Qualitative study identifying leadership challenges encountered in real-world scholarly projects within a faculty development program

Background Faculty development programs often incorporate structured pieces of academic work, i.e. action learning projects, to provide participants with experiential learning while also addressing real world problems. The Leadership in Academic Medicine Program (LAMP), a faculty development program at Weill Cornell Medicine, contains a project expectation, i.e. a capstone, that culminates in submission of a final written abstract. This study analyzed LAMP capstone abstracts to characterize the scope of projects undertaken, and to identify common leadership challenges encountered by faculty participants during execution of their project. Methods This retrospective qualitative review was performed on abstracts submitted between 2017–2025. Two investigators discerned unique challenges described in the project abstracts and labelled them as concepts. Similar concepts were clustered into categories, and categories were clustered into themes. Frequencies of concepts were calculated to identify top themes; projects were additionally classified by scholarly type, e.g. research, education, clinical. Results There were 294 abstracts, 42% categorized as research, 37% as clinical quality improvement, and 22% as education. Over time, there was a shift towards more quality improvement (22% to 40%) and education projects (9% to 37%). The authors coded 133 unique concepts, occurring 784 times. Concepts were clustered into 26 categories and from these categories, 6 overarching themes representing leadership challenges were identified: 1) collaborate across area, 2) engage stakeholders, 3) develop something new, 4) negotiate resources, 5) respond to a problem, and 6) change existing culture. Conclusions Identification of six prevalent leadership challenges confronted by faculty during execution of distinct types of capstone projects provides unique insights to the needs of faculty leaders, assists with data driven improvements to the LAMP curriculum, and offers guidance to other academic faculty development programs.