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The Coaching Librarian Newsletter Text in decorative font, with a photo of Angela on the right side of the header

I help leaders build more empowered teams by embracing your curiosity and developing a coaching approach to leadership. I bring a dozen years of experience as an academic librarian to my coaching practice. So the examples come from library work, but you don’t have to be a librarian to learn something valuable!

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Latest Posts

  • Coaching exercises to help you (and your team) reclaim your sense of agency

    Sending out that last edition of this newsletter was really scary. It’s a lot easier for me to talk about coaching skills than it is to talk about myself like that. I don’t even have words for how much I appreciate those who responded with messages of support. And fewer people unsubscribed than I feared!…

  • How setting intentions can help you practice your coaching approach

    Happy New Year! January always feels like a new beginning for me. When I was an academic librarian, this time of year meant starting a fresh new semester. And it meant starting to think about the annual self-evaluation I had to write as part of the regular review process – which included setting goals for…

  • Using the Year Compass to chart your path forward

    As 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…

  • How coaching can help your team reflect on accomplishments and set meaningful goals

    For 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Exploring the problem

    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. Coaching is a skill that you need to develop through a combination of passive learning, active…

  • How do you handle really difficult conversations with members of your team?

    I have two news items to share before jumping into the newsletter for this week: Registration is still open for my free workshop on Using a Coaching Approach to Leadership on June 25. And registration is officially now open for the next cohort of Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership this August through December! This…