For many people, December is a time for wrapping up projects and reflecting on accomplishments. That reflection can help you identify what matters most to you. And you can use that clarity to shape your goals for the upcoming year.

If you’re still in the thick of things and won’t be able to think about reflections until after the end of finals week, flag this email to come back to it later this month!

Around this time last year, I was working with a coaching client who was in a bit of a mid-career slump. They had fallen into a pattern of writing annual goals that sounded good on paper for their annual evaluation process, but that didn’t really matter to them on a personal level.

Since those goals weren’t clearly connected to the values that matter most to them, they often fell short on meeting the goals. Sometimes they completely forgot about the goal and spent their time on other projects. Sometimes they did just barely enough to check that box on their evaluation, but didn’t really meet the intent of the goal.

As a coach, I help clients get clear on their core values first. Some need help getting out of the day-to-day minutia to refocus on the big picture. Some have never taken the time to clearly identify what matters most to them, so we need to work through articulating that.

And then, we align their work to those values.

As a leader using a coaching approach, you’re generally not in a position to spend as much time digging into what matters most to each of your team members.

You also need to make sure that your team members’ goals support the goals of your department and your library as a whole. And you're coming into a conversation about goals with a bunch of other considerations in mind - not just what matters most to this person, but also what your library needs this person to contribute, and possibly trying to figure out how this will balance with other team members' individual goals.

Despite these differences, there are parts of this process that you can adapt to help your team members think through goals that matter to them AND are aligned with your library's needs.

When you're able to prioritize projects and goals that are aligned with the values that matter most to you, then your work feels more meaningful. And that makes you more likely to follow through on the work it takes to accomplish those goals.

When you're able to help your team members connect these dots, that helps them be more likely to achieve their goals, so that you don't have to keep reminding them, or worse, have to hold them accountable for failing to meet those goals.

Reflecting on accomplishments

When a client is feeling disconnected, like they’re just going through the motions, one place we may start is reflecting on what they’ve been most proud to accomplish in their life. Not what others would consider most impressive, but what they're privately most proud of.

I start by zooming all the way out to identify what really matters most to the person I’m working with. You'll want to stick to their professional experiences!

As they reflect on what comes to mind, I ask curious, open-ended coaching questions about what similarities they can find between those accomplishments. For example:

• What patterns stand out in HOW you contributed to these accomplishments?
• What patterns stand out in WHAT you accomplished in these experiences?

Sometimes, that process highlights what seem to be misalignments.

If they’re working as a cataloger, but all of their proudest accomplishments are connected to leading their church youth group outside of work, then it’s going to be more of a challenge to find an alignment between their values and their work!

So what is it about the experience of leading that youth group that they’re most proud of?

Maybe their answer boils down to the opportunity to provide mentoring in a way that feels meaningful.

OK, so what about that is important to them?

Maybe they value supporting members of their community, especially when they can see tangible outcomes from their efforts.

If that’s the case, then we can start talking about what opportunities they have to directly support members of their library community.

Of course you still need your cataloger to do the cataloging. But if you can connect that cataloging work to projects that are meaningful to the cataloger, that can transform how they feel about the cataloging work. For example, having an opportunity to mentor a junior cataloger (maybe through a state library association program) could make that cataloging work feel more meaningful for the imaginary cataloger in this scenario.

In other cases, the librarian’s values and job expectations are already well aligned. They just need help refocusing on those values to reconnect the meaning to their work.

As our conversations bring those values back into focus, we talk through which projects and initiatives are most aligned with those values… And what parts of their work has been distracting them from those values, causing them to lose that sense of meaning in their work.

Aligning individual goals to library goals

A side effect of getting caught up in the day-to-day minutia of your task list is that you can lose sight of the big picture.

This is where you as a leader have an advantage over an external coach - hopefully you have a better sense of the big picture to be able to help your team members connect their goals to your library's priorities.

Using a coaching approach means leaning into your curiosity, asking lots of questions and actively listening to understand where someone is coming from... and that can help you learn which connections they are and aren't making.

As a leader, there may be times when it makes sense for you to step in and share your perspective on how the work they most value connects to larger library goals.

You'd be surprised how often I've heard a library worker mention something they think would be really cool, but assume it's not possible because it's not explicitly listed in their job description. So, it can be invaluable for you to have this conversation and share your perspective on how that idea would directly fill a need to help meet a libray goal.

The other side of that coin are the folks with a ton of great ideas that they can easily connect to the library mission. Your perspective on what is most important for your library right now can help them figure out which goals to prioritize now and which to put off until later.

Getting this support for yourself

I recently revised my individual coaching listing to include a 4-session package at a discounted introductory rate. This can be an excellent opportunity to get a sense of what it feels like to receive the sort of coaching that I'm encouraging you to offer to your team!

​Schedule a one-hour discovery call to see whether we're a good fit. In that call, we'll talk a bit about your situation, and then do a 20ish minute sample coaching session. After that, we'll talk about what coaching package would be the best fit for you, what that will look like, and what the next steps will be.