I had a whole draft ready to go for you today about common ways to improve your coaching questions, but then someone sent in a question that preempted that! So you can look forward to a discussion of coaching questions next time!

Today, though, we’re just about 3 weeks away from the deadline to register for Lead With Curiosity: Coaching skills for library leaders, so it feels pretty urgent to respond to this question:

How do you advocate for the value of coaching in a way that will convince your boss or upper administrators to invest in training for you?

They’ve tried, but got pushback from administrators who asked questions like “Why does a library leader need coaching professional development?” or “How does this relate to the work libraries do?”

Before I share my full answer, I’ll encourage you to reflect on what it is that’s drawing you to want to learn more about these skills.

How do you see this helping you be more effective in your job?

…

My answer is that coaching is an essential leadership skill that’s closely aligned with my values as a leader.

So it’s not directly related to the library-specific part of my work. Instead, it’s related to the work of leading a team and managing people in a way that empowers and develops my team members and builds a healthier work environment.

Coaching skills relate to the work that YOU do in libraries as a library leader by enabling you to:

• Help your team take more initiative in problem-solving
• Support your team in coping with changes and uncertainty
• Get your team working together toward a shared goal
• Navigate conflict in a way that leads to better outcomes
• Develop a culture of continuous learning & improvement
• Feel confident giving constructive feedback for improvement

An early article that really brought attention to using a coaching approach in management is ​Leadership That Gets Results by Daniel Goleman (stuck behind a paywall). This article outlined six leadership styles, including the coaching style, arguing that successful leaders are those who are adept at switching between multiple styles as the context requires. It cited the coaching style as the least commonly used style in this particular study, but one that has a “markedly positive” effect “on climate and performance” (p. 10). There's a growing body of research backing up this claim and trying to explain why it improves climate and performance.

In the 25 years since that article was published, there’s been a lot of talk about coaching, and a lot of different interpretations of what counts as coaching.

More recent scholarly literature on managerial coaching finds that the actual behaviors lumped under a “coaching” label are all over the place. Some adapt skills from professional coaching, which is what I teach in Lead With Curiosity.

Others draw an analogy from little league sports coaching instead of seeking formal training, and wind up sticking a “coaching” label on stuff that I would call basic training. That training is essential. But when an employee starts to associate training on how to do a task with “being coached”, then the idea that they could benefit from further coaching can sound like you think they’re doing something wrong.

And then, there’s the Situational Leadership approach, which characterizes “coaching” as another form of “selling” or “persuading” 🤮

Coaching is a totally unregulated industry, so they’re free to define the term however they want, but that definition feels like the polar opposite of the way the International Coaching Federation defines coaching.

The ICF definition is aligned with the values I developed as a librarian practicing critical pedagogy and teaching critical information literacy. The Situational Leadership one just reminds me of a past manager who openly bragged about how she manipulates people.

How you define "coaching" has a HUGE effect on the outcomes you get from coaching!

So one important benefit of getting ICF-aligned training in coaching skills is that it sets you up to actually get the benefits that researchers find in organizations that use this approach.

Those benefits include improving work-related outcomes, including goal-attainment and self-efficacy, and enhancing innovative work behaviors.

They also include outcomes like improving morale and reducing turnover, because employees feel heard, valued, and supported.

Coaching skills also help you manage interpersonal conflict within your team in a couple of ways. First, coaching focuses on getting below the surface level symptoms (the open conflict) to figure out what’s at the root of the issue, so that you can address that. Instead of focusing on the one exchange that blew up, we focus on listening to understand what’s been simmering for months or years, so that we can find a more effective solution.

And second, developing coaching skills provides tools for conflict-averse librarians to have these conversations in a less threatening way.

One past participant in Lead With Curiosity mentioned this as one of the outcomes from having participated in the program:

Now, the Goleman article cited above wasn’t just about using a coaching approach to leadership. The ultimate argument is that leaders need many styles, and you should seek leadership development that supports you in learning styles that you’re not already adept in using.

Coaching is the style that is least commonly used, but it has a significant positive impact, assuming you're using a definition that's about empowering your team members!

My guess is that it's the least commonly used style because coaching involves developing specific skills that require breaking a lot of common habits.

It means listening to understand instead of listening to form a response.

It means leaning all the way into your curiosity and asking questions that are intentionally designed to help someone find the answer that works best for them, instead of jumping in to give them your solution.

You built your career being praised and promoted for having the answers and being great at your job.

It can be a little jarring to go from that to figuring out how to support others in becoming the ones with the answers and the ones who are great at their jobs.

A library leader needs coaching professional development in order to learn how to effectively use this approach to develop their team’s capacity for excelling in their library work.

How are you developing your skills in this area?

In Lead With Curiosity, we’ll spend a pretty intense 4 day jumpstart week in July building core coaching skills, including asking effective coaching questions and using a structured framework to examine a challenge and find a clear path forward.

And you’ll get plenty of chances to practice and get feedback!

And then you’ll get 3 months of ongoing support to further build your skills and provide some accountability for actually using these skills with your team.

If you’re on the fence about whether to join now or wait for the next cohort, it may be useful to know that the next one won’t be until sometime in 2026. I love the program, but I don’t love the marketing work that goes into promoting it! So I’m going to give myself a break from that for a little while.

And I’m always happy to talk about whether this is a good fit for you - no pressure, just answers to your questions and maybe some questions for you to consider! Schedule a time to chat.