Category Archives: Podcast

Podcast, Training

Episode 307: Planning

Old English Garden, Battersea Park - geograph.org.uk - 286969

Introduction

Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills.  This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.

This week we are looking at strategies for planning.

The Basics

How do you know what is going to happen in the future? Do you have a set of magic glasses that let you know what is coming up? Probably not. At least, we don’t have any cool tools like that; and will be jealous of you if you have them. This is the essence of planning: think about what you want to happen then figure out how to make it happen.

Today we will walk through some different strategies for looking into the future and figuring out how to get there. Let’s set some goals, and then talk about different kinds of planning for different situations.

Overview of the Planning Process

When you are thinking about plans and looking toward the future, what do you do first? How do you start? Let’s walk through a process that will be helpful as you do your own planning.

  • Step One: Get Your Bearings
    Look around and figure out where you are and what you have now. This is the time to collect your budget documents, any past plans, any other information on prior plans you might have hanging around your file cabinet. And you may have other resources of data which contribute to your understanding of your current position.
  • Step Two: Big Ideas
    This is the time to dream. Think about all the things you would like to see in your library. Capturing ideas in words that people can read makes them real to everyone. Don’t worry too much at this stage about making the goals realistic, or fitting them into a specific plan – just get them down and you can figure out later what to do with them or how to adapt them to the needs and realities of your library.
  • Step Three: Refine and Define
    Now you have a whole big bunch of potential ideas – things you have always wanted to try in the library. This is the point where the realistic parts need to come into play. In this step, take the best parts of the dreams and aspirations for the future, and figure out what can actually be accomplished. Ideally these goals should be phrased in a positive way, even when they are aimed at solving difficult problems.
  • Step Four: Implement
    Now that you have all this great info and these optimistic goals ahead of you – DO THEM! Don’t get paralyzed by the fear that it might not go well; some goals will be wrong, some will not get achieved – but it does not matter. Enough of them will turn out well, and by working toward those goals, you will help your library succeed where other organizations may fall behind in service and in funding.
  • Step Five: Assess and Revise
    Once you are underway with your work, you can start measuring how close you are coming to the goals you have set. It does not happen too often that you achieve exactly what you set out to do; goals change with the changing realities. Figure out where you are in relation to the goal, with the definitions you developed, and work on some mid-course corrections as necessary.

Types of Plans

So now that we have a plan for planning, we are going to work through some of the different types of plans you might use in your organization. Remember the most important thing about planning: not doing it is worst decision. Letting things just happen without trying to figure out where you want to go is not the best way to operate. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes – you will, after all; just dive in and start figuring out where you want to go and how to get there.

Strategic Planning

  • Let’s start by looking at the strategic plan. This one is the long-range plan, the one that lets you look years, not weeks or months, into the future. In the past, strategic plans extended five or maybe even ten years ahead; as the pace of society changes it has become more common to consider it as a more of a two to five year look into the future.
  • In a strategic plan you are looking at the big picture of what your organization wants to accomplish. Not every single detail needs to be ironed out here, but you want to develop some large or long-term plans that your library would choose to accomplish. From that you can make smaller plans (see below for more information on that!); but you need to have that overall view of where you want to go.
  • Whether you decide to go it alone, or to get assistance, this is going to be a large project. Ideally, you want to talk to as many people as possible to get all kinds of feedback and planning ideas from your stakeholders.
  • You want to put together all of these ideas, and start weeding them down in a realistic way. Some things will be impossible: you do not have the budget, the time, or the ability to bend the laws of physics in the necessary ways. Some things you are just not going to be interested in trying.
  • The important part of strategic planning is to keep your eyes focused firmly on the far flung future. You want to have a big-picture sense of what is going on and where you want to be in a few years. Think big!

Tactical Planning

  • Next, let’s talk about Tactical plans. If you were a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, you may remember Captain Picard snapping out orders and requests for suggestions from Worf in Tactical. His answers were always quick and to the point, and did not get hung up in the big picture.
    • You don’t have to always want to shoot bad space guys, it is just a way of thinking about this planning style!
  • Think short range, next three months; what urgently needs to happen? What would be good to happen? What can’t wait? In these plans, the focus is on a smaller plan. These are the pieces of the plan that you use to make the larger plans in your strategic plan happen.

Project Planning

  • Related to Tactical planning is the Project plan. In most libraries, this will be the type of planning carried out by most people and discussed most frequently. Think about your summer reading program: making it happen is a Project plan.
  • This is a plan focused on one specific plan or thing to be accomplished. The idea is to figure out what is going on to meet a specific project from start to finish. So a project plan will include ideas about the formation of a project and its definition, then how it will be implemented, who will participate, and how it will be evaluated after it has reached its target completion.
  • Generally this is quick – a few days or weeks, maybe months; and you are done. As a manager you want to keep an eye on things; but you should be able to feel confident enough in your staff to let them handle project plans after some consultation with you.

Disaster Planning

  • Disasters are not an “if” situation – they are a “when.” You will have disasters. Disasters are scary, they cost money, they cost a lot of time you could be spending on programming and materials selection, they give you bad publicity – they are just all-around problems. Disaster planning will let you get ready so you can minimize the problems disasters cause.
  • Just start off easily: what disasters are possible or likely in your organization? This would be a great time to convene a team to think about your plan, or to involve the community by asking them to contribute disaster ideas. So what disasters are possible for you?
    • The standard disasters are fires and floods – they can easily happen in any LIS organization and can cause varying amounts of damage.
    • Denial of service attacks, hackers taking over your website – these are not just problems for our for-profit organizations, they can and do happen to any of us.
    • Earthquakes are a problem not only on the West Coast, but along the New Madrid fault line, and potentially near fracking sites.
    • Hurricanes hit the Southeast, and can run all the way up the Eastern Coast.
    • Bomb threats can happen anywhere.
    • A friend worked for an organization whose off-site storage facility was destroyed by a tornado.
    • I talked to a librarian who said they included “how to handle a rattlesnake” in a library in New Mexico; and another librarian in Maine who said dealing with roaming bears was part of their plan.
    • Some disasters will be common to all of us, while others will be regionally or site-specific. They can also be time-sensitive. A couple of weeks after 9/11, my library evacuated as assorted health officials came to identify the mysterious substance on our floor – which turned out to be the cattail plant shredded into little piles.
  • Now, do you have a long and frightening looking list? Perfect! That’s exactly where you should be at this point. Don’t panic, the rest of this part will help you to get past that.

Conclusion

Remember that a plan is a living document. Things will change, it will develop over time. Sometimes those changes will be great and you will be thrilled that wonderful bonus things happened for your organization. Sometimes, those changes will feel like they involve taking pieces of your heart out and stomping on them. Celebrate the first, learn to shake off the second – you just keep developing the plan until you are done.

Thanks to everyone for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week to discuss our next topic: Budgeting.

Do you need more books in your life? Sure you do! Subscribe to our Books and Beverages book group podcast. Each week we look at a different genre, chat with our guests about their book suggestions, and sip our beverages. It is always good to find a new book!

Podcast, Training

Episode 306: Decision Making

Decision Tree on Uploading Imagesv2
Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills. This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.

This week, we discuss one of the primary skills that define good managers: Decision Making. If people cannot make a decision, or consistently make bad decisions – they are bad managers, no matter what else they do. Let’s look at some ways to make good decisions instead!

Check out our full information page here!

The Basics

Have you met bad managers? Well, of course you have – everyone has. There may be many reasons they are not good at their jobs; but it is very easy to picture bad managers who are dithering around decisions, constantly asking for more information or other people’s opinions. Then when a decision is made, it is too often a bad one, or is so often second-guessed that it becomes meaningless.

Instead of falling victim to this terrible fate, we will walk through some processes for making decisions in an effective way. No one single procedure will be right for every situation, but some basics will always be useful to you.

Formal Decision Making

This is the drawn-out process that you can follow when you have a big decision and some time to do it. When you do not have those, you can use pieces of this to abbreviate your own process.

  • Define the problem

Sounds easy. It is not. Sometimes it will be blindingly obvious what decision you are trying to make. Should I terminate the guy who set fire to the rare book room now or after his arson arrest? Will story time kids prefer crafts with glitter or with crayons?

As we have discussed in other chapters – be clear and specific with what you are really deciding. In the glitter example, the real decision is probably bigger and has more elements: kid’s desire for fun, parent’s desire for non-glittery children, librarian’s desire for both fun and the ability to be clean – they all clash and overlap. Defining the real question may lead to some easy answers – or show how much information there is still to be learned.

  • Identify surrounding issues

We have already begun to identify some of these. Also think about budget. How expensive is the glitter? Will you have to pay overtime to get it cleaned? Will glitter fun get covered by the local news, giving the library some great PR? Are the cheap no-name crayons made from a toxic substance, opening the library up to lawsuits? No need to get too fanciful here; but think through the situation and see what kinds of other issues will either enhance or detract from a solution.

  • Develop alternative solutions

This is where you, and your team, think through the possible different ways you could resolve this decision. In our question, the potential solutions seem pretty clear-cut: crayons, glitter. But we have the potential confounding factors involved in any issue: What about both crayons AND glitter? What about neither? What would happen if we just canceled story time and instead took a hike on the nearby nature trail? Include all the potential alternatives here, so you can be sure you are going to be able to identify the best one.

This is definitely where having a team of people, or even one other person, will help the decision making. You are awesome, of course; but even trying to “think outside the box” will still result in you thinking like you. You are the sum of your knowledge and experiences, and they will pretty much always add up to the same things. Bringing in other people means you will increase the knowledge and experiences provided.

  • Pick the best alternative

This one gets tricky when you think about it. You can spend time arguing over what “best” means in your particular situation. And you can have a bunch of potential alternatives you do not really like. Making decisions is much more fun when it involves deciding between a bunch of really great and fun things. If that were often the case, it would be lovely to be a manger. But instead it’s tough, and you will do things people don’t like, and get rid of things your patrons use, and it will all feel hard and bad. Hang in there. Pick the best one.

  • Implement the decision

Whew. That was tough. But now we have the best (or least awful) alternative. Now put it into action! You do not want to waste the work you have already put together, so get in there and make some good things happen. Mobilize the team who helped you with the decision. Find new partners and friends. Organize a giant banner to be hung in front of the library. Or, just buy the glitter and be prepared for the results. Whatever your decision was: Now Do It.

  • Set up an evaluation system; redo if necessary

We are doing things, it’s great. But is it great? I hear grumbles, but are they meaningful grumbles, or just general fussing? How do we know if this was a good decision? Just making one is a good step, but you want to figure out how to know whether this will work for you or not. So set up an assessment plan and be prepared to evaluate the decision. The world is not going to end if you made a bad decision. You will make a bad decision, you will choose the wrong one, things will be wrong. But hopefully if you are following along with this procedure, it will decrease the number of bad decisions you make. And you can remake the decisions. Let’s say you went with glitter over crayons. Now your Children’s department is covered with glitter, which can not be removed by any amount of effort, so glitter will be all over the place for months. And two parents called to complain their kids are now allergic to glitter, so they are never coming back to the library. And the whole thing was so exciting and noisy you got shut down by the police. Crayons probably would have been a better choice – and now you know for next time! Do not let yourself get too down over a poor decision; take the lessons there and move on to a better one next time.

Conclusion

Making decisions is an important part of being a manager; making good decisions is even better. Use the strategies we have walked through here, adapt them to fit your needs and those of your individual situation, and use other tools that work. The process is not as important as actually doing it, so dive in and make decisions – and feel confident doing it!

Join us next week to discuss our next topic: Planning. You will take your decision-making skills and start making good decisions for the future!

Do you need more books in your life? Sure you do! Subscribe to our Books and Beverages book group podcast. Each week we look at a different genre, chat with our guests about their book suggestions, and sip our beverages. It is always good to find a new book!

Communication, Podcast

Episode 305: Discipline and Termination

Austria - Göttweig Abbey - 2015Introduction

Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills. This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.

This week we discuss two topics managers hate to deal with: Discipline and Termination. No one likes this, but it is vital to keeping your library healthy and functioning.

Joining us is Guest Host Kathy Parker, Director of the St. Ben’s College and St. John’s University libraries.

Check out our full information page for all the details, including links to this week’s books!

The Basics

These human resources topics are deceptively hard to discuss. On the one hand: employees do the wrong things, or are terrible, or get caught up in budget cuts, or other situations will occur. This will definitely happen, and managers will need to develop strategies to best handle them.

On the other hand – this is not an area where you can just guess what to do. Laws are involved; and good intentions are not wrong, but are not enough to depend on to know you are making the right decision and doing the right thing. We are not giving any legal advice here, and we really encourage you to talk to your library’s or your city or your college’s HR department, and their attorneys before you make decisions. Depending on where you work, you may also have union rules that you need to follow.

Not disciplining employees, and not terminating employees, is not an option. So let’s talk about ways to do this well. We are going to skim some of the big areas of these topics to get everyone started in thinking about it, and putting together policies and procedures for your library.

We cannot give you legal advice here – and most HR matters will involve legality. So always make a point of talking to your library’s HR department and /or the attorney. And if your parent organization has these people – then talk to them from your college, your school, your hospital, or whoever else is near you. Be fair, and do the right thing.

Podcast, Training

304: Motivation and Coaching

Motivation-arrows

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Whatever tool you use, we hope you enjoy it! Thanks for listening, and sharing ideas on libraries!

This season, we are working on building a toolbox of leadership skills and ideas. By the end of this season, you will have fifteen specific skills that will make you a stronger leader and manager in your organization.

This week we are looking at strategies motivating people at work.

Although working in libraries is a wonderful job most of the time, the repetitive nature of the work, the service focus on people’s needs, and just working at the same job for years, can start to wear people down. Keeping staff motivated is an important part of that job as a leader. It is also one of the most difficult parts of the job.

Ideally people will enjoy their jobs, but may need work in expanding their horizons so they don’t get stale. Many things librarian staff do in a day or a week are pretty repetitive. You can only show people to the bathroom so many times, or set up a new library card account, before you have the whole procedure and all its nuances completely understood. And then what? This is where motivation comes in – helping staff to see how their small daily actions add up to a larger effort, in support of the library’s mission and strategic plan.

Most leaders – the good ones anyway – want to help staff to be as successful as possible. But knowing how to do this is tricky; your employees (rightly) insist on being unique individuals, each with their own set of motivators, which you may or may not know. And you need to help push all of them to be their best at work, doing that without a lot of the information that would be very useful. Keeping people going is much more complex than a quick pat on the back, or an occasional “good job!” But it does not have to involve a huge amount of work – just consistency.

Think back to our first episode on theories; there are all sorts of ways to deal with motivating and directing people. You can try yelling and screaming, you can try being everyone’s friend and letting them do what they want, or you can find something in between.

One management study looked at ways to motivate people who were working on an assembly line. Researchers tried everything: they sped up the line and they slowed it down. They changed around break times. They turned up the lights to be very bright, and then turned them way down. What do you think happened? Every single thing they did increased productivity, and decreased absenteeism. The staff were so happy that people were paying attention to the work they did, and that the researchers were taking the time to talk with them about their jobs, that they responded by working harder. The group as a whole worked together to make everyone’s individual performance stronger. This is called the Hawthorne Effect, after the Hawthorne Western Electric factory.

Regardless of your management style, it is not likely that all people will respond the same way to the same motivators. It will be your job to figure out different motivators for different people (or departments), while trying not to let anyone feel others are getting preferential treatment. Being a good leader is tough!

Motivating and coaching can be challenges for everyone involved – it is hard to maintain a generally positive attitude toward work all the time. When people work for your library for several decades, every needs to stay focused on providing great service. Taking some positive steps to motivate yourself and the people around you can help to build a good organizational culture!

Thanks to everyone for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week to discuss our next topic: Discipline and Termination.

Check out our full information page for all the details, including Self-motivation, Motivating Others, Gamification, and links to the books we are reading this week!

Do you need more books in your life? Sure you do! Subscribe to our Books and Beverages book group podcast. Each week we look at a different genre, chat with our guests about their book suggestions, and sip our beverages. It is always good to find a new book!

CMLE, Podcast

Episode 302: Ethics

Business ethics

Want to listen to an episode?

  1. You can download an app, subscribe to “Linking Our Libraries” and all episodes will appear on your phone – it’s so easy!
    • Apps we like include Pocket Casts, iTunes, and Stitcher.
    • Download any of these, search for “Linking Our Libraries” and hit Subscribe.
    • If it is not readily available, just enter this RSS feed: http://libraries.blubrry.com/feed/podcast/.
  2. Or, you can stream an episode right now on your computer by going to our streaming page, by clicking here.

Whatever tool you use, we hope you enjoy it! Thanks for listening, and sharing ideas on libraries!

Want to talk with us about this topic? Do you, your staff, or your organization need training in this topic? Want to write a policy, or develop a program? We are here for you!
Click here to get started!

Welcome back to Season Three of Linking Our Libraries! We are Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to share information with all types of libraries, archives, and other nonprofits working to build their skills. This season we are working through the tools you can use to be a better manager and leader.

This week we discuss Ethics.

The Basics

It is surprising how many people do not think about ethical issues being a problem in LIS. This may go back to the mistaken ideas some people have about what librarians do all day – that is, that we sit around all day waiting for people to come ask us lovely and fun questions that we can answer with smiles on our faces. Of course this does happen, and most of us enjoy it when things go so well. But other things happen too, and can pose challenges to our ethics, our practices, and even the laws governing our library and society. When you add in the idea of being a manager, responsible for the actions and behaviors of not only yourself but also yours staff, and things can get much more complicated when trying to behave ethically.

In the library field, we are a profession, and as such we are governed by an ethical code. To be more accurate: we are a multi-faceted profession with a lot of different people in different professional areas doing all kinds of different things. So we actually have several different ethical codes relevant to the work we do.

  • There are the biggies that cover us in the United States: the American Library Association (ALA) and the Society for American Archivists (SAA) both have ethics codes governing most of us across the profession.
  • Subsections of these groups may also have specific ethical codes to follow that are relevant to their work.
  • Other ethics codes may also be relevant to you if you are an LIS person working in some of the less traditional jobs for our profession. So you may be governed by codes for computer science, or engineering, or museums, or performers, or wherever else you find yourself working.

No matter what you do in libraries, you are covered by ethical codes. Be proactive about looking for codes that will govern your work, to be sure you do not get caught without your ethics firmly in place!

Too often, ethics are things that get mentioned quickly in orientation, everyone looks solemn, and we all reassure ourselves that we, of course, would always be nice people who will do nice things. Yay for us. But that is just the barest beginning of ethics and ethics training. We can all start from the stand that we are nice people (most librarians are, after all); but we need to have a specific, written-down, set of ethical principles that we all know, we all understand, and we all agree to follow. And then problems will happen and disasters will come to your door. Ethical codes give you either a nice ladder to climb up out of the problems, or can be used as a handy weapon with which to clobber if you ignore the rules and cause problems that make it into the news.

As a leader, it is particularly import for you to know and to display ethical behavior. Managers who lie, cheat, and steal show staff members that teamwork and ethical behavior are pointless; no one will get ahead in this kind of organization by following the rules and doing the right thing.

Thankfully, the opposite is also true. Managers who create an ethics-friendly organization, and who demonstrate ethical behavior even when it is the harder choice, are showing their staff how things should be done. All of this will add up to an ethics-friendly organization. And you will have yet another powerful skill for your own Manager Skill Set!

Thanks for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week to discuss Hiring and Staffing.