What a Professional Coach Brings to the Library

Professional coaching is a growing industry that encompasses a huge range of activities, from executive coaches working with senior leaders to life coaches supporting people in everything from building healthy friendships, to dating, to reaching health-related goals, to moving abroad.

In their latest survey of the profession in 2023, the International Coaching Federation (ICF), one of the largest member-led professional organizations for coaches, estimated that there are approximately 109,200 active coach practitioners worldwide. That’s a 54 percent increase from their previous survey in 2019. Of the survey respondents, 56 percent reported that they primarily work with managers and executives.

Leadership and career development coaching are becoming established as essential tools in building a healthy workplace. A recent ICF survey of coaching cultures in organizations found that 64 percent of the companies represented employ external coach practitioners to support leadership development. These organizations are also investing in hiring internal coaches and providing training for managers/leaders to develop coaching skills. The survey found that “38 percent of organizations are using all three coaching modalities.” While coaching is still relatively new in libraries, I’m one of a growing number of coaches who have a background in libraries and specialize in supporting library workers.

What is coaching?

As a coach, I’m often asked what coaching entails. The ICF defines coaching as “a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires [coachees] to maximize their personal and professional potential.” This means that professional coaches work with clients as equal partners to help them explore new perspectives and consider new possibilities, with the goal of solving problems and meeting goals.

I find it useful to distinguish coaching from other types of professional support:

• Mentoring: A more experienced person shares their experiences and wisdom to guide a junior colleague. By contrast, a coach facilitates a client’s growth by evoking their own resourcefulness.
• Consulting: An outside expert analyzes a challenge and presents a solution. They may provide a blueprint or actually implement the changes. By contrast, a coach facilitates conversations that help a client analyze the challenge and co-creates a solution.
• Therapy: A licensed professional works with a patient to heal past trauma and manage mental health conditions. By contrast, a coach helps a client set and act on new goals that enable them to integrate healing into their day-to-day life.

People often turn to a coach when they feel “stuck.” Perhaps they’ve tried to resolve some legacy toxicity on their team, and nothing’s working. Or they’ve hit a mid-career slump and realize that they’ve lost their passion but don't know how to get it back. Or they might want to change jobs or careers but don’t know what they do want to do or how to make that transition.

Others work with coaches at more routine periods of their career or leadership journeys. A coach might help a client clarify their core values and explore how to center those values in everything they do. For example, the coach might challenge their client to explore the assumptions behind a knee-jerk reaction, consider what else might be true, and then develop a response that is aligned with their values.

Working with a coach can also help a client build confidence. My clients often have an image in their head of what it means to be a strong, confident leader, based on the stories they’ve heard throughout their lives. This character always has The Answer and never seems to doubt themselves, which leads my clients to feel as if they're falling short.

Through our conversations, they might realize that fitting the story they’ve been told about what leadership “should” look like actually goes against their values. We might focus on changing their internal narrative to create a new vision of confident leadership that centers their values of collaboration, kindness, and curiosity.

A coach will also support clients in setting clear, meaningful, and actionable goals. For a library leader, that work includes discerning between the many different demands on their time to focus on what is most clearly tied to their values and/or their library’s mission and developing strategies to say “no” to requests they can’t take on right now.

What does it cost?

The average cost for a one-hour coaching session in North America is around $272, with significant variation depending on the type of coaching and the experience of the coach (ICF). Executive and leadership coaches charge significantly higher rates on average than life coaches, ranging anywhere from $200 all the way to $3,000 per hour for executive coaching for C-suite leaders in major corporations.

Coaches commonly only offer longer term packages, from 3 to 12 months. A single one-hour session can help a client work through a specific challenge. But it takes longer to achieve larger goals, like working to address legacy toxicity in your library, leading your team through a reorganization, reconnecting with what you used to love about your work, or exploring a new career path.

Selecting a coach

Coaching is an unregulated industry, which means that anyone can call themself coach and define the practice however they like. When considering hiring a coach, one criterion to consider is whether they hold any credentials or certifications.

For many, the gold standard is a credential from a member-led professional organization, like the ICF or the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), which demonstrates that the coach has met certain educational and training requirements, has a certain level of experience coaching, is accountable to an enforceable ethics code, and is committed to continuing education. For example, to earn the ICF’s foundational credential, the ACC, a coach must complete an accredited training program, log at least 100 hours of coaching, successfully complete a performance evaluation, adhere to an ethics code that governs, among other things, maintaining confidentiality and legal compliance and managing conflicts of interest, and pass a written examination that covers knowledge and application of core coaching skills and the ethics code. To renew that credential, they must meet requirements for ongoing education and development.

Many coach training programs also provide their own certifications, which are also not regulated, so there’s a wide variation in the quality that those certifications represent. Certifications tend to have a better reputation when they are issued either by a coach training company that is accredited by a professional organization or by an established academic program.

Coaches generally offer a free, no-obligation consultation so that prospective clients can get a feel for their chemistry.

When evaluating a prospective coach, I’d recommend first asking how they define coaching and what their approach is. Some coaches incorporate mindfulness exercises, psychometric assessments, and a wide variety of other techniques. All of these tools can enhance coaching, but some may be a better fit for a given client than others.

A prospective client should walk away from even a 30-minute consultation feeling as if the coach is genuinely interested in getting to know what matters most to them.

Finding a coach

I’ve started a crowd-sourced listing of coaches who support library workers. Many coaches maintain an active presence on LinkedIn. The Hiring Librarians blog published a series in 2024 featuring interviews with several coaches who specialize in offering leadership and career coaching in libraries (including me). The Librarian Linkover podcast regularly features interviews with coaches who work with librarians.

Conclusion

In my 12 years as an academic librarian, I observed many challenges that kept leaders from building a cohesive team and affecting positive change. Whether the specific situation involved legacy toxicity, adjusting library services in response to budget cuts or program cuts, improving communication within and between library units, or responding to political attacks, two underlying obstacles stand out: a misalignment of actions and values and seeing only a narrow range of perspectives and possible responses. The skillsets of a librarian—from active listening to facilitating discussions to various pedagogical approaches—are all relevant to leaders trying to solve such problems. But coaching offers a set of techniques that dig below the surface to help clients connect their actions and values and get past whatever is blocking their view of a wider range of possibilities.

When I was an instruction librarian, the most rewarding part of my job was seeing that “aha” moment when I taught a student how to do something they had been struggling to figure out. This is also what I hope to achieve as a coach: that “aha” moment when someone finds a solution they hadn’t considered before or realizes something significant about how their values connect with their work.