One of my mentors in a leadership program I’m participating in this year said to me this week that other than going to Happy Hour with his wife, a certain aspect of his job was his “most favorite thing in the world.” In his case it’s work he has been doing for over thirty years – and he is excellent at it. We talked about how challenging it can be to back off enough to let others excel at – and learn – in an area that we’re good at and love to do.

It made me reflect about the aspects of my work that I love the most. I love to start new relationships and partnerships – meeting and then getting to know new individuals and organizations – talking about ideas and possible ways to work together – launching a new project and then working together to help it succeed. I’m much more energized by the start of something new – the as-yet-unrealized potential – than in all the details that come afterwards—the negotiations, the implementation and the evaluation. I work hard to manage details because that’s part of every job – but I know it will never be my strength.

Often in our work, we focus on the areas that we need to improve rather than our natural strengths. The Strengths approach says that if we try to be too well-rounded, we’ll never be truly great at anything. If you haven’t dug into the Gallup Strengthsfinder work yet, take a look to see if it’s something that can benefit you in your work – or if it gives you a new way to talk with young people about their strengths.
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I am enjoying the “Day in the Life” series and thought it would be interesting to write a post from my perspective. I started in public libraries as a Children’s and YA librarian for a small system, then became the Teen Coordinator for a larger system, did some partnerships and development work for a bunch of years in that same system, then managed a library building and now coordinate services to children, youth and families in a large urban/suburban library system. This day actually happened on Monday, May 6th.

8:25 – 8:50 Arrived at work and approved timesheets. Couldn’t remember the password to open the computer-controlled shades in my office so squinted into the sun.

8:50 – 9:30 Met with Senior Librarian in our Information Services section about updates that have been long needed to the Youth Services portal, the section on our staff intranet that includes too many separate lists we have to keep up, lots of duplication of information that is in other places, and other valuable stuff we could put in a different order. We developed a joint list of the easy parts and she will lead a conversation with the Youth Services Management Team about how to best organize the rest of the stuff. Our conversation was in the context of knowing that our County will be moving to a new platform later this year and we will need to migrate to a new platform.
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I manage youth services in a large urban public library. Up until last year, we had not hired youth services librarians in almost five years. While we aren’t hiring at the pace we were ten years ago, and we aren’t creating new positions, we’ve opened up a number of youth services positions in the last year or so. It hurts to see how many extremely talented librarians are looking for work – and it’s tough that we can interview such a small percentage – and hire an even smaller segment of those.

I hope we can continue to hire, and I hope other systems can, too. Here are some of the qualities that I see as most desirable in youth services librarians. As a caveat, this is just my perspective. I can’t speak for other hiring managers in my system or others. (more…)

Connect, Create and Collaborate pt 3

In thinking this week about collaboration, connection and creation– in all its forms, this article in Forbes — about how most groups don’t truly collaborate got me thinking about times that I thought I was collaborating – even partnering – with other staff or community partners – but what I was actually doing looked more often just like listening patiently, tolerating, or convincing.

To enter a room of possible collaborators and acknowledge you might not have the best idea yourself – or that you need their help to do work differently and better can be a scary and risky endeavor. Scary because you might not be able to do it “your way” and risky because you have to give up more control than you might be comfortable with—and that this could change your outcome. Living in this place is a hard balance and I work on it almost every day because if it’s an idea with mutual investment – something a group came up with — you have that many more people invested in its success and sustainability over the long term.

In my library right now we have three new strategic change focus areas – students, seniors and readers. These are groups that we’ve always served and will continue to do so – but we’re identifying them as “change priorities,” meaning that we want to look for new, different ways of thinking about how to serve these groups throughout our library– ways that engage all our staff about things that they can each do in their work. In order to enter into this work in partnership with my colleagues, I had to back up and acknowledge I wasn’t the only expert in the room – that everyone around me had new and different ideas that I hadn’t heard before.

Like many of us, I’ve been following the news of elimination of telecommuting at major companies like Yahoo and Best Buy . In both cases the desire for increased collaboration, among others, were cited as reasons for these changes – it made me wonder what other strategies these companies – and others – were using to embed or reinforce a culture of collaboration – which is way harder than just sharing a cubicle.

What can libraries learn from other organizations about what a real culture of collaboration could look like? If we could figure it out among staff, it would probably be easier to teach it to young people.

Most of us are actively creating and supporting ways for young people to connect, create and collaborate with each other but are we doing it in our own work? This post focuses on creating with our colleagues.

A few years ago I learned some techniques that, quite literally, saved me from myself. I hadn’t been managing staff very long and wasn’t very experienced in supervision. I tended to think that if staff had a problem, it was my job as a supervisor to fix it for them rather than helping them address – and find a solution for – the problem itself. Many of the supervisory classes I had taken focused more on a “the boss is in charge/don’t question it” style of management – and that just didn’t feel right to me. I was moving into a new position as a co-manager of a large library in our system and knew I needed some new techniques in my toolkit.

Our library is a county department and the county had just started a facilitation network – to train internal staff to facilitate on behalf of other departments in the county – believing, rightly, that this was a cost saving measure – and also believing that there was great value for everyone in making meetings run better. (more…)

Most of us are actively creating and supporting ways for young people to connect, create and collaborate with each other but are we doing it in our own work? This is a series of three posts about these three Cs in our work — this one focuses on connecting with our colleagues in the library.

For the staff that I work with today in our library system, collaboration and co-creation are critical and happen every day. We have many libraries that are co-managed and nearly all of our work in Youth Services, which I manage, is done by workgroups or small project teams. Even if you’re the sole project manager on a small pilot project, you still are in constant communication with your colleagues who are testing your form or trying a program you came up with.

This type of work is harder for some us than others – but in a big system, it’s absolutely critical – we don’t have the capacity for all of our libraries to be doing 41 completely different things – we have to share what’s working and let our colleagues take our good idea and make it even better. (more…)

I feel so privileged to have been at the IMLS-supported YALSA Forum on Teens and Libraries the past two days in Seattle – right before Midwinter starts today.

It’s hard to know where to start, but one of the most powerful parts of the Forum was that it wasn’t just library folks talking about our work with each other — like we often do– partners and supporters were intentionally included and asked about how we can continue to engage them.

We have to reach out and partner with other organizations that value youth—we can’t do it all ourselves. We need to attend coalitions or collaboratives in our communities to make sure libraries are included in new projects or initiatives – that we are key players at important tables. While I’ve been here at Midwinter I just learned there is now a Twin Cities Career Readiness Collaborative that I was not aware of – I’m going to find out who’s in charge and see if it could be meaningful for my Library. (more…)

Last year the YALSA Board of Directors approved adding a new Interest Group: Managing Young Adult Services. It’s mission is to be a forum on exchanging ideas on how supervisors and managers can support all level of staff working with young adults in public libraries and to develop strategies and tactics to address the needs of current and future managers in young adult services.

It has the potential to be an important Interest Group in YALSA. The problem? Due to a new job for me, I haven’t had the time to do anything with it. (more…)

YALSA is interested in starting a new Interest Group to discuss issues relating to managing young adult services in libraries. We aim to be a forum on exchanging ideas on how supervisors and managers can support all level of staff working with young adults in public libraries and to develop strategies and tactics to address the needs of current and future managers in youth services.

This is the perfect chance for YALSA members to talk with each other about their successes and challenges when managing teen services librarians or a teen department of any size. Members of a YALSA Interest Group can participate completely virtually using tools like ALA Connect. Interest groups can sponsor programs at conferences and submit articles for YALSA publications.

To get the new group started, YALSA members need to show their interest by signing a petition. We need 15 signatures in order to submit a Request for Board Action to have the new group approved. If you are interested in participating in this new group send the following information: name, ALA member number, institution, email, address, and phone number to Maureen Hartman, mlhartman@mac.com And stay tuned for more details!

We’ve extended the application for YALSA’s Great Ideas contest to July 15, 2010!

YALSA needs your Great Ideas – and you could win $250 in cash! We’re looking for creative help from you to help YALSA achieve its goals.

Do you have an idea to:
make YALSA’s awards and booklists into household names?
ensure young adult and school librarians have access to important research?
help YALSA better advocate for quality library services for every teen in every library?
develop continuing education or career services that librarians need?
engage YALSA’s current membership and recruit new members?

Great ideas like yours will help YALSA achieve the goals laid out in its most recent strategic plan: Advocacy, Marketing, Research, Continuous Learning, and Member Recruitment and Engagement. A PDF version of the Strategic Plan is available here.

Who Can Apply?

All current YALSA members and official member groups, including committees, juries, taskforces, discussion groups, interest groups and advisory boards.
How to Apply

Check out the guidelines for more information and the application form. Send your application to yalsa@ala.org as a single attachment no later than July 15, 2010.

Winners will be announced the week of Sept. 7, 2010. There will be a first place winner for an individual member and a first place winner for a member group. If there are no applicants in one of the two categories, we will choose two winners for a single category. Each prize is worth up to $250. Winners will have their idea and photo published in an issue of YAttitudes and have their idea implemented by YALSA.

Please direct questions to Sarajo Wentling, Strategic Planning Committee Chair, at: sjwentling@yahoo.com