AtoZ Blogging Challenge – Vision

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.

We’re currently developing a strategic plan for our library as we’ve had no vision for a number of years, which makes creating and achieving department and personal goals somewhat disjointed from the organization as a whole. Our strategic plan process is starting at the base level of creating a new mission and vision statement as well as core values, goals and objectives for the next few years. The whole planning process will end up taking about a year, with the hope that our strategic plan and new library brand will be released in January 2018.

The thought of creating large-scale projects from scratch that take a year, plus to develop is insane to me as I was usually looking at a few months at a time when I planned programs as a children’s librarian. But, I’m finding this type of long-range work really exciting and enjoyable – it’s definitely a different way of thinking, but also really exciting at the same time!
We’re looking at ways to create a vision for the future and what role the library plays in that vision. Our working model is, “Strengthening a connected and engaged community.” (which for the record, I’m really liking!)

It’s a short vision of what we want to see in the future and clearly shows what the library wants to do to support this vision of the future. With the vision in place, we’re currently working on our mission statement and core values – all of which are short, sweet and to the point, sot that the staff and community can embrace these statements and better understand the library’s role in the community.