Infoblog

Posts Tagged ‘Eureka’

One of the 2009 Eureka! Leadership Institute fellows, Thomas Vose from Riverside County Library System, put an idea from the Institute into action. I’ll let one of his mentors from the Institute, Kathy Gould, tell the story:

Last fall I had the privilege of serving as a mentor for the Eureka Leadership Program for emerging California library leaders. During the residential leadership institute that kicks off the program participants work in small teams to build leadership skills through action learning, exercises, and case studies. During one of the exercises the team that I was working with came up with an idea for a mobile library cart to enable library services to be delivered and promoted at locations throughout a community.

Today our Eureka team got an email from team member Thomas Vose, the Manager of the Lake Elsinore Public Library in the Riverside County Library System. Thomas had taken that idea of a mobile library cart and turned it into a reality …

Thomas reported that people were able to sign up for library cards and check out materials, and that he plans to take the cart to the local Senior Center and park, and to an upcoming Children’s Fair in the community.

Read more about it on Kathy’s blog.

In this podcast George and Joan talk about the concept of place – not just library as place, but the very basic idea of locality and how we develop a sense of community – and of course, how it ties into libraries. This conversation was prompted by their experience at the Eureka! Leadership Institute where they had the opportunity to hear a talk by Richard Rodriguez.

The 2009 Eureka! Leadership Institute is underway at the Dolce Hayes Mansion in San Jose, and we have some links to share. The keynote address by Mary Catherine Bateson is available in MP3 format, and we have photos of the Institute on Flickr (more are being added).

Acting State Librarian of the California State Library Stacey Aldrich will be helping current and prospective library leaders use current tools to explore the future in her Infopeople workshop, “Building Leadership Skills: Planning for the Future,” scheduled in libraries throughout California in June 2009.

“We’ll be looking at what kinds of sources you should be scanning for clues to the future and why; what kinds of triggers you should be looking for; and how you ask the right questions about the future,” she said during a conversation earlier this week. “The key here is that the more tools that you have for thinking about the future, the more proactive you can be about creating the future. This workshop is an opportunity to learn and practice some future-thinking tools and then spend some time thinking about the future so you can find opportunities.”

Included in the curriculum are explorations of scenario planning, a concept explored by futurist in his book The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World; environmental scanning; and top trends which library leaders need to watch.

“We need to look outside of libraries for the forces and trends that are changing people’s expectations about information, technology, and community,” Aldrich says. “If we’re asking the right questions about our future, we can keep developing services that meet the needs of the people we serve.”

Among the sources she cites are the TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) conferences with talks which are archived at Ted.com; the Pop!Tech conferences with similarly archived materials at Pop!Tech.org; and trendwatching.com, which offers a variety of resources including free monthly “trend briefings.”

Using these tools will help library leaders engage in more effective environmental scanning and scenario thinking. Environmental scanning, she suggests, is “taking an interest in observing the world around you…reading and observing things you may never do,” and scenario building, “in its simplest terms, is creating stories about the future to help your library think about possible futures, and then build strategies that will help you thrive in each of them, and to help your library create its preferred future.”

The workshop is the latest offering in Infopeople’s multi-stage Eureka! Leadership Program with its “Building Leadership Skills” series, and it will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled sessions. Registration ($75 per person) for “Building Leadership Skills: Planning for the Future” and other “Building Leadership Skills” sessions is continuing on the Infopeople website; instructors for other sessions in the series include Marie Radford and Steve Albrecht.

Sessions of “Building Leadership Skills: Planning for the Future” are currently scheduled for Buena Park Library District (6/4/2009); San Diego County Library Headquarters (6/5/2009); San Francisco Public Library – Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room (6/11/2009); Belle Cooledge Library in Sacramento (6/12/2009); Fresno – Woodward Park (6/16/2009); and San Jose Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (6/23/2009).

Overcoming challenges in the library workplace involves a mixture of creativity and fun, Suzanne Merritt suggests in her new full-day Infopeople “Building Leadership Skills: Stimulating Creativity” workshop sessions being offered in libraries throughout California from April 10-24, 2009.

“I think the important thing that people will come away with is a boost in their own confidence, in their creative abilities, and that they can apply that in any area of leadership,” she predicted in a conversation earlier this week. “I feel it is important for anyone in a leadership role not only to have a boost in their own creative confidence, but to pass that along and encourage to those they lead to believe in their creative abilities as well. Together they can solve any problem that comes along.”

Merritt is no stranger to the topic of how creativity helps improve the workplace and produce results. Through the work she does through her own company, Ideas With Merritt, she provides participants with tools and skills which translate inspiration into workplace innovation on a daily basis. These skills are divided into three interrelated elements: collecting experiences, connecting those experiences to the workplace, and creating growth by generating, judging, and refining ideas.

“Every human being is creative,” she notes. “Our creative contributions matter. As leaders, part of our job is to bring out our own creative potential and bring that out in the people that work with us. When we do that, people have fun…When people have fun, they are creative. Everything’s so serious right now; it’s a great time to revitalize your own creative energy.”

Material presented during the Infopeople workshop is designed to help library leaders and others—including library business managers, public information officers, systems staff, facilities managers, and volunteers—find creative solutions for handling the increasing workload they face, attracting new audiences and funding sources, and restructuring existing services.

She will introduce participants to her own model, the C.U.R.I.O.S.I.T.Y. model, in which each letter in the term “stands for something specific that people can look for in the world around them to look for sources of inspiration.”

“I don’t want to be listed as one of those ‘these are dire times’ speakers. This is about possibility and positive energy, and having some fun while you do your work,” she concluded.

The workshop is the latest offering in Infopeople’s multi-stage Eureka! Leadership Program with its “Building Leadership Skills” series, and it will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled sessions. Registration ($75 per person) for all remaining “Building Leadership Skills” sessions is continuing on the Infopeople website. Instructors include Stacey Aldrich and Marie Radford.

Sessions of “Building Leadership Skills: Stimulating Creativity” are currently scheduled for Arden-Dimick Library in Sacramento (4/10/2009); San Diego County Library Headquarters (4/13/2009); Buena Park Library District (4/16/2009); Fresno–Woodward Park (4/20/2009); San Jose Martin Luther King, Jr. Library (4/22/2009); and San Francisco Public Library—Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room (4/24/2009).

We don’t have to look very far to see that leadership is an issue which is much discussed and often promoted within libraries and the communities they serve—possibly because so many of us sense a leadership void in so many of the organizations and political entities we encounter.
The great news here in California is that positive, vibrant, creative initiatives are underway. Infopeople is currently repeating its very successful Eureka! Leadership Program, which includes a series of workshops, a week-long leadership institute, and other events designed to provide inspiration and experience to current and prospective library leaders. Participants such as San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone, who attended the initial round of workshops and then attended the institute, are now working on their final projects designed to help them develop their overall leadership skills while making major contributions to the libraries for which they work.
There are also fine examples of library leaders cultivating leadership qualities among their staff: San Francisco Public Library City Librarian Luis Herrera currently has a four-month leadership academy running at the Library and has brought in training consultant Maureen Sullivan, who taught one of the initial Eureka! workshops, to oversee the project; Anne Cain (County Librarian, Contra Costa County Library system) also stands out as an example of a library leader inspiring leadership skills in her staff through her extremely strong commitment to training—something which appears to extend through the entire system and which begins with a month-long new staff orientation program designed to give every employee the best possible start at the beginning of their employment within the system.
If we move a little beyond the physical and virtual settings of libraries, we find tremendous resources from writers including Peter Block, whose Flawless Consulting reminds us that leaders work within organizations as internal consultants and outside of organizations in the more commonly recognized role of external consultant. We also find eminently readable material in a variety of sources including Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner’s The Leadership Challenge and Warren Bennis’s On Becoming a Leader—wonderful because they tell stories in the words of other leaders rather than remaining mired solely in the world of theory.
Many of the Infopeople “Building Leadership Skills” workshop materials remain accessible in the Infopeople past training materials archives. Infoblog articles on the workshops provide additional information. And registration for “Building Leadership Skills” workshops scheduled through mid-2009 is continuing on the Infopeople site.
Next: Polly Cipparrone and an Update on Her Eureka! Leadership Project

Current and prospective library leaders who love to practice, play, and learn should feel right at home in Gail Griffith’s “Building Leadership Skills: Community Engagement” workshop—the latest entry in Infopeople’s Eureka! Leadership Program series.
The daylong session, to be offered in libraries throughout California between January 5 and 30, 2009, will be about “doing and practicing, not so much about studying models,” Griffith said during a recent conversation. “There’s even going to be an exercise taken from improv” so that participants will walk away engaged in the process of seeking engagement between the libraries in which they work and the communities they serve. They will, as part of the scheduled workshop activities, be guided in developing a marketing tool they can use immediately to demonstrate their libraries’ value to everyone they meet.
Griffith, who serves as Deputy Director of Carroll County (Maryland) Public Library and has developed and led a leadership academy for all levels of library staff, anticipates a workshop full of activities which encourage participants to share information about their own libraries’ current successes. Comparing those successes to examples drawn from library systems throughout the country (including Chicago Public Library, which has a first-rate strategic plan including a call for expanding and enhancing program and partnership opportunities, and Johnson County Library, honored as “Best Kansas City Library” by Nickelodeon’s Parents’ Pick Awards in August 2008) should help workshop students gain a better understanding of how to describe what their libraries have to offer.
“Talking about what the library does is a great way of engaging,” she explained. It “helps you see ways you can partner with businesses and others.”
Griffith also plans to incorporate lessons learned from Frank Luntz’s Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear: “That’s a very interesting book. The author talks about the fact that we often tend to use weak words. There’s this whole thing about managing perceptions,” she explained. “When you look at it, there’s nothing wrong with the language a library uses to talk about itself, but it’s not strong…A lot of times when you meet a stranger and say ‘I work for the library,’ they say, ‘I used to take my kids to the library, but now I have the Internet.’ What would happen if you said something like, ‘I work for an organization that provides equal access to quality educational resources for everyone regardless of their economic or educational status?’ It’s not changing what we do, it’s changing how we talk about what we do.
“I want people to leave this day thinking about how they can connect, when they want to connect, how they want to describe what their library has to offer, where they can look for and create opportunities, …and when those opportunities are available, what they want to do about it,” she concluded.
N.B.: Registration for Griffith’s workshop and other Eureka! sessions is continuing on the Infopeople website under the heading “Building Leadership Skills.” Other instructors include Steve Albrecht; Stacey Aldrich; Joan Frye Williams and George Needham; Suzanne Merritt; Marie Radford; Paula Singer; and Pat Wagner.

One of the best two-for-one deals for current and prospective library leaders is Pat Wagner’s “Building Leadership Skills: Developing and Leading Projects” workshop. Part of the Infopeople Eureka! Leadership Program series, it will be offered in California libraries through December 17, 2008; remains available after that on a contract basis dependent on the instructor’s availability; and has materials already viewable online in the Infopeople past training materials archives.
Attending the session held in the main library in San Francisco earlier this week (Monday, December 1), I was struck not only by how much useful guidance Wagner packs into that one-day class about how to collaborate to create successful projects, but also by the way she transfers what she knows to those attending the workshop. There is almost an aesthetic pleasure in watching how, as a leader herself, she inspires the best in people who join her in the learning process. As a trainer and a leader, she facilitates an experience involving tremendous amounts of teamwork, with a fine combination of seriousness and humor, in a way which leads the observant participant to see the workshop itself as a successfully completed project.
Through exercises in which we discuss case studies examining problems which are common in the project management process—at every step combining what we learn from Wagner with what we already know, and adding in copious amounts of what we learn from each other’s experiences in a variety of library systems—we gain confidence. The understanding that we have the skills to be successful participants in developing and leading projects. And an appreciation for the idea that success comes from well defined processes rooted in realistic expectations. You don’t seek perfection, Wagner suggests, “you do what you can do. That’s life.”
The heart of the afternoon session is an extended period during which workshop participants assume and discuss roles played by people in a project where the final product is a printed budget request to be submitted to a governing body. As the discussion continues, the magic begins to happen: Wagner almost completely recedes from being the center of the learning process and each of us works through a series of questions which prompt us to consider not only what we would do in the roles we have assumed, but how what we do affects all others involved in the project.
Among the lessons learned intellectually as well as viscerally is one Wagner summarizes near the end of the day: “being a good project manager means that the people working for you make the right decisions.” And if, by the end of the day, we haven’t completely absorbed that lesson, it is not for lack of effort on the part of the instructor or the workshop participants. Which probably is the most memorable lesson of all.
N.B.: Registration for the remaining scheduled offerings of “Developing and Leading Projects” (Fresno, 12/10/2008; San Jose, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, 12/12/2008; San Diego County Library Headquarters, 12/16/2008; and Los Angeles Public Library, 12/17/2008) and other Eureka! Leadership Program offerings is continuing on the Infopeople website under the heading “Building Leadership Skills”; each workshop is priced at $75 per person.

If Infopeople instructor Andrew Sanderbeck’s efforts to plant lots of leadership seeds in California next month work, we should see plenty of library leaders who are adept at building and nurturing teams in the years to come.
Sanderbeck is currently scheduled to lead seven sessions of his “Building Leadership Skills: Leading Teams” workshop in November 2008 as part of Infopeople’s Eureka! Leadership Program series, and “Leading Teams” will remain available as a contract workshop through Infopeople for those who are not able to attend the currently scheduled offerings.
“It’s going to be a very blended training,” Sanderbeck noted during a recent conversation. “I’m going to incorporate video clips and exercises. It’s something where they (participants) are going to be doing hands-on things. I think the one big thing they’re going to walk away with is they’re going to really have the tools to put together their cohesive team.”
The workshop, designed for current as well as prospective leaders, works with team-building basics such as understanding the difference between a work group and a high performance team; methods for team members to effectively communicate and share information; how mission statements and goal-setting become the foundations of highly productive teams, and how cultures of collaboration lead to successes for teams in the library workplace.
It also serves as a laboratory for the concepts Sanderbeck hopes to convey to participants: “I run a very casual class environment. We’re going to learn from each other. It’s definitely a collaborative environment. I think they (participants) need this place to practice it…to get comfortable in front of the people we see every day,” he explained.
Those interested in learning more about Sanderbeck’s work will find a blog, the “Friday News Minute!” e-newsletter–formerly the “Library~Connect” newsletter—and other resources on the website of the organization he helped co-found, The People~Connect Institute. To enroll in “Leading Teams,” please visit Infopeople’s online registration site at http://infopeople.org/workshop/394.
N.B.: Registration for latest offerings of other Eureka! workshops is continuing on the Infopeople website under the heading “Building Leadership Skills,” and a series discount is available. Instructors include Steve Albrecht; Stacey Aldrich; Joan Frye Williams and George Needham; Gail Griffith; Suzanne Merritt; Marie Radford; Paula Singer; and Pat Wagner.

If leadership is about taking advantage of opportunities, San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone should be at the head of the pack.
Polly was part of Infopeople’s Master Trainer group when it first met for a weeklong intensive series of workshops in Southern California in 2002—the sessions were later offered as four one-day workshops throughout California– and she was back in residence earlier this year for Infopeople’s weeklong “Eureka! Leadership Program Institute” in San Diego.
“The (Eureka!) program has given me a whole new perspective on approaching things,” she said during a recent conversation. “I’m really glad that I’m participating.”
Eureka!, a joint project between the California State Library and Infopeople, begins with a one-day workshop on the theme of “Exploring Library Leadership,” then continues with a series of nine one-day open registration workshops over a nine-month period. Participants in those workshops are encouraged to apply for the multi-day residential institute, and those completing the residency then return to their libraries to design and implement a project which displays leadership at its best.
The entire process parallels the experiences leaders have on the job, Polly notes, and relies on participants’ ability to adapt to changing circumstances: “I’ve had to reformulate my project,” she noted, and she is currently in the process of deciding what she will do for the San Diego County Library through her Eureka! project. “The scale was much more ambitious than a person can do in a year, so I’ve had to reshape everything, rethink what we’re doing.”
Having attended almost all of the original workshops, she plans to talk to colleagues throughout the San Diego County Library system to tell them “what I’ve learned, why I think it’s a valuable opportunity, and why I think it would be great to have some of our staff apply for the competitive portion as well as attend the classes.”
The result, she predicts, is that more of them will “learn to think more like a manager, more like a leader.”
N.B.: Registration for new offerings of the workshops is currently underway on the Infopeople website under the heading “Building Leadership Skills,” and a series discount is available. Instructors include Steve Albrecht; Stacey Aldrich; Joan Frye Williams and George Needham; Gail Griffith; Suzanne Merritt; Marie Radford; Andrew Sanderbeck; Paula Singer; and Pat Wagner.