Coaching Skills for Library Leaders: Building a Performance Work Culture One Meeting at a Time
A Library 2.0 Service, Safety, and Security Webinar with Dr. Steve Albrecht
OVERVIEW:
Coaching your employees is a necessary leadership skill but not a built-in one. Most library leaders learn to have required conversations with their employees just by doing them, through on-the-job training, work experience, and by having been coached with skill by their bosses before them. If you’re reluctant to speak with your library staff about work performance or work behavior issues, now is the time to get better at these “conversations that mean something.”
Coaching is most often defined as one or more pre-discipline conversations, designed to help all employees improve their work performance or their work behavior, or both. It’s also useful for career development, mentoring, and succession planning. It can help those employees who need to change their attitudes and service orientations, both toward our patrons and each other.
We get who we coach. And here’s another paradoxical challenge for you as a library leader: You will have to spend more time with those employees who need to make changes in their work performance or work behaviors. You can’t hope they will discover what to do. They can’t or won’t fix themselves. This session will give you the confidence, tools, and the talking points to help you help them.
LEARNING AGENDA:
- The need for coaching skills: what it is and isn’t.Coaching methods: in-person, over the phone, by e-mail.
- Discussing the ethical ground rules for coaching, related to disclosure, privacy, confidentiality, and reporting.
- How to use a structured process and meeting follow-ups to coach for provable results.
- Know how and when to assign “homework” as part of coaching.
- How to handle excuses by employees.
- Defining and using “event-driven” coaching as an intervention method with reluctant, fearful, hostile, or apprehensive employees.
- Knowing when to use the four coaching methodologies: strategic, developmental, corrective, and special needs.
- Understanding the four possible coaching employee archetypes: the Rising Star, the Problem Child, the Plow Horse, and the Smart Slacker.
- Using “Personal Accountability Meetings” when coaching is not working.
DATE: Thursday, August 6th, 2026, 2:00 - 3:00 pm US - Eastern Time
COST:
- $99/person - includes live attendance and any-time access to the recording and the presentation slides and receiving a participation certificate.
- To arrange group discounts (see below), to submit a purchase order, or for any registration difficulties or questions, email admin@library20.com.
TO REGISTER:
Use the payment box above to register and pay. You can pay by credit card. You will receive an email within a day with information on how to attend the webinar live and how you can access the permanent webinar recording. If you are paying for someone else to attend, you'll be prompted to send an email to admin@library20.com with the name and email address of the actual attendee.
NOTE: Please check your spam folder if you don't receive your confirmation email within a day.
SPECIAL GROUP RATES (email admin@library20.com to arrange):
- Multiple individual log-ins and access from the same organization paid together: $75 each for 3+ registrations, $65 each for 5+ registrations. Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.
- The ability to show the webinar (live or recorded) to a group located in the same physical location or in the same virtual meeting from one log-in: $299.
- Large-scale institutional access for viewing with individual login capability: $499 (hosted either at Library 2.0 or in Niche Academy). Unlimited and non-expiring access for those log-ins.
Since 2000, Dr. Steve Albrecht has trained tens of thousands of library employees in 28+ states, live and online, in service, safety, security, and leadership. His programs for both staff and library leaders are fast, entertaining, and provide tools that can be put to use immediately in the library workspace. His books include:
The Library Leader’s Guide to Employee Coaching: Building a Performance Culture One Meeting at a Time (in-press, Bloomsbury, 2026)
The Library Leader’s Guide to Human Resources: Keeping it Real, Legal, and Ethical (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025)
The Safe Library: Keeping Users, Staff, and Collections Secure (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)
Library Security: Better Communication, Safer Facilities (ALA, 2015)
Steve holds a doctoral degree in Business Administration (D.B.A.), an M.A. in Security Management, a B.S. in Psychology, and a B.A. in English. He is board-certified in HR, security management, employee coaching, and threat assessment. He has written 28 books on business, security, and leadership. He provides a loving home for four rescue dogs.
More on The Safe Library at thesafelibrary.com. Follow on X (Twitter) at @thesafelibrary and on YouTube @thesafelibrary. Dr. Albrecht's professional website is drstevealbrecht.com.
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