UVA School of Medicine

Team-building sessions take place at Morven Farm about once per week. A variety of exercises take place designed to develop a variety of skills, from negotiating and team-building, to media training and emotional intelligence. Pollart was among the first people invited to participate in LAM. When she completed the 12-week series of weekly lectures, dis- cussions and interactive workshops, Hostler invited Pollart to join her team as an assis- tant dean for faculty development to lead Getting Started, a program for new faculty members who are just beginning their ac- ademic careers. Pollart is now a nationally recognized expert on faculty development and recently won the University of Virginia's Excellence in Faculty Mentoring Award. Making connections Hostler, who now serves as vice provost for faculty development for the University and senior associate dean for the School of Medi- cine, noted that trends indicate experienced faculty are retiring in increasing numbers, adding to a growing physician shortage. She said, "Competition for recruiting and retain- ing the best people in academic medicine at the University of Virginia requires that faculty members become engaged at a very deep level, not only in their research but in their alignment with the school and its val- ues. LAM is one way we're doing that." Other national data show that, while women and minorities have entered the 24 Vitals Fall 2011 academy in increasing numbers, they have not been able to connect with the traditional social and cultural networks that help young professors succeed and become leaders. There is still a glass ceiling at UVA, where 90% of the department chairs from all the schools and colleges across Grounds are white males. "In the days when academic medicine was senior white men facilitating the careers of junior white men, mentoring was literally the arm around the shoulder," Pollart said. "It was social and it was professional. It was very different than it can be now with the diver- sity of people in academia who may need a diverse set of mentors." One of LAM's major goals is to over- come the professional and social isolation that can result when mentorship is left to chance. Hostler designed the program so it would bring people together and create opportunities for faculty members of both genders and all races, ethnicities, disciplines and levels of training to develop a network of colleagues and mentors from a variety of disciplines who can support them in their career development. And since 2009 when LAM changed its name to Leadership in Academic Matters and expanded to include participants from throughout the University, it has been helping faculty members develop collegial connections across Grounds as well as across the Health System. "When people talk about what they got out of LAM, the thing they talk about first is the connection with the other faculty," Pol- lart said. "It's astounding to faculty to all of a sudden know someone in a different depart- ment or a different school that may be far across grounds from their home department. Had it not been for LAM, they would never have met that person." Pollart said these connections not only create exciting opportunities for collabora- tion, but because colleagues share more than intellectual ideas, they also offer a different view of the world. When faculty members can gain insight into how things operate in schools and departments other than their own, it alleviates misunderstandings and allows individuals to see more clearly how their work contributes to the overall mission of the institution. Learning to work with others When LAM was launched in 2004, Hostler had to twist a few arms to get 17 overex- tended clinical faculty members to commit

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