The benefits of a leadership program and executive coaching for new nursing academic administrators: one college's experience.

Despite attention given to the nursing shortage and now the nursing faculty shortage, what is perhaps less visible but equally critical are the pending retirements of most of the current cadre of academic nursing administrators in the next decade. With only 2.1% of current deans, directors, and department chairs in 2006 aged 45 years or younger, there may be a pending crisis in leadership development and succession planning in our nursing schools and colleges. This article describes an innovative leadership development program for largely new nursing academic administrators, which combined a formal campus-based leadership symposia and executive coaching. This article is particularly useful and practical in that actual case studies are described (albeit modified slightly to protect the identity of the individual administrator), providing a real-life narrative that rarely makes its way into the nursing academic administration literature. The executive coaching focus is very sparsely used in nursing academia, and this college's success using this professional development strategy is likely to become a template for other institutions to follow.