Last time, I talked about the reality that you’re most likely going to stumble several times as you work on putting a coaching approach to leadership into practice. It’s important to really internalize that it’s ok to stumble, to fall back into just issuing orders or quick advice. What matters is that you get back up again, and just keep resetting your intentions every day to be more curious, ask more questions, and actively listen to your team members.

The other major obstacle that I mentioned last time, and told you I’d have more to say about this time, is the reality that not everyone is going to embrace this approach with open arms right away.

You’re likely to feel like at least some of your team members are knocking you off of this coaching path. They may just sit and stare at you, or just give one word answers to your questions. They may even directly tell you that they just want you to tell them what to do.

That can come across as just being obstinate. Like they just don’t want to take responsibility for their own development. Like they’re just disengaged or unmotivated or whatever.

But there are a lot of very understandable reasons why people sometimes act those ways, especially when their boss starts acting in a way they’re not used to.

And it’s ok if some folks don’t want to be coached.

The foundation of your coaching approach is your coaching mindset. That means fully embracing your curiosity. That means recognizing that everyone is responsible for their own choices, and it’s not your responsibility to force someone to do the thing that you think would be best for them. It doesn’t matter how much you and I know coaching can benefit your team members, if someone doesn’t want to take advantage of that opportunity, that’s ok. They might be doing calculus that includes factors that you know nothing about, and those factors may be what makes coaching wrong for them right now.

But even when you’re supervising a person who absolutely will not engage with your coaching questions no matter how many times you try, you can still make sure to keep your coaching mindset in place.

Stay curious about what might be going on without jumping to any assumptions or judgments about what they’re dealing with. Stay in that space of knowing that you don’t know, instead of making up a story about what must be going on with them.

And keep inviting them to try being coached, by asking questions as they feel appropriate. That sounds really fuzzy, but as you practice coaching the team members who are open to this approach, you’ll get a better sense of what questions work best for you and when.

Coaching asks for a level of vulnerability that not everyone is going to feel safe with, especially when you first start using this approach.

The best time for coaching is when your team member knows the outcome they’re trying to reach, but there are dozens of ways to get there, and they’re not sure which path is the best for them. If there’s one right answer, like the proper procedure for submitting an expense report, then that calls for training or instruction. The time for coaching is when your team member is trying to figure out something more flexible:

• how they want to structure a library program
• how to do outreach to this new group
• how to prioritize their work
• what professional development they want to focus on next
• how to respond diplomatically to someone they find challenging to deal with

And so on.

For that coaching to work, they have to feel safe admitting that they don’t yet know the best way to get from where they are to the outcome they’re trying to reach. That requires vulnerability.

And that doesn’t feel safe for a lot of people who are carrying trauma from past low morale work experiences, whether that’s in your library or three library jobs ago.

If you’ve had a horrible experience with a super micromanager who scolded you every time you did something slightly differently than how they would do it, then you might not feel safe telling a new supervisor what you think is the best way to do a new task. You might feel safer asking them to just tell you the right way.

If your past boss repeatedly ignored your goals and priorities and just kept piling their own pet projects onto your desk, then you might start to feel like it’s a waste of energy to even try setting your own goals. You might ask for your boss to just tell you what to do to skip over those middle steps.

It’s incredibly valuable to learn to use a trauma-informed approach in addition to learning coaching skills. It doesn’t matter which order you learn them in, because they both support one another. Leading with curiosity helps you stay open to learning more about trauma responses, and embracing a trauma informed approach helps you slow down and listen more, which is one of your core coaching skills.

So as you start using a coaching approach, you may only really get to use the full skillset with a few people, and just maintain your coaching mindset the rest of the time.

And you might have one or two or five people on your team that just will not engage with your coaching questions at all for a while…

But then, maybe a year or more into your new practice, they might surprise you. Some of your team members might need to wait and see how it goes for other members of your team before they’ll be willing to risk being vulnerable with you.

They might need to hear other team members reassure them that they didn’t get in trouble for not knowing everything already, that instead they got the support that they need to thrive.

So you may feel knocked down over and over, but you just have to keep getting back up.