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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 that are in integrity with my values and goals. You need to be clear on why you lead the way you do, or why you even want to lead, so that you can make decisions that are aligned with your values and goals. So why did I decide to focus on helping library leaders develop a coaching approach to leadership? The nice, sanitized version that I’ve shared in most contexts has been that the most rewarding parts of my job were mentoring colleagues, helping them achieve a goal that was important to them, and teaching critical information literacy using methods that really focused on helping students connect the content to their lived experience and take more ownership of their learning than they were used to. So shifting to coaching, where I could focus entirely on helping people achieve their goals in ways that work best for them, was a natural fit. And that’s true as far as it goes. But that’s not the whole story. The whole story is that I’m obstinate, and even when I felt like I had to leave librarianship because I couldn’t handle the toxicity I had experienced anymore, I couldn’t stop trying to make things better. My introduction to Kaetrena Davis Kendrick’s work was The Low Morale Experience of Academic Librarians. That was probably one of the most painful things I’ve ever read, because I saw so much of my own experience reflected there. It was cathartic, and incredibly important in opening this conversation in the field, but it also spoke to just how common this is. I stayed and fought back while several colleagues left for other libraries or left the field entirely. And there were times when things got better for a while – I was reorganized out from under a harmful department head, and the whole library came together to meet with the Provost to deal with a harmful dean, which led to that dean “stepping down” after less than a year in that position. But then along came a new university president, and I was too worn down to fight again. Compounding all of that was the legacy toxicity created by leaders who had retired years before I was even hired. That was the background noise of my entire 12 years in that position. I experienced a whole lot of “what not to do”, and honestly only had one leader who I think of as a positive example. And that leader saw the potential in my leadership style, based on how I led committees and whatnot, and promoted me to lead a department in a reorganization. And then I got to experience the transformative power of using a coaching approach to leadership, though at that point I would have called it adapting critical pedagogical practices to leadership. By leading with curiosity, by actively listening and focusing on building psychological safety, I got to see my team come together and develop in ways that I couldn’t have predicted when I first accepted the position. We had some really challenging work to do, including working toward a consensus on a set of clear expectations for liaisons – we hadn’t had clear and explicit expectations since I started, so some people would not like that on principle, and we had lost a lot of librarians in the prior handful of years, so we needed to deprioritize things that some felt were really important. But by taking our time, and really listening, and asking lots of questions, and staying focused on moving forward instead of rehashing old arguments, I was able to facilitate productive conversations and get us to an outcome that we all felt good about. And that’s why I’m here, writing to you. I want to help you learn to use this sort of approach with your team, because I believe that this approach will go a long way toward fixing some of the toxicity that is so prevalent in libraries. Most people want to feel good about their work. When leaders find that balance of providing support without micromanaging, empowering employees to feel safe taking ownership of the work they’re responsible for, and build trust by leading with curiosity instead of authoritarianism, their teams thrive. I’m on a mission to reduce the toxicity in libraries by teaching leaders to use a coaching approach and coaching those who aren’t getting that support from their leaders. So why are you here? I encourage you to spend some time genuinely reflecting on that question. I’d love to hear your responses! Hit that reply button and let me know why you lead the way you do and/or what keeps you reading this newsletter! |