Achieving the benefits of coaching your team
Angela Pashia, ACC
I help library leaders confidently manage change and conflict so that you can feel good about going to work
I talk a lot about the benefits of using a coaching approach, but I also hear a lot about employees who are resistant to the idea of coaching because of how that label has been used in the past.
So how do you actually coach your team in a way that leads to positive outcomes?
Coaching is a skill that you need to develop through a combination of passive learning, active practice, and constructive feedback, just like teaching or doing effective reference interviews.
You can learn a lot about any of those skills from reading on your own, but to really get good at using these skills, you need to practice with other people and get constructive feedback on what you've done well and how you can improve.
One of the ways that coaching can go wrong is when you lean into asking questions, but jump too quickly to solving the first problem that you see.
This came up recently in the class that I teach for Library Juice Academy on coaching skills.
Someone shared that when a supervisor jumps too quickly to action steps, it makes them feel unheard. It makes them feel like the manager only values their work output, not them as an individual.
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In today's issue of my email newsletter, The Coaching Librarian, I talked about some strategies to avoid having this approach backfire like this. If you haven't already, you should definitely subscribe over there! Some editions go to the public feed, but some (like today's) only go out via email.
Coaching is a skill that you need to develop through a combination of passive learning, active practice, and constructive feedback, just like teaching or doing effective reference interviews.
You can learn a lot about any of those skills from reading on your own, but to really get good at using these skills, you need to practice with other people and get constructive feedback on what you've done well and how you can improve.
That’s why I created Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership.
Participants get to practice actually coaching one another in a safe, supportive environment and get feedback on ways to improve - which sometimes includes encouraging you to stay in the discovery and exploration phase longer!
Let’s talk about how joining could benefit you, questions you have about the program, or what’s been holding you back from enrolling.