The Coaching Librarian

In a meeting with the current Lead With Curiosity cohort, I made a participant laugh by asking an unexpected question: What opportunities does the first week of the fall semester open for using a coaching approach? Of course I phrased the question that way on purpose. This time of year tends to be incredibly hectic for academic librarians. Been there, done that. And that makes it hard to make the time to actually practice coaching your team. But I didn't want us to get stuck in that space....

I’m looking forward to a busy July, and getting ready for it has coaching questions on my mind! This month, I'm teaching Coaching as a Leadership Skill, a 4-week fully asynchronous course for Library Juice Academy. And then the jumpstart session for Lead With Curiosity: Coaching skills for library leaders is later in the month. You have until July 15 to join us! In both, we spend a good amount of energy on learning to ask effective coaching questions, because it takes time and effort to build...

This week, I’d like to share my experience of getting started actually coaching someone else for the very first time. I’ve shared this story before here, but a lot of folks have joined since then! And it bears repeating, because a lot of library leaders share some of the same fears that I had. So I hope that this reassures you that you don’t have to wait until you feel like a fully competent coach to start practicing at least a little bit of this! I’ll drop a quick reminder here that if you...

Yes, yes I am starting today with an early Cardi B reference 😂 The hardest part of developing a coaching approach to leadership is that you're going to feel knocked down over and over, but you just have to keep resetting your intentions to try again tomorrow. One of the major challenges is that you can't expect everyone to just magically open up and engage in the way you're hoping for them to respond. You'll probably get at least some resistance from employees who have good reasons to not...