Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Angela Pashia, who was an academic librarian for 12 years before becoming an ICF-Certified (ACC) leadership coach.
When you think of coaching, what comes to mind for you?
I’ve been talking about this a lot over the past couple of years, since becoming a professional coach. It’s becoming common for job ads for library leadership roles to mention coaching as a responsibility or coaching skills as a requirement[i]. On the other hand, I’ve worked with library leaders whose team members completely shut down at the mention of being coached, because of past experiences with workplace coaching. That seems like a disconnect, but I attribute it to very different definitions of coaching.
My first encounter with anything explicitly labeled “coaching” happened when I was a librarian exploring other possible career paths. I came across a video promoting a training program to become a book coach, and I thought that sounded like the coolest job ever! From this series of videos, it sounded like a book coach would mentor and guide authors through the publishing process, as well as do some teaching about the process when needed. As a librarian, the parts of my job that I loved the most were mentoring junior faculty and teaching critical information literacy in a credit-bearing course, so this seemed like a perfect fit! That idea of coaching as sort of the “guide-on-the-side” version of teaching and mentoring seems pretty common among the librarians I’ve talked with who haven’t had any specific training in coaching.
Being a librarian, I threw myself into researching more about professional coaching. Coaching is a completely unregulated field, but there are some professional organizations trying to establish shared standards and definitions. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the largest and most widely recognized member-led professional organization for coaches. So I completed an ICF-accredited program instead of the book coaching course that set me onto this path, and discovered that coaching is not at all what I had imagined.
The ICF version of coaching is a strengths-based approach, assuming that the person being coached is a fully capable adult with strengths and resources to draw on. Unlike a mentoring relationship, in which I would share my experience and knowledge with someone less experienced in that area, coaching centers inquiry – asking questions and listening a lot more than I talk. The ICF defines coaching as:
“partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”
Partnering is about setting aside hierarchies as much as possible. For me, it feels like taking the next step from using critical pedagogy, shifting from the “guide on the side” to being an active collaborator. The process is a semi-structured inquiry model, with questions designed to help dig into the root of a challenge, so that we can find the best path forward. And this helps to maximize their potential by focusing on reaching goals that matter to them, in a way that works best for them.
In learning to coach, I shifted from sharing my expertise to helping others develop their own solutions.
Coaching as a leadership style
Coaching as a leadership style often comes up when I’m working with new leaders who are dealing with imposter syndrome. While it’s important to acknowledge the structural factors that contribute, I’ve found that our mental models of what it means to be “a leader” can also contribute to this sense of being an imposter. One common part of that is the idea that some people are “born leaders,” instead of recognizing that leadership is a skill that has to be developed. Another contributing factor is what your image of “a leader” looks like. If your idea of a good leader is based on watching experienced leaders who seem to know everything about everything and always have a solution for every problem, then how do you see yourself as an effective leader when you’re still learning?
Explicitly adopting coaching as a leadership style gives you permission to let go of the pressure to already know everything, and to embrace your curiosity. This approach encourages you to listen to your team members as the experts in their specialized areas – which means you should ask them questions to learn from their expertise! This invites more perspectives and ideas to the table, which leads to better solutions than any individual leader would be able to consistently come up with on their own.
The foundation for developing this coaching approach is to work on practicing staying in a curious, open, nonjudgmental mindset. That includes pausing to question what assumptions you’re making about a situation, continuing to learn, and viewing mistakes as lessons instead of as failures. That also includes paying attention the ways biases, context, and culture influence our interactions.
Practicing staying in this mindset is useful in all of your interactions, and helps you lead in a more inclusive, trauma-informed way. For example, staying curious while training a new employee can help you learn more about how they work best and how you can best support them.
The time to shift into actively coaching is when your team member is working through a challenge where there’s no one correct path forward – whether that’s planning a program, deciding the best way to do outreach to a liaison department, or thinking through which conference to submit a proposal to. Coaching is about helping your team member work through challenges and find the solution that’s right for them, so they need to be able to make the decisions about how to move forward.
There are some important skills to develop and several models that people use to shape their coaching conversations. Two fundamental skills are active listening and asking open-ended, non-judgmental questions.
What this looks like in practice
When someone comes to you for help solving a problem:
One simple way to start incorporating this mindset is to ask more questions before offering your solution.
“What ideas have you already thought of?”
And then get curious about workshopping those ideas before you add your own to the mix!
When you have information that they need:
The emphasis on partnering means doing your best to share information instead of giving advice that someone might feel pressured to take.
That can sound like the difference between:
“We tried that before, and it didn’t work. You should give up on that idea.”
And:
“We tried that before, and here are the things that went wrong… How does that affect the way you’re thinking about this idea?”
Depending on the details, they may decide to scrap that idea, or they may come up with some great improvements on the original plan. Either way, it becomes their choice.
When you need to address a performance issue:
This could apply to any time when you need to see a certain outcome within a certain time frame, because it can be hard to see what options they have. Either get this done by this deadline, or face consequences. But when you look for any opportunity to offer choices, you’ll be surprised at how many you can find!
One way this could show up is:
“I need to see this outcome by this time next month. How do you want me to check in with you between now and then to make sure you’re on track?”
A different version of coaching as a leadership style
I could go on all day about coaching as I understand it, but to understand why some employees reject it, we need to talk about other ways “coaching” has been taught. Within the well-established Situational Leadership Model, they include coaching in their “Style 2”:
“Selling, Coaching or Explaining: Leader still makes decisions but provides context and engages in dialogue to reinforce buy-in.”
This approach is grounded in work from the 1970s, while the ICF was founded in the 1990s, so that may explain the very different uses of this term. And I’ll admit that I haven’t completed this program, so I may be missing some nuance. But years ago, I had a supervisor who used this “selling” style frequently, focusing on getting members of our department to “buy-in” to their priorities instead of supporting us in setting goals that mattered to us. Let’s just say that this approach led to very different outcomes than I’ve experienced from ICF-aligned coaching.
Of course there will be times when a leader has to be the one to make the final decision. And in that case, being transparent about explaining the reasoning behind that decision is good practice. But that would not be considered coaching within the ICF framework.
So whenever you’re discussing coaching, it’s important to make sure you’re both using the same definition. And when I work with leaders whose team members have negative associations with the label “coaching”, we frame it as leading with curiosity, instead.
[i] I did a quick skim of ALA Joblist while drafting this post. On just the first page of unfiltered results, I found three job ads that mention coaching!