Lifestyle

AtoZ Blogging Challenge – Change

2017atoz.jpgDuring the month of April, I’ll be participating in the 2017 Blogging from A to Z Challenge. For this year’s theme, I chose to look at leadership qualities as I’ve just recently (within the past 6 months) become the director of my public library. We have about 50 staff members, most of whom are part-time employees serving a 30,000 resident community by providing high-quality programs and resources. Each day, I’ll look at one trait and how it’s helped me to become a better director.

Change has been happening a lot with my new position. I came from a unique situation in that, I was a part of the organization for eight years before becoming the director. This means that I was well aware of things that I would change sooner rather than later. I gave my staff about 4-5 months before I started making changes.  During this time, I got to more of the staff as a director with staff surveys and individual and group meetings.
One January came, I started working on some major projects – we’re having a large used book sale at the end of this month with the materials we’ve weeded from the collection, we’re working on creating a strategic plan that will hopefully be in place for January 1, 2018 and I’m slowly making policy changes that allow for better access for our patrons and also make the staff’s job easier.

Not all changes have been met with agreement, but I am continually communicating with my staff so that even if they don’t agree with the what is happening, at least they are aware of why it’s happening. Communication is continually something I work on as I send out staff-wide emails, work with specific groups of people within the organization and gather knowledge from the staff on the front lines. I hope that my staff can see that although these decisions and changes can be difficult they are done with the library’s best interest at heart.

4 Comments

Add a few sprinkles

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.