AtoZ Blogging Challenge – Young-At-Heart

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.

Another letter where it was difficult to find leadership traits, but I think young-at-heart can go together with eXcited from yesterday. I’m a young director, there’s no argument there. And most of my staff are between 10-60 years older than I am… that’s right – there is almost a 60 year age difference between myself and one of my employees. This means that in our workplace there are three different generations all working together, which is pretty cool!

I want to encourage my staff to be welcoming to even our youngest patrons – babies and toddlers who come into the library for storytime, to pick out books and to play with toys. I want our library to be safe, so I don’t mind when they ask the little ones to walk through the adult department, but I also want them to treat these little patrons as kindly as we do the adults in our library, because eventually they will become the adults in our library. I want our staff to be welcoming and comforting when needed so that kids know we care about them as individuals and I think part of that is being willing to remember what it was like to be a kid and a teenager – to be young-at-heart.

I don’t mind taking a little time out of my day to play with the kids in the children’s department, suggest a book or two to a tween and check in about how school’s going, and be more than excited when one of our “grown-up kids” (college kids) come back to visit. These connections create a strong community and that’s what we’re striving for – for everyone.