Last month, Book Riot published “Pizza Parties Don’t Fix Burnout”: The State of Librarian Mental Health, reporting the results of an open survey the author sent out.

And the results were... not great!

60% of the respondents mentioned burnout, which is honestly less than I would have guessed, given the range of other issues mentioned! One of the comments they shared was:

Overwork was mentioned all over the place, too, but note that it's the people who make the difference in that quote.

Respondents came from all levels of library work, including those in leadership roles. Toxic leadership and a lack of support from above were consistent themes across the board, but there's no clear cut management vs staff divide here. Middle managers – and I'm using that to include anyone who supervises a team and reports up, so anyone from a team lead to a library dean – often catch toxicity from both directions, as they negotiate competing interests.

Despite the overwhelming reports of harm, there were a few responses that reported positive experiences.

That sounds so simple, but it has a huge effect on whether staff cuts and budget cuts and all of the other pressures will turn to burnout.

So where does coaching come into this?

Building trust

By starting with genuinely curious questions and actively listening to your employee, instead of jumping to judgment or advice, you build a more trusting relationship with your team members.

Picture a time when one of your team members comes to you for help on something where there's no one right answer, and that is entirely within the scope of their role to handle. Maybe they're deciding the best way to communicate something to the faculty in their liaison departments. Maybe they're thinking through next month's book display.

Now imagine, instead of jumping to give advice, your first response was “what ideas have you already thought of?”

A lot of us jump to offering suggestions right away because we want to be helpful and support our team members. But when you start with the assumption that they've already thought through this and have some ideas worth talking through, you communicate that you trust that they are a competent professional. And you demonstrate that they can trust you to back them up instead of stepping in to micromanage as soon as they do something a little bit differently than you would have.

And that trust-building goes both ways. As you talk through their thought process, including what ideas they've thought of, what concerns they have with those options that led them to your office, and work through identifying some next steps, it becomes easier for you to trust them. They may wind up doing things differently than you would have, but you can trust that they've thought this through and made reasonable decisions.

Building autonomy

Lack of any meaningful control over one's work is a huge factor in workplace burnout. And you can get there through micromanagement, or through having 3 extra jobs dumped onto your plate, so that all you can do is scramble to barely keep the building from falling down around you. I'll come back around to this last part in the next section!

Intentionally using coaching skills means inviting your team members to make the decisions whenever possible. Of course, there will be times when that's not possible. But even if neither of you have any choice in what outcomes they need to produce, when can you let them make decisions about any part of getting to those outcomes?

Even when you have some information to share that you think will be helpful, using a coaching approach means trusting your team member to decide what to do with that information.

For example, imagine that you're talking through a project, or program, or presentation idea, or whatever with your supervisor.

Imagine how you would feel if they said:

Now imagine how you would feel if they said:

Which of those approaches would leave you feeling like you had more choice in the matter?

Building clear expectations and priorities

Coaching conversations improve communication around expectations and priorities, which can reduce the risk of burnout from a couple of different angles.

First, when expectations are unclear, so you never know when you've done enough, a lot of people will just keep scrambling to do more. I've seen this drive people to overwork, even though they were in a situation where they would have been fine without taking on nearly so much. By fine, I mean they would have gotten tenure, promotion, and meets or exceeds expectations on all of their annual evals, but maybe wouldn't have gotten the highest “gold star” ratings.

To be clear, the blame here lies with their leader's failure to provide clear expectations, not the employee for taking on too much in an effort to do “enough”. But without regular coaching conversations, the leader may not understand why this person would be burnt out, since it's entirely their choice to take on so much. Ouch.

And then, we have the scenario that seems a lot more common now – your whole team has too much on your plates because of hiring freezes and mission creep. You know they're struggling to keep up with everything because each one of them is trying to cover three full time jobs.

In that case, you can help support your team members by helping them prioritize what is actually mission-critical and figure out what can be shifted to a back burner and forgotten about for a while. You can help them understand what you actually expect them to be able to get done (and how well it needs to be done), when they're trying to juggle way more than any one person can actually do well.

Of course the ideal would be to be able to hire more people, but I'm assuming you're already doing everything you can to advocate for that. So where can your team members cut corners to avoid burning out?

Building coaching skills

I could keep going on and on all day about how great coaching is!

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Whether you join Lead With Curiosity or some other program, I hope that you'll invest time and energy into developing your coaching mindset and core coaching skills.

Of course, I encourage you to consider enrolling in the next cohort of Lead With Curiosity, starting June 15!

And I invite you to ask any questions you have at this point – about Lead With Curiosity, more about workplace burnout, or anything else that this issue brought to mind! Just reply to this email – either with your question or to get a calendly link to schedule a video chat!