AtoZ Blogging Challenge – Determination

During 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.

Determination is “firmness of purpose” (according to Google). And it’s something I seem to have in spades. One of my first decisions I made as a director was the importance of creating a strategic plan. The library had no formal blueprint for the future and I felt strongly that without it, we would be unable to keep up with the 21st century and remain an essential part of our community. This hasn’t been an easy process and I chose to go about working on this without hiring a firm to help us. Partly because I didn’t want to have to wait to get approval for the cost, but I also felt it would be a great project to take on as a new leader to really move our organization into the future and to bring together my staff.

My staff has been engaged throughout the process so far with small group meetings, emails, worksheets and more. Although I’m not requiring staff to be involved, I don’t want anyone to say after the whole year of planning that their voice was never heard.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, we are also working on an entire weeding project of the collection and I’m happy to say that we are just about finished after roughly four months of work and our fundraiser will be held in a matter of weeks. Determination has gotten me through the past few months with so much going on – besides these larger projects, we’re also running a library and I’m updating and researching policies to make sure they are consistent and well-understood by my staff in order to make their job easier and provide easier access to patrons.