Why teams should coach their leaders

Leaders take on a significant amount of invisible labor when managing people and organizations. What if by engaging our teams, we could increase the visibility of and appreciation for our work while also improving our leadership skills? Learn about this highly data-driven approach to executive development and coaching.

This session originally was presented at AVMA’s 2025 Veterinary Leadership Conference.

Learning objectives:

• Understand the pros and cons of stakeholder-focused coaching.
• Learn how to provide and receive feedforward, as opposed to feedback.
• Evaluate ‘personal’ versus ‘potential’ stakeholder leadership priorities.

Dr. Cyndie Courtney is a small animal veterinarian, workplace conflict consultant, and founder of The Jerk Researcher. Her consulting work combines real-life experiences with evidence-based approaches that offer practical solutions to workplace conflict. She is certified in Stakeholder Centered Coaching and has training in non-violent communication, conflict mediation, workplace wellbeing, and workplace violence prevention. She won the World Small Animal Veterinary Association’s Next Generation Award in 2019 and was named Outstanding Recent Alumnus by Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine in 2021. She also was a member of AVMA’s 2015-2016 Future Leaders class.