Hi all, I’m Lorraine Squires, and I’m the Head of Teen Services at Mastics-Moriches-Shirley Community Library.  I have been in Teen and Adult Public Services for over ten years, but last year I made the move to both a new library and a new management position, so I’ll be wearing two hats at this conference – exploring management resources and teen services.  Fortunately, I think they’re two complementary hats!

After an awful day of travel yesterday, I’ve gotten to participate in 2 discussion groups already.

One was an informal dinner with other PLA bloggers last night.  It’s so great to be able to sit around and talk library theory.  Too often when we’re discussing situations in our home libraries, it comes down to personalities and politics.  When you’re talking to librarians from other parts of the library world, you can elevate the conversation – what SHOULD we do, and how can we accomplish it.  That kind of rambling, theory-and-practice conversation is worth the price of admission to conferences, for me.

The second discussion group was Saturday morning’s LLAMA Middle Managers Discussion Group.  Well attended, with around 15 middle managers from public and academic libraries, it featured a well-directed conversation about how to manage and support change in our organizations.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT was the big catchphrase around the table, as librarians discussed how to facilitate change both to our staffers and our administration, and how to communicate about change effectively.

Some of what we talked about:

Understanding that you have to explain the reasons for the change:

• why will this make our organization more effective or more responsive to patron needs?
• how does this change help us meet our strategic goals?

There was a lot of discussion of how to communicate that staff members have to “fake it till they make it” – present the change positively to the public, even if the staff hasn’t bought into the change yet.

The importance of having a strategic plan, and of consulting it often.

• A great suggestion – not only should you measure your progress on goals each year, but you should post your progress quarterly – how close are you, what do you have to do to meet your goal by the year’s end.  Posting and discussing on a quarterly basis makes it more “real” to staff.

Another great point was the importance of having a sponsor for your change – your supervisor’s got to work with you to make sure that you have the resources and the support to make changes happen.

Some debate about how much you show your staff of your frustrations and roadblocks -do you keep everything smooth, or do you admit when you’re blocked or encountering friction?  One of the messages that sounded like it would work was: I’ve got to work within a framework, and so do you, so let’s figure out together how to do that.  Along those lines, the importance of presenting ideas upward effectively was discussed – both for ourselves, and for our staff.  We talked about what administration is looking for when an idea is presented:

• What are we trying to accomplish or solve?
• What are possible solutions?
• What avenues did we explore that did not seem to hold solutions?
• What steps will we need to take to implement the solution we’re recommending?
• What resources and support will we need?

Once we know what our adminstration wants in a presented idea, we should teach that to our staff too – especially the idea of asking and answering the questions of what challenge is being addressed, and what we hope to accomplish with our solution.  Several people mentioned they try to encourage staff to come to them with complaints and questions only once they have an answer.  Which of course, leads to the discussion of what to do when the answer they have doesn’t match up with your library’s goals and strategic plan.

My favorite remark was one of frustration with people who “hate change” – the speaker pointed out that change happens everywhere, to everyone, unless they’re dead.

It looks like LLAMA will be looking into a workshop on change management – if it’s as thoughtful and chockful of ideas as this discussion was, it will be a huge success.