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 just feeling like you have the skills you need to do your job. That’s part of it, but feeling like your skills are underutilized, or feeling like your supervisor doesn’t trust your competence, heavily contribute to burnout.

Relatedness involves a sense of belonging and connectedness. The podcast hosts discuss poor relationships with coworkers as contributing to this.

And autonomy is about having a sense of control over at least some aspects of your work.

Of course, it’s useful for researchers to distinguish between these factors, but they’re often related. So feeling micromanaged can lead to feeling a lack of autonomy, and also feeling like your your supervisor doesn’t believe that you’re competent to do the work on your own, which can then lead to negative relationships.

So how can you use a coaching approach to improve all of these factors for your team?

Using coaching skills - especially active listening and asking open-ended questions - helps you get to know what matters most to your team members and understand where they’re coming from. Just taking time to actively listen to understand your team members’ perspective, instead of listening to respond, can improve relatedness by helping them feel truly heard and valued.

Setting aside some time in your regular 1:1 meetings for coaching creates space for you to have regular conversations about what challenges each team member is dealing with, and eventually incorporate regular discussions about goals - ways they’d like to be able to use their existing competencies that they haven’t been able to yet and what skills they’d like to develop in the future.

Of course, you can use this approach in daily interactions, not only in designated 1:1 meetings. Asking questions to talk through a challenge, instead of just offering up the first suggestion that comes to mind for you, helps build a sense of autonomy, as they’re ultimately the ones making the decision about how to get from point A to point B.

Using a coaching approach in these conversations helps you learn what they already know and what they need to know to achieve their goals. Sometimes, that may be some institutional knowledge about how administrative procedures work or who is the best person to talk to for that thing. Sometimes, it may become clear that they need some additional training, and you can offer that in whatever way makes sense, without it being a big deal. That makes sure that they're getting the information and skills development that they need to do their job well, in a way that normalizes ongoing development instead of making them feel like they’re “in trouble” or incompetent.

By demonstrating that you trust their competence and giving them as much autonomy as you can, you help to build that sense of relatedness.

And, when that relatedness is threatened through poor relationships with others on the team, you can use coaching skills to get a better understanding of what’s at the root of that conflict, so that you can address that root cause, instead of just pasting a veneer of “niceness” over a festering wound.

So this all sounds great in theory, but what might that look like in practice?

Here’s a completely made up scenario between a department head and an academic librarian in their monthly 1:1 check in.

This example assumes a certain level of trust and psychological safety - depending on your unit’s history and personalities, it may take time for your team members to get comfortable with this new approach. But I’m including an intro to this new approach for those of you who are considering trying it for the first time!

OK, so, a few things to note here:

🌟 The leader mostly asked open ended questions, and never told the person what to do.

🌟 When the leader had information to share, they shared it. But, then they put it back to the librarian to decide how to use that information. This approach isn’t about leaving your team members to “just figure it out” on their own. Instead, you’re there to share relevant information and help them figure it out.

🌟 This is a super simplified version, assuming that you’re just getting started. In Leading With Purpose: Coaching Skills for Library Leaders, we dig into building your skills in asking effective coaching questions and following a more structured framework for the conversation to make sure you’re getting to the real heart of the issue, and building a habit of using these skills, so that it starts to feel more natural!

Whether you’re ready to enroll or not, I encourage you to look for opportunities to practice active listening and ask more open-ended, non-judgmental questions. Small steps can make a big difference.

How do you see yourself incorporating more active listening and open-ended questions into your conversations with your team?