Notes from session on leadership

Here are my raw notes from the session on leadership.

Sam

• 'Manage problems, lead people'
• People can be embarrassed to admit that they don't know, especially people that are less comfortable with new technologies.
• Not everyone is able to be brave!
• Importance of offering different kinds of support and guidance at different stages. Every manager should know which type of employee will learn in different ways.
• What if we have people who use technology as a way of rejecting change within the organisation? It's not just a change in the library, it's a change in the world. This is the way that people do things now and you stop providing a quality service if you don't understand this. 
• Leaders can create a more positive corporate culture - this would be easier than changing one person. One of the best things we can do is to make it OK for things to be scary: give people opportunities and the chance to take risks.
• Leaders keep the helicopter view and sometimes need to be able to take hard decisions. 
• One strategy is to devolve responsibilities to leaders within the team, to work with others in a peer-to-peer rather than supervisor-supervisee relationship.
• Good leaders and mentors can be outside of the organisation too.
• Leaders know how to find good 'followers' - the doers that may be able to tip the culture in a more positive direction. Also known as change agents / champions in change management theory (don't forget about the theory! it can be useful).
• Informal lunchtime learning: invite people with expertise to come and share what they know, more hands-on and informal, very good in getting people participating.
  Whole library planning days.
• It's important for leaders and managers to communicate the big outcomes of the change so that goal that people are working towards is clear, not just the tool or process for doing it. People need to know why they need to do things differently.
• Part of the problem lies with risk-averseness of the profession as a whole. We don't like to make mistakes. Part of changing the culture is changing the language and the ways that we think. If this is a personality trait in many librarians, do we need to hire non-librarians, even as temporary provocateurs?
• Reverse mentoring: having people help the people above them in the hierarchy to gain new skills, especially with new technologies. 
• Treat people as individuals. Find out what their strengths are and enable them to make the most of those, but recognise that someone's strength is not the same as what they might most enjoy doing.
• Are cross-functional teams or teams with mixed skills better equipped to deal with change than those where everyone has a similar skillset and a similar role? 
• Focus on the team and reassuring everyone within it: 'Don't worry, we won't leave you behind'.
• Leadership is about inspiring and taking people with you, managing is about the detail and getting stuff done.