❤️

We all need a little more magic in our lives, don't we?

The 2025 cohort of Lead With Curiosity just wrapped up, and I'm gathering feedback from participants. The 2026 dates are still TBA. If you're interested enough to want to have a voice in when that will be, click through to sign up for the waitlist!

In the full program, we build core coaching skills. Participants practice coaching one another and get feedback on what went well and where they can improve. And we spend a lot of time discussing the real life challenges of trying to take these skills from the classroom to their regular daily interactions.

The foundation underlying all of that is the coaching mindset.

Once you train your brain to lean into curiosity before it jumps to giving advice, then everything else comes more easily. When you're genuinely curious about what ideas your team member already had to solve a challenge, instead of just focused on a technique to reach an outcome, then it's a lot easier to ask open ended questions.

My approach, both as a coach and in teaching you to lead with curiosity, is based in the skills and competencies outlined by the International Coaching Federation (ICF).

In Lead With Curiosity, we only focus on the parts of this that are most relevant to your work as managers. A lot of the really intense professional coaching pieces feel out of reach for most managers I've talked with.

As a manager, you're in a much more complicated net of relationships than most external coaches are with their clients AND you have less time to focus on coaching.

You're caught in the middle between demands coming from above and the needs of your team members. When your (dean/director, board, provost, or whoever) demands that you find a way to keep the library open later, or add a new time-intensive process like offering notary services, or increase your programming offerings, with no additional staff lines, while your employees are already feeling stretched to the breaking point, that can strain your relationships. And those emotions can affect how willing your team members will be to open up and engage when you try to coach them.

You're also caught in the middle between competing interests on your team. You want to give everyone some autonomy to pursue the projects they find most meaningful, but you also need them to work together toward shared goals and departmental / library-wide outcomes.

Lead With Curiosity isn't about becoming a professional coach, it's about adapting the most relevant coaching competencies to your work as a leader, while navigating these messy relationships.

But we do focus on the coaching mindset competency, because it's directly relevant to your work as a leader.

You can work on that on your own, even when you're still building the trust you need for your employees to feel safe being coached. You can intentionally shift your mindset, even when it feels like you have no time to practice actually coaching.

Earlier this year, I created an email mini-course that dives into how the ICF markers of a coaching mindset connect directly to your work as library leaders. I included it as an early bird bonus for those who enrolled in Lead With Curiosity. Participants received the full series before our first session, so that they had time to start shifting into a more curious mindset before day 1.

And, modeling their focus on continual improvement, the ICF just did another revision of their Core Competencies, including the markers they use to evaluate whether someone embodies a coaching mindset!

These are behaviors that show up when you've fully embraced your curiosity, and that create a positive feedback loop. Practicing these behaviors help you stay in a more curious mindset, which makes it easier to practice these behaviors, and so on.

The new list has 10 items, where the previous version only had 8, but they're all interconnected. I'm mostly copying this list, but slightly tweaking the wording to fit your context:

1. Acknowledges that employees are responsible for their own choices
2. Engages in ongoing learning and development as a leader, including ongoing learning about using a coaching approach as a leader
3. Develops an ongoing reflective practice to enhance one’s coaching
4. Remains aware of and open to the influence of biases, context and culture on self and others
5. Uses awareness of self and one’s intuition to benefit those being coached
6. Develops and maintains the ability to manage one’s emotions
7. Maintains emotional, physical, and mental well-being in preparation for, throughout, and following each coaching interaction.
8. Seeks help from outside sources when necessary
9. Nurtures openness and curiosity in oneself, one's team members, and the coaching process
10. Remains aware of the influence of one’s thoughts and behaviors on the client and others

That looks like a lot at first glance, but again, they're all interconnected.

And, each of these on their own can improve your relationships and build trust with your team members, as you show that you trust them to be responsible for their own choices (including the consequences for those choices), stay aware of the ways your biases may affect the way you see things, prioritize well-being in your interactions, and so on.

I'll be revising my Cultivate Curiosity mini-course to reflect these changes before the end of the year, so that it's ready to go out as an early bird bonus for those who sign up for Lead With Curiosity 2026!

Of course I'll let you know once I've finished those revisions, in case you want to work on embracing your curious mindset before you decide whether to commit to Lead With Curiosity!

In the meantime, what questions do you have about these components of embodying a coaching mindset?

When you think about how each of these might connect to your work in leading a team, which ones feel more / less obviously relevant?

It was not always a comfortable experience, but I learned so much and came out proud of my growth. If you are open to and interested in a different way of leading, do it!

What was the most valuable part of the program for you?

Most valuable: learning about and practicing coaching in a manageable, supported way. If I had tried to research and apply a coaching approach on my own, I would have been quickly overwhelmed by the amount of information and would have integrated much less into my actual practice. Second-most valuable: getting to know and learn from my cohort and Angela.

~ Anne Graf, Head of Instruction Services