Tag Archives: Linking our Libraries

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

Want to listen to an episode?

  • You can download an app, search for “Linking Our Libraries” hit subscribe, 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/.
  • 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!

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, Communication

Episode 303: Hiring and Staffing

Now Hiring

Want to listen to an episode?

  • You can download an app, search for “Linking Our Libraries” hit subscribe, 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/.
  • 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!

Check out our full information page here.

(Note: Lady Grey was in-house while we recorded this episode; so the parts that sound particularly great may have been influenced by her calming presence!)

Welcome to another episode of Linking Our Libraries! This week our Guest Host is Carla Lydon, director of the East Central Library System here in Minnesota.

If you like libraries, archives, or history centers; or if you work in a nonprofit; or if you just want to learn more about management and leadership, you are in the right place!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and our job is to help libraries! We are a multitype library system, with member libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. Yes – we are pretty lucky!

This season we are looking at a variety of topics related to management and leadership. Our focus is on libraries, but our topics are relevant to all types of nonprofits working to improve their leadership skills.

Do you want to talk with us about a topic? Want us to set up some training for you? Check out our website under “Can We Help You?” and let’s talk!

First we are going to look at a somewhat idealized hiring process. Every library varies in how they are able to hire: some have no input and a new person is just plopped into the library, some have complete freedom to structure their hiring as they want. Hopefully, the steps we look at today will happen, at some level!

One of the most important things a manager can do for an organization is to hire well. You need good staff to have a well-functioning organization, and a bad hire – one that brings in an unskilled, unmotivated person, or person who spends time complaining, giving bad customer service, or just doing poor work – can throw the whole place into chaos. The cost of a bad hire can be very high, and this problem can be very difficult to fix. A good hire will do good work, and add to the positive organizational environment you want to build!

Hiring and staffing are extremely important challenges any library needs to face; and making good decisions, bringing in good people, and getting them deployed to best serve the mission of the library are crucial! It is tough to do, but if you have questions you can always check in with us here at cmle.org!

Tune in next Thursday for our next episode of Linking Our Libraries, where we keep going with our discussion of management and leadership topics.

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.

Podcast

Get ready: Season Three of Linking our Libraries is coming!

We are getting ready to put out Season Three of Linking Our Libraries – the podcast focusing on library training topics. No matter what you do in libraries/archives/nonprofits – we have episodes to help you to be more effective in your library!

This season we are creating a toolbox of skills. One of the training topics we get a lot of requests for is Leadership and Management skills. We will be building on these topics in future training opportunities, but this season we will present you with fifteen topics important for success as a leader in your organization.

Topics will be grouped, and will build on previous topics. So we start at the very beginning, with a look at some management theories to give everyone a foundation of ideas about your own leadership style. We progress through ethics, some HR topics, and then into different kinds of planning – the defining skill of a good manager. We wrap up with some strategies for bringing together groups of people, including looking at the organizational culture, communication, and teamwork.

We have several Guest Hosts, who bring their own experiences and library ideas with them to share with all of us. This is one of the big values in being part of a multitype system – our guests come from all types of libraries: public, academic, school, and special; so when they share their ideas we know those ideas will resonate across all our libraries!

We like the idea of a fifteen-episode season with a theme – especially a theme our members have requested more information on for their own skill building. We hope you like it too!

Subscribe today, to be sure you get each new episode as it drops. Episodes will drop every Thursday at 6am – for those who just can’t wait for their next dose of leadership and management skill training!