Using the Year Compass to chart your path forwardAs the year draws to a close, I’m looking forward to some rest and rejuvenation. Whatever your plans are, I hope you have gentle holidays and space for reflection. In the last issue, I talked about reflecting on your accomplishments over the past year and setting meaningful goals. Today, I have another totally free tool to share with you: the Year Compass. You can download a fillable pdf to complete digitally or a version that’s formatted to print. This workbook includes questions to guide…Read more
How coaching can help your team reflect on accomplishments and set meaningful goalsFor many people, December is a time for wrapping up projects and reflecting on accomplishments. That reflection can help you identify what matters most to you. And you can use that clarity to shape your goals for the upcoming year. If you’re still in the thick of things and won’t be able to think about reflections until after the end of finals week, flag this email to come back to it later this month! Around this time last year, I was working with a coaching client who was in a bit of a…Read more
How can coaching skills help you navigate holiday gatherings?My regular every-two-weeks schedule says that I should be sending out a newsletter today, but this Thursday is Thanksgiving in the US. When I worked as a librarian in the US, I was either out-of-office or just mentally checked out for this whole week! So I'm "officially" skipping this week. I’ll be back next week with my regular content focused on applying a coaching approach to leading your team. But, I don't want to leave you hanging if you are paying attention! This week, my mind is on how…Read more
How do you "manage up" to get the support you need?The main topic for this week is managing up, but first, I want to acknowledge a huge elephant in the room. It has been a pretty somber week here in Lisbon, Portugal. Every person I’ve talked with has asked how on earth Americans could re-elect that fascist.* They’re scared about how US policies are going to affect the whole world for the next however many years. And that’s just the sentiment from a distance. I know it's much scarier for those who live in the US and who will be among the first…Read more
How can you use coaching to help your team avoid burnout?Burnout is on my mind this week. I tuned into the latest episode of the Surviving the Stacks podcast, and a lot of the conversation connected with the reasons I'm so invested in helping library leaders develop coaching skills. They discussed three key issues that influence workplace burnout, based on the scholarly literature: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. You can help your team with all three of these by developing a coaching approach. The way they use competence is more complex than…Read more
How do you show up with a coaching mindset even when you're frustrated?Maintaining a coaching mindset – being open, curious, and flexible – is the foundation for using a coaching approach to leadership. To be able to effectively help your team members find the useful lessons they can take away from a mistake or figure out some productive next steps in a tricky situation, you need to be able to tap into your curiosity and keep a focus on moving forward. This topic is fresh on my mind because of a recent discussion in a group that I participate in. A library…Read more
Exploring the problemI 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. 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…Read more
My regular every-two-weeks schedule says that I should be sending out a newsletter today, but this Thursday is Thanksgiving in the US. When I worked as a librarian in the US, I was either out-of-office or just mentally checked out for this whole week! So I'm "officially" skipping this week. I’ll be back next week with my regular content focused on applying a coaching approach to leading your team. But, I don't want to leave you hanging if you are paying attention! This week, my mind is on how…Read more
Burnout is on my mind this week. I tuned into the latest episode of the Surviving the Stacks podcast, and a lot of the conversation connected with the reasons I'm so invested in helping library leaders develop coaching skills. They discussed three key issues that influence workplace burnout, based on the scholarly literature: competence, relatedness, and autonomy. You can help your team with all three of these by developing a coaching approach. The way they use competence is more complex than…Read more