AtoZ Blogging Challenge – Listen

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.

No one is going to know more about the front lines of library work than the people who work on the front lines. No one is going to know more about materials processing, than those who process materials. No one is going to know more about booking programs than program planners. Which means, that as a leader of all these groups of people, it is my job to listen and understand what is working and what needs to be reviewed.
Listen to the community through Facebook comments, a suggestion box or community survey. The community is who you’re serving and through a basic community survey, we were able to find out what our community really enjoyed about our library and what our community was looking for from us. We have a number of new projects that we want to work on, due to the results of our survey and I’m excited to provide these new services to our community.

Listening is such an important leadership trait and one that is underutilized by so many leaders. I know that I can’t be everywhere at once, but I can listen to my staff and our community to know what needs to be fixed and what is working really well.