By Katherine Vessenes, JD, CFP®

Are you transitioning into a leadership role at work?

MD Financial’s CEO and Founder Katherine Vessenes, JD, CFP®, talked to Dr. Brian Clyne, MD, MHL, about his side gig, leadership coaching, in today’s episode of More Money Minutes for Doctors. Dr. Clyne shared his experience with doctors and how he has helped them in times of transition at work.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and grammar.

Katherine Vessenes: So, doctors, are you transitioning into a leadership role at your hospital or clinic? Or maybe you're looking to become a partner at a private practice? If so, you'll want to pay very special attention today because we have somebody very special with us, Dr. Brian Clyne, who does leadership coaching.

K: Welcome back to More Money Minutes for Doctors. I'm your host, Katherine Vessenes. I'm also the CEO and founder of MD Financial Advisors. Before we get started, listeners, if you have any questions, please reach out to us at info@mdfinancialadvisors.com.

K: Before we get to Brian's very interesting information about how to become a leader when they didn't teach you that in medical school, our friends at the SEC have a few disclosures they'd like me to make. Yes, Brian and his lovely wife are current clients of ours. And Brian, did I pay you anything or give you anything of material value to record this video today?

Dr. Brian Clyne: No.

K: And by the way, he didn't pay me either. I think this is such an important topic, we wanted to get this information out to everyone. So, thank you for that. All right, Brian, can you give us a quick background about who you are, how many years you've been in practice, and how you got into this really interesting side gig?

Dr. C: Sure. Thank you again for having me. This is really a privilege and an honor. As you mentioned, my name is Brian Clyne. I'm an emergency physician. I have been in practice about 25 years post-residency.

Dr. C: My career has been predominantly in academic emergency medicine, so a lot of the work, in addition to clinical work that I do, has been around medical education and career development.

Dr. C: I've always had an interest in leadership development. I think that formed during phases of my career where I was asked to serve in leadership roles that I felt unprepared for. And so, I embarked on a lot of self-studies around what it is to be a leader which has been a source of interest of mine over time.

Dr. C: Fast-forward, I mentioned one of those experiences happened about six or seven years ago, and I was asked to serve in a role where, for the first time ever, I enlisted the help of a leadership coach. Some of your listeners may have some familiarity with leadership coaching, performance coaching, or executive coaching. It's something that I think in a lot of other industries has become baked into the professional development and leadership experience. But it hasn't happened in healthcare to the extent it has infiltrated other industries. I knew a little bit about what coaches did. I had heard of some colleagues who enlisted the help of a coach, but it was the first time I had worked with one.

Dr. C: To make a long story short, it was a transformative experience. I learned so much about myself. I learned so much about how I was showing up as a leader. I had a little bit of a misnomer about what I thought coaching was. I thought I was going to lay out all my problems to the coach, and my coach would tell me what to do.

K: And they didn't do that?

Dr. C: No. That’s exactly what they didn't do. I learned that coaching is a lot about empowering the client to make their own discoveries, make their own decisions, and become a little more connected to their values and their sense of purpose.

Dr. C: Through that work, I started to realize there's actually a skill set here. It took me a little while, probably about six months into working with a coach, I realized there's a methodology. There are tools. There's something there. We're not just having unformed, random conversations. When I started to realize that there was a body of knowledge to learn about in coaching, I became really intrigued. So, I went back and did some retraining, became certified as a leadership performance coach, and have since been working almost exclusively with healthcare professionals, but also folks in higher education and some social service nonprofits.

K: I love this story for so many reasons. But for one thing, as you know, I work with a lot of your colleagues. I'm sure this is a credit to you as a person, but also to what you learned as a coach: they uniformly tell me how much they enjoyed working with you when you were in this leadership position. So I think all the work that you did—and I'm sure it was gut-wrenching at times and soul-searching—really paid off in this very happy community of doctors.

Dr. C: Well, thank you for saying that. But you know, I think one of the larger points I wanted to make is that so many of us who devote our lives to a career in medicine spend so much of our time in our training learning the clinical craft, learning to take really good care of patients. In certain specialties, learning really precise technical skills. It takes a lifetime to develop those, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Dr. C: But what's missing in a lot of medical education and training is, some people call them the softer skills, I like to think of them as the power skills. Skills related to leadership, emotional intelligence, the things that they don't necessarily explicitly train you as a physician.

Dr. C: I talk a lot about this notion of accidental leadership. The accelerated version is, on Monday you're identified as maybe a good clinician or a good individual contributor. On Tuesday someone says, "Hey, maybe you should lead the team". And then by Friday you're asked to serve as the department chair or the division chief.

Dr. C: It's an exaggerated story, but I think it speaks to how things can happen in medicine where people find themselves through one skill set or competency area—i.e. being a good clinician or publishing a lot of research papers—and then they're asked to have these other transferable skills and knowledge and lead an organization.

Dr. C: Through a series of experiences like that, that's how I really became interested in this area because it was a yawning gap between what I had been learning in my training, medical school training and beyond, and what I felt was being asked of me in these other roles.

K: I can totally relate to this. I don't know if I've mentioned this to you, but I spent decades being an attorney and financial advisor, and now I'm managing this company with six advisors plus a support staff of 20. And to your point, now I need to be in the CEO role. I think one of the things that you may have faced when you stepped into leadership unexpectedly is managing people. Those contrary interests are much different than telling a patient you've got a broken leg, or I need to take out your appendix. It's just a whole different skill set.

Dr. C: Yeah. You know, as you get different responsibilities, sometimes they're not necessarily aligned with what you know and what you've been doing—so it's that whole "what got you here might not get you there" kind of thing. I think it's a pretty famous catchphrase. The point is, that when you're navigating those transitions, there's increased complexity. Oftentimes, you have less control over things than you might think, because now you've got this whole spectrum of other people you're managing. There's just scale. You have to be able to evolve in your leadership skills and your awareness.

K: Absolutely. To me, so much of that is putting aside how I would like to handle things in this particular situation, right? And you sometimes just have to let other people work it out with their skills, which I've found difficult at times.

Dr. C: Yeah. A really practical example: I mentioned I'm an emergency physician and I have a fair amount of experience. So, I'm working with a trainee, let's say they're a resident or a medical student, and they're presenting a case. Maybe they haven't seen that type of case before. Maybe it's really challenging for them to think through some of the medical decision-making. But through experience and pattern recognition and the years, I can maybe see things differently or have a clearer perspective and know exactly how this is going to play out or what the diagnostic plan will be, etcetera, etcetera.

Dr. C: And so, it's tempting in a busy work environment. You have to be able to say, "Listen, here's what you need to do. Do this test, do this thing, call this person". In the short term, that gets the job done. And yes, the patient got appropriate care, but it did very little to enhance and develop and empower the trainee. Whether you're formally coaching someone or using coach-like skills, there are always opportunities to think about leadership differently.

K: Right. Well, the last time we chatted, you didn't even have a website. I was amazed; how do all of these places find you for the side gig business?

Dr. C: Well, it's true. I have an informative and amazing website and it's all in my head.

K: Well, it seems like you're doing really well without it, so I don't know that you need to get it out of your head.

Dr. C: You know, it is a side gig. It is a business. But it's probably not a business with a capital B like some of your clients have. It's something where I have kind of a steady trickle of clients and I do some independent contract work for other organizations. But it's a small percentage of my effort. The best way to reach me is just simply via email and it's my name, brianclyne@gmail.com.

K: Tell us a little bit about your program then. How does that work?

Dr. C: People, especially healthcare professionals, come to coaching for different reasons. And increasingly you're finding people that are coming to coaching not because they're in a failed state, or being remediated, or needing to fix something. It's because they're actually realizing that we don't always have the innate or natural ability to develop our leadership skills on our own. And by definition, we all have these blind spots.

Dr. C: People are coming to coaching because they're doing well but they really want to optimize. They want to reach their full potential. I feel like the clients that I add the most value to are the people that I've had mirror-like experiences: they're newly transitioned, say they're a junior faculty member who's now becoming a residency program director. Or they're a mid-career faculty who's taking over a large division. Or even senior faculty who are now at an executive level. Those transition points, which can be really fraught and disorienting and stressful.

K: And scary.

Dr. C: Yeah. Those are the people that are seeking me out. And so, my coaching is essentially a series of conversations. They're different kinds of conversations than you might have with a mentor.

Dr. C: A lot of them are exploratory. They're designed for the client to discover some things about themselves. And so coaching conversations, they can take a lot of different forms and directions.

Dr. C: But for the most part, we focus on a specific goal over the course of roughly six to twelve-month engagements. And I typically meet with clients once every two weeks for about an hour. Sometimes if there's something really time-sensitive and they're working on a short deadline, it may be more frequent.

Dr. C: There's the conversation, the interaction, but there's always some "doing." A lot of the work in coaching occurs in between sessions where the client has designed some fieldwork for themselves or there's something they're committed to doing to move forward. And so if you meet every week, there may not be enough time to do those things. And if you meet every month, you might lose momentum. I've found that a cadence of about every two weeks is useful.

Dr. C: And we constantly check in about “where are we? Are we making any measurable progress towards the goals you set?” And ultimately if we agree that that is the case and they've gotten what they need out of coaching, then the idea ultimately for coaches is to not create dependency, but to end these relationships in a positive way. However the clients define success, if you can reach it and achieve it, it’s the most satisfying.

K: And I think of coaching and consulting differently, right? Because with a consultant you've got an industry expert that can identify the problems and make some suggestions about how to fix those. And coaching to me seems like you're helping that person discover those themselves. Is that fair?

Dr. C: It's a great point. Yeah, I think consulting is probably known more for, as you said, subject matter expertise. Someone coming in, really getting in the weeds and knowing all the details and then maybe identifying a solution and presenting a set of solutions or suggestions. Whereas I guess the inverse would be in coaching. The client is the expert in their own lives, and you honor that through coaching. You're less inclined as a coach to impose suggestions.

Dr. C: You may at times, and you may see something that the client doesn't see that you want to point out or maybe even challenge. But yeah, that notion of subject matter expertise is something that we think a lot about in coaching as a distinguishing factor from consulting.

K: Right. And then where do you see doctors struggle most? Like are there some common threads with the clients that are coming to you?

Dr. C: Yeah. You know, I think those points of transition as I mentioned are critical, especially when you're doing leadership coaching. There's no surprise now that a lot of people in healthcare are seeking coaching because of work-life imbalance or burnout. There's obviously a strong body of work to suggest that people in healthcare, a lot of physicians but a lot of other people too, are not finding the kind of meaning and fulfillment in their work that they would like. And so, I do coach people who maybe that's the primary reason why they're seeking coaching. So that's something that I feel like is a big challenge.

K: So you're seeing some people who are burnt-out, right? And they're just trying to figure out how to get that work-life balance? It may not even be so much about leadership, but it might be how they manage their job and their life. Is that right?

Dr. C: Right.

K: I’m seeing a lot of those clients, too. The way we might approach it is they say “how soon can I retire? Or if I take this other job that is a whole lot less stressful and my pay is cut by 25%, can I still survive and feed my family?” We have those kinds of conversations too. But in your case that sounds like it might not be a leadership issue, but a regular burnout issue.

Dr. C: Right. I don't do exclusively leadership-focused coaching, but examples of coaching topics include career change. Maybe not getting out of medicine, but like modifying their role in some way. How they approach their career, whether it's their job itself, or their hours, or their other commitments. How they manage their time. Sometimes people really need help setting goals and creating some internal barometers of success.

Dr. C: There's so much that happens in medical training. Physicians in particular, whether it's the type of personality that gets attracted to medicine to begin with or the acculturation process that occurs through medical school and residency training and just the culture of medicine, there are some mindsets that end up taking hold. There's probably no shortage of physicians who experience some degree of perfectionism and competitiveness. Being aware of those mindsets is really important as a coach.

Dr. C: They surface in many of the topics that clients bring. Some of the healthcare-specific mindsets surface and there are some fundamental beliefs and assumptions that people have about themselves and how they should function in their careers. That can all often serve as a sticking point. In summary I'd say I see a lot of people that are stuck.

K: Right. Now do you ever get into their personal relationships with spouses or children when they're stuck?

Dr. C: Obviously they're a whole person and some of their challenges are going to be at home as well as professional. For the most part, I try to stick to the professional challenges and don't get into a lot of home relationships. There's a lot of interpersonal relationship coaching when it comes to the workplace.

Dr. C: I feel like I spend a lot of time in my coaching around people who are having a difficult time with a team or getting results from an individual and they don't know how to manage that. They don't have the tools to have the conversation. And so coaching can take very kind of granular form around how to work with people and how to get the results and build the relationships that you want.

K: I can see how satisfying that would be and how that would reduce a lot of stress. They're probably going over and over in their minds about this particular situation, the employee that's not performing or the team that's not working, and they talk about feeling stuck, they keep regurgitating that back and forth in their minds. That's very, very stressful. I think what's great about coaching is you give them a path through that.

Dr. C: Yeah. Sometimes you can help get them a path through it, but more often than not, you might be able to offer them or get them to see it from a different perspective.

Dr. C: I think that's the key. Sometimes we're brooding on these things or we're holding onto them. Let's take this example of a colleague or a workplace interpersonal challenge. There's a perspective that we're holding. What a coach can be helpful in is saying, “well, what's an alternative perspective? What's another way of looking at this?” Being able to shine some light on a new reframe of how to see the problem.

Dr. C: Most leaders, most people, encounter problems and they just don't see them. They see them one way because by definition they have a lens that's informed by all of their whole belief system, assumptions, and values. A coach can really provide insights towards a different perspective. That can be a really key thing to open up change.

K: Right, and very freeing. So, do you have a tip for doctors? Let's say doctors in a new leadership position. What's one tip that you would give them?

Dr. C: That's a great question. This is a tip that I've learned through coaching and it's really about having the skills to sit down and talk to people and teams about how we're going to work together. What do I mean by that? I think so often today we're so agenda driven. You and I have a working relationship, right? And our working relationship centers around having to get these three things done, we're going to meet every two weeks, these are the measures, these are the numbers, etc.

Dr. C: But we rarely step back and say, "Hey, Katherine, let's just think about how are we going to make this working relationship successful? What do you need from me? What do I need from you?" There's you and there's me right now, but then there's this thing between us and it's our working relationship. And how are we going to take care of that so that we're productive, so that we're successful, so that this organization thrives? We don't often step back and create that context and get explicit about how we're going to communicate, how we're going to deal with the inevitable conflict that arises.

Dr. C: Call it setting agreements, or establishing ground rules, or whatever it may be. If I was going to give advice to new leaders, I would say think about and try to develop some of those skills around setting those terms. Once you have them and you agree to them with your team, or your partner, or whoever, that's something that you can go back to time and again. "Hey, are we honoring those agreements in this particular situation?" They're such a healthy tool for having a productive and successful workplace.

K: I think I found that very helpful for myself and my own business to think about the team members and setting those expectations around the relationship and around communication.

K: It's not something I've thought about before, but that was very helpful to me personally. Thank you for that. All right, before we close, is there anything else that you'd like to mention?

Dr. C: I guess the thing that I want to mention is I enjoy this work. I'm inspired by it, and it's something that I hope to do more of incrementally over time. And why? Why is that? Because it is so fundamentally important to our professional development, to our personal well-being, and to the impact that we want to have in the world. If you're listening to this and you are a healthcare leader, you're in a position of creating or offering a coaching program to members of your practice, your team, or your hospital.

Dr. C: We need to get to a point where coaching is like in the water. It's baked in. It's something that is so accepted and integral to our lives. Just like we have to take care of patients, deal with the EMR, it should be like part and parcel of what we expect in our career. That's the ultimate goal: to really penetrate coaching as a tool for personal professional growth. I hope that if anyone is listening that has the ability to help disseminate that, that’s where this goes.

K: I would love to see that, because I think as a profession doctors are extremely stressed. And as you know the numbers talk about how there's so much burnout there. I think your proposal for changing how the industry looks at this could really, really reduce those stress levels immensely.

K: The other thing is, on the financial advisor side of this, we haven't really talked about how excited I was that you have a side gig that's like your passion project. I think that you could do this long after you hang up your stethoscope, right? And you say, "I'm retired from emergency med," but you could probably do this for decades afterwards. And that's very exciting to me on so many levels because it uses all of your skills.

K: As you know, the longer you work the longer you live, right? It keeps your brain sharp and it gets some extra income in retirement. I think I'm very proud of you for doing this.

Dr. C: Well, thank you. I do imagine a future where this takes a little bit more of my time and effort and maybe a little bit less in emergency medicine. But I still like what I do.

Dr. C: Sometimes I talk about this—there's a really sharp contrast between what I do in my day-to-day life in the emergency room and what I love about coaching. I give you this kind of quick analogy: when people are at their steady state and baseline health, and then something happens, they come to the emergency department. They might see me and at best, I might be able to get them back to that steady state. And what I love and what inspires me about coaching is meeting people who are here (steady state) and getting them here (higher level). Beyond what they ever expected. And so that's the kind of thing that excites me and keeps me going. I hope to be able to do it well into the future.

K: Well, I'm excited you're doing this. I'm excited for the people who get a chance to work with you. And just to remind you to get a hold of Brian, you want to tell them your email address again?

Dr. C: brianclyne@gmail.com

K: Excellent. Very good. Thanks again for joining us today, Brian. Such great information. I hope our listeners can really, really take this to heart. For those of you listening today, if you have any other questions for us, please reach out to us at info@mdfinancialadvisors.com. And remember, do take care of yourself, plan, protect, and prosper.

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Katherine Vessenes, JD, CFP®, is the founder and CEO of MD Financial Advisors who serve 600 doctors from Hawaii to New York. An experienced Financial Advisor, Attorney, Certified Financial Planner®, author and speaker, she is devoted to bringing ethical advice to physicians and dentists. She can be reached at Katherine@mdfinancialadvisors.com.

These statements are from a current client and may not be representative of the experience of other clients and do not guarantee future performance or success; no cash compensation was exchanged for this recognition. MD Financial is not aware of any material conflicts of interest between this client and the firm.

Additional information, including management fees and expenses, is provided on our Form ADV Part 2 available upon request or at the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website, here. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results.