It is possible (and desirable) to manage up, down and across the organization. This may mean that you facilitate, coax, and/or cajole. As a middle manager, you must understand the organization’s vision and mission, and how your unit fits in. To move forward, you must explain that relationship to your unit and create a climate of trust and optimism. On the flip side, your manager must also understand the work of your unit and how it fits in.

Within your unit, develop a bias toward action and getting things done. Take advantage of opportunities for consensus – which decisions can be made by popular vote? Be clear that this won’t always happen, but that if it is possible, you’ll give your staff that chance. Don’t be afraid to develop new leaders and to help your staff achieve career success, promotions, and advancement.

As a middle manager, you need both people skills and technical skills. Technical knowledge is required to understand the work of your staff, but be careful not to micromanage! Recognize that you are capable of and understand the job, but that it is no longer yours. You also need professional knowledge, planning skills, decision-making skills, and communication skills. Focus on helpfulness, not niceness or likability.

To manage up, propose solutions instead of just presenting problems. If you make things easier for your manager, they will appreciate it just as much as you do when your staff does the same. Develop peer relationships to form a support network for yourself. You will not be controlled by others if you build relationships that make you a valued member of the management team

Recommended reading: Practical Strategies for Library Managers by Joan Giesecke

Jill Canono, Leadership Consultant at State Library and Archives of Florida, began by stating that shared leadership means shared vision, values, responsibilities, and accountability. It also means asking a lot of questions and really looking deeply at your organization, yourself, and your coworkers and employees.

• What do people do to make sense of a situation in your workplace?
• Who is involved? Who ultimately understands it?
• What skills and talents do people have that aren’t being utilized?
• What happens when you experiment and fail? (If the answer to this question is, “20 years ago we tried it and it didn’t succeed so we never did it again,” upper management is responsible for smashing that myth so everyone can move on.)
• How can you encourage experimentation?
• How do you share information? Which of those methods are actually effective?
• What communication barriers exist in your organization?
• Who within your organization thinks differently than you do? What are the reasons you may be resistant to having deep discussions with them?

After you ask all these questions and consider the answers, you also have to commit to change, even (especially) when it isn’t comfortable or easy. Canono’s presentation is available online.

Olivia Madison, Dean of the Library at Iowa State University, continued by talking about how committees work within organizations. A committee can be a microcosm of the larger group, which can be a useful way for managers at various levels to take an objective look at how things actually work. She recommends setting a goal of at least one decision or recommendation to be made for each meeting held. As a leader of a committee, she also recommends that one show enthusiasm, commit to a shared outcome, use/develop one’s project management skills, and get different people involved.

Nanette Donohue, Technical Services Manager at the Champaign Public Library, started by noting that she feels she has what she terms Kids These Days Syndrome: as someone who has been with the organization for awhile and is in a middle management position, it is difficult as you mature to see kids coming and playing on your lawn (read: invading your workplace with new ideas and varying degrees of background knowledge) and even more difficult not to want to tell them what to do. Leadership transition and sharing is about compromise and negotiation for everyone. We all have to learn how to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, to acknowledge that this can be awkward for everyone and move on to the actual work to be done.

Donohue also noted that not all leaders will self-select, and as leaders at all levels we need to provide opportunities for everyone to lead. All opportunities are important, even if the outcome isn’t major. She also recommends being flexible, respecting the experiences of others, and not taking things personally, all of these especially when things don’t go exactly how you want them to or how you would have done them yourself.

As a middle manager, one also sometimes has to take the role of being a member of the group (not leading), and in those cases, you need to make a case for the change you want to make (it needs to resonate with whoever the final arbiter is). One should not be afraid to ask – the worst thing that could happen is that you are told no and (guess what?) it’s okay to be told no sometimes.

As a developing leader, if you’re not getting what you need at your workplace, get involved outside your organization: cultivate connections and participate in association work. Leaders in associations and similar groups are generally friendly and approachable, or they wouldn’t have been elected or even nominated. Donohue recommends the book The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and For Our Leaders. Everyone follows at some point – even top leaders follow their constituent groups.

I was lucky enough to be one of the 75 attendees at Friday’s ALA Unconference, which was created as part of ALA President Jim Rettig’s Creating Connections initiatives. As Rick posted, we, the attendees, gave ten presentations and participated in close to thirty discussion groups, all on topics suggested and voted on online.

Many of the presenters and discussion group moderators have already added their presentations and resources to the wiki. I got a lot out of the whole experience, but one of the most valuable parts of the day for me was Matt Hamilton’s presentation on Libraries and Innovation (download the presentation for his full notes). We’re in a time of great change in my community and at my library, and as Matt spoke about, that presents a terrific opportunity for innovation. One of the most difficult things in a time like that is for the big idea people, those who are often most excited about and impatient for change, to take the time to let change incubate. The other side to this is that even if it’s not earth-shattering or revolutionary, an idea given time to take shape allows people to see the process, to know that it’s okay to try new things and see what happens. This freedom to take chances can open up a whole new culture in your organization, one that will hopefully follow the vision the big idea people have laid out.

One notion about leadership that came up throughout the entire day was the concept of pushing leadership down the org chart. An empowered staff is a productive staff, and the more independent (in whatever way that takes shape in your organization) staff are, the more opportunity there is for innovation and for neat things to happen. You have to have trust in the people you work with.

Several of us took the opportunity to check out the Cleveland Heights-University Heights Public Library while we were in the area. They’re doing some really innovative things with reference, such as replacing the reference desks with these small stations and replacing lengthy reference shifts with a variety of short shifts spent at these small stations, on phone/IM duty (at a staff desk in a non-public area), or roving. Food for thought!

• Before you can get started, you need to convince your board and staff that it is worthwhile for you all to go on this journey. You’ll all be in it together, so you need to get on board from the get-go.
• If the board is reluctant to form a community planning committee, argue that it would be better to have a more representative group demographically (than your board, which is more than likely not a demographically representative group). There is an increasing distrust in government. The way we avoid that is to reach out to the community, engage people who we want to support us, and create new advocates. Planning with the community is a perfect opportunity.
• Whether you realize it or not, what you’re doing now is a conscious choice to continue on a particular path. You have the ability and control to do something different if you make the choice. Sandra and June are encouraging us to make that choice within the framework they’ve provided, a framework that puts users first. (Often, the path we’re on is set up to put staff, or just some staff, first.)
• It’s important to remember all the little things when you plan to make changes in the way you spend money on collections. When do your database subscriptions come up for renewal? What standing orders do you have? Work the ability/timing to change these things into your plan.
• It should become a habit to link all decisions to the plan. If you let the plan slip from your memory, the entire process will have been a waste of a lot of people’s time.
• There is little to be gained from slowly changing things. Plan to get things done efficiently.
• We need to intentionally rob Peter to pay Paul when reallocating resources and match new with eliminated and modified activities.
• We’re talking about providing the reference service that people really want, not the reference service that we want them to want. This means that our definition of reference must change.
• The idea of reference resources we hang on to (print especially) “just in case” is outmoded and does not make sense. We need to let go! As far as electronic resources go, we must be looking at the cost per use for everything. Set a standard/threshold that you commit to adhere to and then get rid of things that don’t meet it. Then reallocate the money to something your users actually care about. It doesn’t matter how librarians like to find information if the library’s users like to find it another way. We need to adapt to them, not the other way around.
• It is important to monitor timelines and deadlines – did X service get eliminated by X date? Also very important: what happened after we made the change?
• Lack of monitoring translates to the staff as a lack of commitment from management – why should I care if no one’s keeping track?
• Do you monitor daily – weekly – monthly – quarterly – semi-annually – annually? Set yourself up for success: monitor monthly toward targets in the objective. More regular updates/discussions about implementation are appropriate.
• Implementation and organizational competencies: date-based
• Progress toward targets in the objectives: target-based

Sandra and June were very cognizant of how overwhelmed (with opportunity) many of us have been feeling this week. We can see that we have so far to go, and for many of us middle managers, organization-wide change might seem out of reach. They offered us this advice: Start! Move forward with your successes. At the very least, start looking at what activities are effective, how staff are spending their time, what might be more effective. Even if it’s just within one department, you can start to better serve your users a little bit at a time. While you’re at it, you can work on getting the entire organization on the road to planning with users in mind.

I feel very lucky to have been able to take part in this boot camp. Not only have I learned so much, which has helped develop me as a professional and will end up helping my library and my community, I’ve become a part of a network of dynamic, creative people I’ll be able to continue learning with into the future. I’m so excited to see what we can do.

• If you do not reallocate resources, everything you’ve done up to this point is academic (and/or pointless). If you choose not to act in the face of fear (of change), you as a manger have failed to do your job. Any movement forward is better than standing still (or moving backward) at this point. If you ask for help from your community/board/staff/etc, you must be prepared to act on what you hear.
• For some us, for the rest of our careers, we’ll be looking at cutbacks. Most of us have no idea what assumptions were used when creating our original library budgets. This is also true for facilities and resources and technology. It’s not okay to say that children’s services is your highest priority and put the majority of your collection money toward adult non-fiction. The money and resources must follow your plan! We become managers because we’re good librarians. We became librarians because we didn’t want to screw around with money. But we cannot opt out of this part of our jobs – we need to learn/develop and get comfortable with it.
• Questions to ask ourselves:
  • Do I know what percentage of the total budget is allocated for children vs. adult?
  • Do I know what percentage of the total budget is allocated for salaries vs. collections vs. etc.?
  • (and so forth)
• All departments/etc should receive financial reports/updates monthly. What information is provided should be reevaluated regularly so people get the info they need (and unnecessary or un-useful information is not collected).
• We need to have a better understanding of what our staff does so we can clearly communicate what we want them to do within the structure of the new plan.
• Don’t collect data you don’t need. Decide what you want to know and then figure out what you need to collect to get the answer you want. Get the very minimum. If existing records can provide you with what you need, stop there. If existing records do not give you the info you want or the result is ambiguous, drill deeper in the areas you need more information. This data mining model is described in detail in Planning for Results. If you’re going to go to the trouble to collect data, you need to commit to rigorously analyzing it. It makes sense to have people who do not have a vested interest/point of view collect the data.
• This is about data analysis, not data collection.
• We need to join the rest of the world and not get bogged down with the personalities at our libraries.
• When it comes time to tell staff what is going to change, if they’ve been involved from the beginning (whether they’re happy about it or not), you already have the framework for this discussion. You will be able to make progress.
• Many libraries have never had to self-evaluate, especially when it comes to how much they spend on this vs. that. Many libraries are staffed primarily by Change Survivors – people who have been through change but have just let it wash over them without actually participating.
• Most libraries need to stop allocating money to big chunks of the collection. This can be scary but if you’re truly going to meet your service responses, you must do it. It will benefit your community and your responsibility is to them.
• In the planning process sometimes contention is good, because it can lead to results.

The Cleveland Public Library is filled with gorgeous artwork, much of which is functional. A few of us were noting while taking the tour that it is a shame that buildings like this have about zero chance of being created today. The people who planned and built this building were in for the long haul, using beautiful stone and enlisting artists who required hours upon hours to create the stunning works of art throughout. They weren’t creating something disposable that would be falling apart in 20 years.

We talk a lot about green design in new library construction, but it seems to me that renewable materials get more attention than materials that will last as long as those at CPL have (and thus do not require replacement within a lifetime if ever).

The Cleveland Public Library has a room filled with these beautifully ornate display cases. One of the topics we’ve discussed during boot camp is that we all need to consider whether things like displays (and puppets and bulletin boards) fit into our service responses. Most libraries spend at least a little (and for some, a lot) of money, time, and other resources on displays and it’s important to consider how it fits into your larger plan.

I was surprised to learn that the Cleveland Public Library uses the Library of Congress classification system.