Coaching in the Library: A Management Strategy for Achieving Excellence

Citation

Metz, R.F. (2004), "Coaching in the Library: A Management Strategy for Achieving Excellence", Library Review, Vol. 53 No. 2, pp. 120-122. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530410522677

There has been a growing interest in facilitation, mentoring, coaching, and other forms of interpersonal skills and leadership development in recent years. The information sector has followed the trend as material for practitioners and as applied research has demonstrated. Ruth Metz's Coaching in the Library typifies this trend and shows how the most useful books for professionals and human resource specialists are practical. She makes it practical by providing numerous plausible scenarios and case studies (made up rather than actual practice), from short examples (a new member of a team believes he is being under‐utilized, so how can coaching provide a helpful intervention) to extended examples where the coach takes the subject through a process from observation to diagnosis, prognosis to treatment. This simple, but helpful model is used repeatedly, and credibly, to show how coaching can work with individual employees, teams, and, wider still, with the whole organization. Added to that is another simple and highly usable idea – a grid representing coaching that is short‐term and long‐term, and simple (like coaching to unblock communication barriers) to complex (dealing with the destructive dynamics of a low‐performing team). This, again, is applied throughout, can be used by managers and teams, and by trainers and facilitators as an unblocking tool.

Coaching aims to help people and teams to understand what is expected and why. It is a facilitation process which builds on meaningful interactions at work, and aims to identify and sustain and enhance effective performance. Metz, once with Oakland Public Library in California and Colorado State Library, and an experienced library consultant on organizational development, has produced a well‐structured introduction and guide for busy practitioners, above all those keen to build coaching into training and development programmes for others and to encourage personal growth and reflection in themselves. A real strength to the book is that she demonstrates that coaching can work with employees, with managers and leaders (influencing people who influence others), teams, and organizations (dealing with systemic short‐comings), and this makes it a useful trigger point for coaching initiatives (and the identification of coaching needs) in various parts of the library. She keeps her eye on the ball, on coaching, and succeeds in not straying into generic training, although most readers will find it difficult to separate coaching from facilitation all the way through.

A sensible angle is building in some key ideas readers with a counselling background will recognize as Rogerian, authenticity, congruence, and active listening: she recommends this for one‐to‐one coaching, and it would have been good to have seen it extended to managers and leaders, teams and organizations. One key thing is WHO the coach is or should be – there are well known conflicts of interest in coaching in conventional line‐management and team structures, because, among other things, of pre‐established relationships, and readers come away with a very vague idea of who the ideal coach, a deus ex machina, might actually be. Perhaps a consultant, but that is not an answer for most libraries. So in a promising and workable framework, Metz is an attractive advocate of coaching. She admits to barriers – employees with weak egos, interpersonal immaturity in groups, a culture of criticism and blame, workaholism that inhibits commitment, working at cross purposes, authoritarian and élitist attitudes, power play. These are brought out, to some extent, in the case studies, through the observation‐diagnosis‐prognosis‐treatment approach, but professionals and trainers using the book would have to adapt such advice sensitively to their local situation. Used in role‐play it would be crassly manipulative, and so would have to be customized.

The structure, of applying coaching in one context and then by one another, tends to get repetitive, and cumulative polyanna‐ish if readers for once reflect on the moral mazes and Machiavellian dynamics of the workplace. Nothing, either, on coaching the solo‐librarian/ information manager who looks for help – from where? More a book, then, to use for it is practical advice, reminding us that it is no harm to aspire to peak performance. I would like to know more about the incentives for coaching in a world of increasingly flexible and part‐time employment, and environments where the psychological contract leads to ever higher expectations from training (as in knowledge management). That wider information world is for another book – Metz deals with some pretty traditional library issues, where it will work best.