Director's Thoughts #5

As I’ve mentioned in the past, we’re spending this year working on a 3-year strategic plan for our library. We’re starting from the ground up with a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis, PEST (Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological) analysis and identifying our stakeholders. This project is being done not only by the library board, but also by my department heads as well as any staff who want to participate. I didn’t want to force anyone to participate, but I also didn’t want to work on this HUGE project and at the end of the year hear from my staff that “nobody asked me what I thought.” So I’ve staggered the due dates for each part of this first planning session, we had our first meeting for anyone who wanted to participate and we’ll have another staff meeting tomorrow as well as a department heads meeting on Thursday.

My staff really surprised me at our first meeting! I had six staff members participate this morning and it was a great discussion and process.  They all had really great and different ideas to share in our SWOT analysis. I can’t wait to combine everyone’s ideas and really get a broader sense of what people see as strengths and weaknesses for our library. And what I’ve been telling my staff, our weaknesses are just opportunities to become strengths!
Search for my library director thoughts posts to get a better sense of how my life has changed since I became a director a few months ago!