting new developments and opportunities for faculty, staff, and trainees to learn, grow, and advance their careers across the DOM.

Mentorship & Sponsorship for Faculty, Staff & Trainees

In 2025, we set out on a mission to improve mentorship throughout the DOM at our Annual Leadership Retreat focused on mentorship. Several novel initiatives emerged from the brainstorming at this collaborative and thought-provoking retreat.

We subsequently launched the inaugural UCSF DOM Mentorship Incubator for new faculty hires across our divisions and sites. Twenty-four faculty joined a longitudinal cohort focused on mentorship, culture, community-building and curriculum to launch their careers at UCSF. Participants work on personal mentorship network “maps” and participate in a quarterly curriculum covering topics ranging from writing robust faculty letters of recommendation to understanding personal finances to defining their niche in academic medicine. Now, one year later, a robust mixed-methods evaluation shows that 96% were satisfied with the program and participants rated their confidence in their career development as significantly greater post-intervention.

“The program fostered a sense of community within the Department of Medicine and reinforced the value of mentorship as an ongoing professional relationship that I hope to both benefit from and provide to future trainees and junior faculty.” —Incubator participant.

We are excited to welcome our second cohort of twenty-five new faculty this fall, and our first cohort is delighted to pay it forward, serving as near-peer mentors for the new participants. We thank all mentors, mentees, peer mentors, staff mentors, and extra-divisional mentors for their support of our first cohort and enjoyed honoring mentors and mentees at a celebratory graduation in September.

If this program sounds helpful to your professional development goals, all slides and videos from the events are posted on the DOM mentorship website and are available to everyone, whether you’re new to the faculty or well-established.

We were also thrilled to launch the inaugural DOM Staff Mentorship Program in fall 2025 under the outstanding leadership of Aaron Tabacco, PhD, RN, director of staff experience. This novel program intentionally matched twelve mentor-mentee pairs across DOM divisions and sites with monthly mentor development sessions on trust, feedback, coaching, sponsorship, and other skills, in addition to traditional mentee support sessions focused on relationship-building, reflection, and program closure. Aaron notes, “While it has been wonderful to see our staff benefit from this new internal DOM program, one of the most rewarding aspects has been seeing how energized, excited, and happy our mentors themselves have become.”

For physician-scientist mentorship, the evidence-based, nationally renowned Faculty Mentor Training Program, led by Mandana Khalili, MD, director of faculty development, GEPA, continues to innovate with a formal and comprehensive faculty mentorship training program with self-paced and in-person modules, with the next course offered in fall 2026. For new or established mentors and mentees alike across all specialties, we also have one-page handouts on Best Practices for Mentorship for mentors, mentees, and division chiefs. We invite you to share these handouts with your favorite mentor, mentee, or leader.

Since advancement and promotions are often viewed as opaque, associate chair of faculty experience Urmimala Sarkar, MD, MPH, and I have engaged in group mentorship to demystify the promotions process, launching Promotions Town Halls for both physician-scientists and clinician-educators to explain the promotions process in further detail. Please check out these videos and forward them to your peers and mentees if they have questions about advancement and promotion.

For UCSF Internal Medicine Residents, we are now in the second year of the innovative Mentorship and Advising Portal. Matrix mentorship is ubiquitous in our residency and throughout the DOM, and this portal helps trainees keep track of and communicate their various milestones and accomplishments to mentors and advisors.

The future of mentorship is bright, with ongoing work by Gregory Ow, MD on AI MentorMatch, an AI-assisted platform that will work synergistically with UCSF Profiles to assist with mentor-mentee matches and systematically provide the rationale for suggested pairings.

This fall, we launched a new DOM Mentorship Awards Program to honor and recognize outstanding faculty and staff mentors. The three new awards will honor outstanding staff mentors, clinician-educator mentors, and scientific mentors. Please take a moment to nominate your inspiring mentor. Nominations close November 30.

Fall is often awards season, so leaders should continue to hone their sponsorship skills to nominate faculty, staff, and trainees for both internal and external awards. This helpful one-page sponsorship handout by Mitch Feldman, MD, MPhil, Mia Williams, MD, MS, and Veronica Yank, MD, MS describes the differences between mentorship and sponsorship and how we can all be sponsors to promote professional growth.

Coaching in the DOM

We have already worked hard to build a culture of coaching across the DOM, where colleagues feel comfortable supporting each other, lifting each other up, and reflecting on how to achieve our personal and professional goals. The DOM Physician Peer Coaching Program launched twelve American College of Physicians-trained Physician Peer Coaches across the DOM who have completed one year of in-depth training and are now actively coaching interested physician faculty who have self-referred or who have been referred by their division chiefs. To continue to simplify, optimize, and scale up this in-depth process, a UCSF team led by Cynthia Chor and Ed Chen is working on this project as one of the UCSF Clinical Enterprise Management Recognition Plan (CEMRP) goals.

The UCSF IM Residency already has a robust residency skills coaching program for folks who need extra support with clinical reasoning. We are incredibly grateful to UCSF IM alum Peter Alperin for his philanthropic support of a new initiative, the Alperin Coaching Program, which will focus on career coaching for residents, including interest in careers in academic medicine, clinical care, health technology, health policy, and industry. This new program will be run by Dan Wheeler, MD, who notes, “I'm really excited for the opportunity to pair each IM resident with a trained faculty coach who knows them well, is invested in their growth, and can help support them throughout residency.”

Leadership Development in the DOM

UCSF IM residents and subspecialty fellows already have the opportunity to participate in the longitudinal Health Systems Leadership Pathway (HSL), which gives dedicated training to trainees interested in becoming both outstanding physicians and future leaders and innovators.

This year, we have also launched two new DOM leadership programs for faculty: a free “journal club” style program, DOM Mini-LEAD, focused on dissecting articles related to leadership development, and the highly rated four-day intensive DOM LEAD Program (Leadership Excellence and Development), focused on in-depth leadership development. Josue Zapata, MD, MBA, assistant chair for leadership development and director of LEAD and HSL, states, “I’m excited about LEAD because it gives me the chance to help our incredible faculty develop the skills to do their best work, while also giving them the opportunity to step back, think bigger about the work we do, and learn from other amazing people across our DOM.”

As you can see, we have been hard at work to improve professional development opportunities for our faculty, staff, and trainees ever since our 2025 Annual Leadership Retreat! We hope that these offerings help you, and don’t hesitate to reach out with additional ideas, innovations, and feedback.
 

Lekshmi Santhosh, M.D., M.A.Ed. 
Professor of Clinical Medicine | Pulmonary and Critical Care 
DOM Associate Chair for Mentorship & People Development 
Associate Program Director | Internal Medicine Residency 
Gold-Headed Cane Endowed Education Chair in Internal Medicine