angela

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 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…

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 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…

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…

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…

In case you missed it: be sure to grab 7 ways you can use coaching to build a more inclusive culture with your team (even in areas that are hostile to DEI efforts)! 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…

In the last issue, I included a poll asking for your feedback on ways to build community around this coaching approach to leadership. The option that got the most votes was “Monthly semi-structured conversations on a coaching topic”. So, save the date for Thursday, 26 September at 4pm London / 11am Eastern / 8am Pacific! Here’s the google calendar placeholder for now, and I’ll have more details next time about what the topic for the conversation will be. This time, I’d love to get your…

This past Friday, 15 Aug, I celebrated the first anniversary of my last day as an academic librarian! 🎉 https://www.pexels.com/photo/cupcake-with-chocolate-icing-and-sparkler-2190381/ I’d like to invite you to celebrate with me – I’m offering a free coaching session to the first 5 people who reply to this email (limited to those who haven’t had a free session before)! That’s not a sneaky way to get you on a video chat for a sales pitch… At least not directly! The best way to understand the…

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 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…

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 is an opportunity to join a small group of library leaders meeting every other week for 5 months to practice building your coaching skills and building lasting habits. We…

Why do you do what you do? If you’re already in a leadership position, why do you lead the way you do? If you’re not already in a leadership position, why do you want to develop your leadership skills? I recently started working with a new business coach, and one of the first questions she asked me was why I do what I do. It’s important to be really clear on that “why”, because that’s going to guide all of our work together. I need to be clear on why I’m doing this in order to make decisions…