Hey there, library leader! Let’s talk about building skills that will help you:
🌟 Support your team members in taking more ownership of their work
🌟 Confidently manage conflict and change
🌟 Get your team working toward a shared purpose
After 11 years in academic libraries, this was the best professional development experience of my career thus far!
Dory Rosenberg
Research has found that the coaching style of leadership has a “markedly positive” effect “on climate and performance.”
But what does that mean?
Coaching in this context 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.
It’s almost cliche to say that librarians love finding answers.
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 those jobs.
That’s where
Lead With Curiosity
comes in!
You’ll leave the course with enhanced tangible skills and more of the confidence needed to thrive as a coaching leader.
Lorin Jackson
You found your way here because you care about building a healthy, engaged, empowered team. You want 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
But you keep running into obstacles:
- Your team members don’t want to take initiative. Maybe they’ve even told you they just want you to tell them exactly what to do.
- Your team members take so much initiative on their own disconnected projects that it feels like you’re trying to herd cats right now.
- You’re really uncomfortable dealing with anything that feels like confrontation, and need more tools to help you manage those difficult conversations.
- You feel like you give great advice every time your team members bring a problem to you, but then they don’t take it or only half-heartedly follow your suggestion. And that leaves the problem not really resolved.
Learning coaching skills will give you a whole new toolset to bring to these challenges.
Building a coaching culture is an investment up front that pays dividends over time.
There’s no magic wand that will magically fix everything overnight. But these skills will help you make slow changes that can add up over time to a radical transformation in your relationships with your team.
Developing a coaching approach to leadership enables leaders to both:
🌟 support high performers in their ongoing development and
🌟 support those with performance shortcomings in identifying the root cause in order to find more effective solutions
Jumpstart: June 15-18, 2026
Zoom sessions:
5:30 – 7:00 pm London
12:30 – 2:00 pm Eastern US
9:30 – 11:00 am Pacific
Enrollment tiers:
1
Jumpstart your curiosity
4-day intensive program designed to build your core coaching skills.
$1250
2
+ Build new habits
Adds 3 months of group support for actually putting these new skills into practice.
+ $1250
Tiers 1+2 earlybird bundle: $2250
3
+ Individual coaching
Adds 4 months of individual coaching to take your learning to the next level.
+ $1600
May be added onto either lower tier
For those of us who work in management, the pressure to “know it all” or to always have a solution at the ready is immense. This course helps you to de-program these assumptions, to enter into conversations with a spirit of curiosity rather than judgement, and to cultivate a less emotional-intensive approach to management.
Ali V.
Learning outcomes (click to open/close each section!)
Step 1: Embrace your curiosity
We start with developing a coaching mindset, because that’s the foundation for using a coaching approach to leadership. This means really internalizing that it’s ok to be open and curious while managing others, instead of feeling like you have to have all of the answers to every problem on your own. Once you get comfortable with this mindset, you’ll be ready to start asking some great questions!
Step 2: Learn coaching skills
Next, we build your knowledge about core managerial coaching skills and some frameworks to shape your coaching conversations. These are the skills that are going to help you confidently manage through change and conflict in a way that builds trust and helps your team members feel comfortable taking initiative. Once you know the basics, we can move on to putting these skills into practice!
Step 3: Practice actually coaching
It’s easy to talk about coaching, but it’s a whole other thing to actually start coaching other people! So this program includes space to coach one another and get constructive feedback, homework that asks you to start coaching your team members, and discussions about how it went and how to improve. It feels awkward the first time, but the more you practice, the more natural it starts to feel!
Step 4: Apply a coaching approach
We’ll discuss applying a coaching approach to your specific challenges as well as common challenges like dealing with resistant employees and performance shortcomings. This stage is interwoven with the others to help you integrate the coaching mindset and skills with your everyday interactions with your team.
I would tell a colleague to absolutely sign up for this if they were interested in developing their skills as a manager or leader. This program helped me develop my active listening skills, be less reactive and more reflective, and to feel less overwhelmed as a manager with a large number of direct reports.
Jenny Dale
Program outline
1. Jumpstart your curiosity
Build your foundational coaching skills in this 4 day intensive program.
Expect to spend 2-3 hours on homework to prepare for each 90-minute Zoom session.
Monday
Introductions & Coaching mindset
Tuesday
Core coaching skills
Wednesday
Coaching skills & practice
Thursday
Practice sessions
2. Build new habits
You know how easy it is to learn new skills and make plans to start using them on a regular basis… And how hard it can be to actually stick to that plan.
This enrollment tier provides three months of support to help you actually change the way you lead your team.
Twice a month for 3 months, you’ll:
⭐️ Join a live Zoom session (90 minutes) that will include:
- Structured exercise to continue developing your coaching skills
- Group coaching through the obstacles you face in actually putting this approach into practice
- Discussion of the recent shared resource
⭐️ Receive an email sharing another resource to continue your learning
The date and time for these sessions will be determined by scheduling poll after enrollment has closed. These groups will be limited to no more than 6 participants.
After the jumpstart, I felt confident that I could and would do it, and then remembered the reality of my workload and how hard it is to develop new habits. The ongoing support sessions were really useful for me in terms of accountability and continuing to learn from Angela and others.
Kim
Take your learning to the next level with individual coaching
Experiencing individual coaching while learning about how to coach others can enhance your learning and help you be more effective in using these new skills.
That’s why I’m offering this 4 month package at such a significantly discounted rate for Lead With Curiosity participants.
✅ 8 sessions, 45-60 minutes each
This coaching can focus on unique challenges that you’re dealing with, like:
- Struggling to manage conflict between members of your team
- Employee retention issues
- Being completely overwhelmed by a team that comes to you to solve every tiny detail for them so that you barely have any time for your own work
- Leadership development goals beyond those directly addressed in the program
If you’re considering this enrollment tier, please schedule an enrollment call to see whether this is the right choice for you!
Payment may be combined with payment for the group training or paid separately.
This discounted price is available until the group program is 25% completed.
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!
Anne Graf
Who will get the most out of this program?
Those who regularly have opportunities to practice using coaching skills at work will get the most out of this program.
That generally means people who manage a team, whether that’s 2 student employees or a whole library system.
There are some exceptions to that, though. The skills we discuss are valuable in a wide range of contexts. So if you do a lot of mentoring or lead active committees and work-groups, even if you don’t officially supervise anyone, this could be a fit.
Past participants have included a library faculty member who supervised student assistants, department heads, deans, and a higher ed administrator whose unit included the library. And participants have come from both academic and public libraries.
If you’re not sure whether you’re a fit, let’s talk . I hate pushy sales tactics, so this will be just a no-pressure, no-obligation conversation.
Worst case scenario, we agree that the program isn’t the best fit for you right now, and we both got to meet someone who cares about making libraries better for library workers!
This course strengthened my ability to manage managers.
Public Library Administrator
Why enroll in THIS program?
⭐️ It was created by a librarian for library leaders, focusing on the skills and scenarios that library leaders experience
⭐️ Intentionally designed to optimize building new leadership habits
⭐️ The approach and skills are grounded in coaching as defined by the International Coaching Federation
⭐️ Participants put these skills into practice and receive constructive feedback, improving their effectiveness in using these skills with their teams
One of the critiques of other programs to help managers develop a coaching approach is that it’s a lot easier to talk about it than to actually put it into practice.
So we start with discussions, but move into a structure for participants to practice actually using a coaching approach to help one another work through small challenges they’re facing.
The skills learned apply to any leader. I’d also share that the cohort model is really great for allowing them to reflect on their own work context and get a better understanding of how to approach their leadership development, as well as the support and networking opportunities that the cohort provides.
Ian Coronado
Who’s facilitating the program?
Hi, I’m Angela, a former librarian and an ICF-certified professional coach!
As a librarian, I focused on learning to use a critical pedagogy approach to teaching information literacy.
As I moved into leadership roles, I adapted the skills I built in the classroom. That focus on critical pedagogy influenced the way I facilitated meetings and the way I led my team.
And then, I learned about coaching. And that felt like the next step in my journey toward working to empower people.
Now I want to bring some of what I’ve learned as a professional coach back to support library leaders in building healthier workplaces that empower instead of burning out their workers.
The opportunity to focus on coaching for an extended period of time, learn from Angela as an expert and facilitator, and connect with colleagues who are also interested in leading with curiosity is a magical combination.
Kim
More FAQs
Can this count as professional development?
Yes! Past participants have used professional development funding from their employer to pay for their enrollment.
Here is a one page pdf to help you make the case for your employer to approve funding.
What forms of payment do you accept?
I accept payment by credit card or direct deposit, no paper checks.
I also accept electronic transfers in British Pounds and Euros. We can do the exchange rate math when payments are due.
What’s the refund policy?
I don’t offer refunds on this program unless something truly out of your control prevents you from participating. In that case, I will offer you the choice of rescheduling to join a later cohort or receiving a refund of the purchase price minus payment processing fees, available until the date of your cohort’s first meeting.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me to discuss them before you enroll. I’m happy to discuss the program via email or video chat . I hate pushy sales tactics, so this will be just a no-pressure, no-obligation conversation.
Will this program lead to any sort of certification?
No. This program focuses on adapting a coaching mindset and using some core coaching skills to become a more effective leader, but it is NOT a formal coach training program and will not lead to any sort of formal certification.