On Friday I attended this preconference institute (along with some other RCPL folks) put on by John Shannon and Becky Schreiber (they were also the facilitators at the Eureka Leadership Institute I attended in 2009). By forming discussion groups based on age ranges, we got a chance to talk about how to be a leader at any stage in life. By looking at the various stages of life and leadership, we explored what it was like to be in those stages and what we could contribute to the library. We all agreed that no matter what our age, we all wanted to be treated with respect and were working towards the same goals. My ah-ha moment was realizing that it's not only our own age we have to take into consideration, but also the age of the other staff and patrons we're working with and the age of our organization. If you'd like to learn more about the conceptual models of personal mastery, please let me know and I'll share my handouts with you.
During the institute, we viewed some interesting media:
Did you know 3.0? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHmwZ96_Gos
Social Media Revolution http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuNx0UrnEo
I’d be interested in hearing your response to the videos.
I attended this workshop as well. I was surprised to find that I was the only person in the room in the 32-42 age demographic! Luckily, the 42-50 folks let me hang out with them, or I'd have been a lonely Gen X-er all day. Chronologically, I'm right between the Apprentice Stage and the Midlife Transition Stage, which sounds about right to me. Because I went through a career change in my mid-30s, I think I've already passed through a lot of the transition people typically go through in their 40s. Age-wise and career-wise, I'm settling into a time of stability and mentoring others. It was enlightening to talk with other people in this stage and to compare our experience with others in older and younger phases. Being right in the middle is a comfortable place to be. I feel that I'm still able to relate to my younger peers, but I've developed my own maturity and sense of purpose, which makes it easier to get along with people in all life stages. Becky and John are great leaders. They really know their stuff, and they have such wonderful energy and enthusiasm. I would recommend them to anyone looking to strengthen their leadership abilities.
ReplyDeleteI was also one of the “RCPL folks” at the Life Long Eureka Leadership: Re-inventing yourself and your library. It was great to see John Shannon and Becky Schreiber again; they are fantastic facilitators that encourage meaningful dialogue. According to the Schreiber’s, this was the first time they had combined both lifelong learning and strategic planning together. The objectives of this being to harness the power of every staff member, getting the person in the right position and niche; and to find out what people in different generations think, to position libraries in their communities. We responded generationally to contributions in four areas of a strategic model: Systems improvement, Organizational culture, Customer responsiveness, and Vision alignment. Focuses may be internal or external, and in regards to time, talking about the immediate future as well as taking the long view. There is a lot of info on generations, working with and serving them and what the characteristics are. This was the first time I had seen this practically applied to library staff by dividing up into groups and then comparing thoughts. One concept coming from this is the false assumption that younger generations know all about technology, not true, only if it’s something that interests them. A participant talked about always having technology questions sent to her, and tech projects assigned to her because she’s part of a younger generation, and that she didn’t know all, was willing to learn, but often times knew just about as much as the person asking the question. Lack of time ran through all generations, especially the lack of time to learn new technology. To solve this may be an approach that integrates work and learning. I’m not sure what the details would be in how this would look, it’s a broad concept, but it sounded helpful and resonated with me. We also discussed the place of the library now and in the future as there is a plethora of information available to people, but a lack of time to sift through, Stacey Aldrich’s thought was echoed here “The best way to make the future, is to invent it.”
ReplyDeleteI attended and enjoyed this workshop as well. I had not previously attended any of John Shannon and Becky Schreiber's programs and have been interested and curious to see what this one was like.
ReplyDeleteThe "Do You Know 3.0" video focused on the ever-increasing amount of information available, which highlights the need and opportunity for library professionals to help patrons navigate data and find needles in haystacks. The "Social Media Revolution" focused on the explosive growth of sites like Facebook and reminded me of the need for libraries also to have a presence on these sites and to be aware of what is said about us there.
It was interested to see the different perspectives that resulted from splitting the attendees into 3 groups based on age -- for example, as patrons get older they seem to place a greater importance on customer service.