angela

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…

⭐️ The early bird discount registration deadline for Developing a Coaching Approach to Leadership is already coming up next Monday! If you’ve been thinking about joining, click through and sign up for a registration conversation while this note is on your mind! And now, on to our regularly scheduled content! I had a couple of interactions recently that raised the question of when is the best time to invest in training to develop a coaching approach to leadership. Whether you’re thinking of…

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…

Inclusivity and coaching is a heavy topic. On one hand, I see a lot of potential for a coaching mindset and a coaching approach to working with your team to contribute to making your workplace more inclusive. This comes to mind pretty frequently on LinkedIn, where I follow several people who talk about making workplaces more inclusive with regard to neurodiversity and disabilities, parts of DEIA work that I was less informed on until the past couple of years. Last week, I engaged with a post…

Time management is still at the front of my mind right now, because I’m getting ready to teach another session of Strategic Approaches to Managing Your Workload at Library Juice Academy in May and promoting my new small group coaching program built around the same theme, Tame Your Workload. This time, instead of focusing on how you can make time for coaching, let’s flip that around: how can you use a coaching approach to help an employee learn to more effectively manage their own workload? In…

One of the concerns that I hear regularly from people who are considering adopting a coaching approach to leadership is the amount of time that it can take. When you’re being pulled in too many different directions at once, it can be difficult to take the time to emotionally prepare for a coaching conversation and then have a full curious conversation. Even if the coaching conversation only takes 10 minutes, that’s a lot more than spending only 1-2 minutes issuing a directive. And that’s just…

As much as I advocate using a coaching approach whenever possible, it’s important to remember that it’s only one tool in your toolkit. In professional coaching, we talk about “coachability” – whether a person is ready and willing to be an active participant in their development in this area. This isn’t meant as judgment toward them, because there are many reasons a person might not be in a place to benefit from coaching. But it does mean that their energy would be better spent seeking other…