Coaching is a valuable skill / support in a lot of situations, but it's important to remember that it's only one tool in your toolbox. Sometimes that's because the situation calls for a different type of support, and sometimes that's because of coachability – whether someone is ready and willing to be coached on this topic at this time.
When coaching is a great choice
The best time for you to coach your team member is when they know the outcome they’re trying to reach, but there are dozens of ways to get there, and they’re not sure which path is the best for them. Some examples of this could include:
- how they want to structure a library program
- how to do outreach to a specific group
- what professional development they want to focus on next
- how to respond diplomatically to someone they find challenging to deal with
And so on.
The same logic applies for yourself. The best time to look for a coach is when you need help figuring out how to achieve a goal in a way that works best for you. Maybe you have 5 mentors all giving you different advice, and none of it feels quite right for you. Maybe you know that you feel stuck but don't even know where to look for options to consider. Maybe you'd really love someone to just give you the right answer and wave a magic wand to make you feel great about your work, but you know you never listen when someone tries to tell you what they think you should do to fix your life!
Coaching is a strengths-based approach that centers inquiry in order to help the person being coached figure out their own path forward.
When coaching is NOT a great choice
There are a lot of different ways that you support your team members and deserve to be supported.
Training and instruction are interactions that focus on teaching something new, which is fundamentally different from a coaching conversation. They're essential for building new skills. This includes teaching standard procedures to your team members and supporting them in enrolling in continuing education courses to become better at doing their work.
This also applies to your own development as a leader. Whether you're leading a whole library or just supervising two student employees or pages, managing people is a skill set that you need to develop. It doesn't “come naturally” to anyone. When it looks like it does, that's because they had more opportunities to build those skills in lower stakes contexts before stepping into a formal leadership role. That's behavior that you can learn, too, not innate ability.
When you're ready to build your managerial coaching skills, I encourage you to check out Lead With Curiosity and sign up for the waitlist!
Mentoring is another incredibly valuable support. In this relationship, a more experienced person shares their lessons learned to help you develop. Occasionally, when I'm coaching someone, they become stuck because they just don't have any ideas or examples to draw on. In those cases, I explicitly “switch hats” to share my experience or ideas to provide a place to start – when I switch back to coaching, maybe they'll work through how to adapt that idea, or maybe talking through why that idea doesn't feel right for them sparks a new idea.
I encourage everyone to develop mentor relationships – both as mentor and mentee. This fills out your support net, so that you have plenty of ideas to work through and decide between in your coaching sessions!
And then, there are the times when you need more “traditional” managerial skills, like giving clear direction and corrective feedback. Coaching can help to address performance issues by helping you figure out what's going on below the surface. But that depends on the person being coachable. And when they're not, you'll need to rely on other skills to effectively manage the situation.
Coachability
Coachability is a person's willingness and ability to fully engage in the coaching process. That includes a bunch of factors, like being open to receiving constructive feedback, meaningfully engaging when a coach questions your assumptions, considering other perspectives, and making changes to act on new insights.
And there are many more factors that can go into how coachable a person is.
A sense of psychological safety is essential for someone to be fully open to being coached. If you're here reading what I have to say, then I assume you know how important this is AND how hard it can be to develop, especially in a library with a history of toxicity. It's worth putting in the work to build, but this can take time.
Workplace trauma is a closely related factor that's also worth acknowledging on its own.
If you’ve had a horrible experience with a super micromanager who scolded you every time you did something slightly differently than how they would do it, then you might not feel safe telling a new supervisor what you think is the best way to do a new task. You might feel safer asking them to just tell you how to do it.
If your past boss repeatedly ignored your goals and priorities and just kept piling their own pet projects onto your desk, then you might start to feel like it’s a waste of energy to even try setting your own goals. You might ask for your boss to just tell you what to do to skip over those middle steps.
Having time to meaningfully engage with these ideas outside of the coaching session is another factor. It's hard to be highly coachable when you constantly feel like you're barely keeping your head above water.
And I could go on and on here, but the point is that sometimes coaching is not the most effective way to support your team member or the best way to get help for yourself, and there are a lot of understandable reasons for that.
And this can change by topic and over time.
Some people may never respond well to a coaching approach. Some people may not react well now, but may warm up to it over time. Some may be coachable on some parts of their job and not coachable in other areas.
How can you best support your team members?
Whether they're open to being coached or not, you can support your team members by cultivating your curiosity and actively listening to them.
I'll also encourage you to join me this fall for open Curious Leaders Discussions. Some topics focus more on how you can use a coaching approach to navigate challenges with your team, and others focus more on helping you embrace aspects of a coaching mindset.
Our next discussion is on Sept 10 at 6pm London / 1pm Eastern / 10am Pacific:
Managing conflict with curiosity
I hope you'll consider joining!