Core Competency D -- planning, management, marketing, and advocacy

“Core Competency D — apply the fundamental principles of planning, management, marketing, and advocacy.”

Introduction

One of the exercises required by the LIBR 204 class I took for the MLIS program at SJSU was to assess oneself with several assessment systems. I took three personality tests and I was not very surprised by some of the results, but then, I should know myself well enough to be able to look at a description of personality types and call mine without taking the test. The Social Styles test had me tied between Expressive/Analytical, which really don't go together at all. The Keirsey Temperament Sorter II labels me an "Idealist," the description of which is distinctly at odds with the results of the Humanetrics-Jung Typology assessment which confirmed my self-assessment that I am 100% introvert.

So, how do these assessments help me become management material?

Management

Management of staff, resources, space – all of these fall under this competency. I realized that, upon becoming a librarian, even if it wasn’t a library manager per sé, I would still be “management” as opposed to my heretofore role as “staff.”

This realization has given me more insight into the roles played by each part. Rather than adversarial positions as is often envisioned at the words, “management” and “labor” or “supervisor” and “staff,” each member of the team complements each other and that is when it works. At the same time, someone has to be in charge. Someone has to take the lead and that is why librarians have advanced degrees. We have greater knowledge and experience from which to draw and that allows us to lead other staff members in creating successful policies, procedures, and programs and in building and managing relevant collections. I also assessed myself through these systems as an Idealist. The description of an Idealist is someone who relates well to and inspires others to seek personal growth. This makes me think there is something in me that answered the questions in such a way that a previously unknown aspect of my personality may just be capable of doing that. That makes me feel more capable as a manager because it is the managers’ role to ensure that those staff members they manage have the opportunity to grow and to educate themselves. My library manager and our circulation supervisor have been invaluable resources to me throughout my time as a student earning my MLIS. They have supported me through accommodating my schedule for classwork and by giving me tasks and responsibilities that are more in line with my level of education and aspirations than are in my job description. For example, I was recently put in charge of and permitted to lead a program at our branch library involving recycling old books. My library manager often asks my opinion on ordering books for our collection as well as weeding old, non-circulating, and/or shabby books.

Planning

Every successful thing starts with a plan and every library with which I have had any experience has a strategic plan. These things seem daunting until one sees that there is a formula to making them. Most strategic plans involve a team effort. The formula involves:

1)      Vision and Mission of the Institution

2)      SWOT or an evaluation of the institution’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

3)       Strategic Outcomes and Strategies

4)      Action Plans

5)      Resource list

a.      Part A: Strategic Plan Resources and Action Plan Resources

b.      Part B: SWOT Resources, Evidence of Support for SWOTs

From these tools, the team builds a strategic plan. I had the opportunity to participate in creating a fictitious strategic plan for an actual library as part of a LIBR 204 class (see D_Evidence_1). I actually learned as much about myself as a manager and team member as I did about creating a strategic plan. As an introvert, I have difficulty functioning within a team, but through this experience, I have learned that discomfort can be put aside for the duration of a project and that, at the end, the sense of shared accomplishment is very satisfying.

Marketing and Advocacy

It does no good to have a great library or a notable archival collection if no one knows about it. That’s where marketing comes in. Putting myself “out there” to market is well outside my comfort zone as an introvert and that is one of my challenges but being aware of these challenges helps me to overcome them. Each program, each facet that makes one’s library unique or even useful, is material for marketing. Promoting programs or special collections unique to the library or branch is one way of marketing. (see D_Evidence_2).  I think that the bottom line is that I am, indeed, an introvert, but that merely defines my comfort zone. I can and certainly have stepped out of that zone to meet goals and I can do it again when called upon to do so as when I am promoting our branch’s programs like story times or books clubs or events held at our branch to patrons at the circulation desk. Marketing is synergistic for libraries. Only by serving our community can we discover what needs we might still meet and then offer what meets hose needs. I explored this concept of marketing in an article I reviewed (see D_Evidence_4).

Part of planning should be discovering what information and entertainment needs the community which the library serves has and then taking the necessary actions to meet those needs. Letting the community know what is then available is marketing by whatever methods are used (i.e posters, website, social media, etc.).

One type of advocacy in which I have stepped outside that zone of comfort was in working to get out the vote for continued funding to our libraries. Our county was looking at cutting budgets for library funding and there was a measure on the local ballots to do just that. The result would have been a sharp decrease in the hours that libraries would be open to the public, as well as cuts to staff which reduce the number of services we provide to the affected communities. We had seen the result of such budget cuts in another nearby community library which I studied as part of my collection development class (see D_Evidence_3). The Pomona Public Library curates 23 special collections, including the Laura Ingalls Wilder collection, and this most likely played a part in keeping that library open when budget constraints forced the city to make some tough choices. The library was at risk of being closed. The community served by the library rallied. There were protests, fundraisers, and people came out to vote to save their library. Instead of closing the library, the hours were cut back in half, staff were cut to the minimum to keep the library staffed during the few hours of operation, story times were cut altogether, and the city allocated roughly 20% of the previous year’s operating costs to keep it open in 2011. The following year, the people came out again and more money was given to the library to re-instate story time and other services. The library had become an indispensable part of the community and the community advocated to keep it open.

Our efforts to advocate for our own library system were successful. There were some hours cut from some of the branches and a hiring freeze put in place, but no one was let go because of cuts and services were not markedly affected.

Conclusion

The principles of planning, management, marketing, and advocacy are interrelated. Everyone from managers to staff to patrons working together can make a library successful and relevant. As stated above, managers who involve staff members in planning, strategic and otherwise, get a better perspective of what needs are to be addressed by the plan. Managers and staff can work with patron feedback towards making the implementation of the plan work. As a future manager, I will be involved with both planning and the implementation and adjustment of those plans. I feel prepared through my experiences presented in my evidence to do these things.