Tag Archives: staff training

35 day of City Expo – Management Skills and Learning Opportunities

How do you manage during a 35 day long city fair which is the result of a 3 year long innovation journey? And what skills do you need to have in order to manage this?

In a previous blog post, Tina Haglund has described the H22 City Expo of Helsingborg Sweden. https://blogs.ifla.org/cpdwl/2022/06/14/h22-city-expo-helsingborg-sweden/

In this blog post I follow up on this and reflect on the management skills needed and the learning opportunities the City Expo gave.

During the past years, all departments and employees of in the city of Helsingborg have had the opportunity to explore and apply for funding to test new ideas and innovations. The public library of Helsingborg has for example been working with co-creating together with citizens to find out the needs and ideas in a new (and rebuilt) library in 2026 https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/initiative/development-and-rebuilding-of-the-city-library/. Also the library has a project collaborating with the University of Lund, on “The sustainable/resilient workplace” https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/initiative/sustainable-workplace-a-collaboration-and-research-project/. Digidel 2.0, exploring how to develop the digital competence center of the library is another example of the work https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/initiative/digidel-2-0/. And many other innovations and development initiatives have been put in place.

The results of the innovation work so far was presented during various talks and presentations during the 35 days. This meant that at the same time as keeping business running as usual, the library staff also were involved in many different activities. At the same time employees could work as volunteers during the H22.

Of course this affected both the employeeship as well as leadership and management skills. All managers of the city of Helsingborg have, during the last three years, gone through a management skill program called “Samspel Helsingborg” (= interplay/interaction Helsingborg). This program has given us the skills needed in moving from New Public Management (NPM) into a Trust Based Management model and has been key to the success of the innovative movement.

The Trust Based Management model is something which have been worked on at the national level through a research based work “The Swedish Delegation of Trust”. The guiding principles in Trust Based Management is according to The Swedish Delegation of Trust:

  • Focus on the Citizen – their experience and knowledge, understand what is needed
  • Comprehensive/holistic view – everyone take responsibility for the whole
  • Space for action – delegate powers and mandates, welcome co-decisions
  • Support – closely as part of the core business (rather than central)
  • Knowledge – reward continuous learning
  • Openness – share information, welcome dissent and respect criticism

My reflections on some management skills that were of importance before, during and after this period of innovation and City Expo are:

  • Involvement in strategy and business plan – involve all staff in the strategical planning as well as the operational planning of the library business. Make real use of all the knowledge within the organization and ensure that everyone knows where we are heading. Follow up together with the staff, so that everyone see how the work proceeds.
  • A culture of participation – ensure to build a culture where both staff and users gets involved and participate in the development work.
  • Trust – really manage by trust and let go of control. Let the employees use their skills and solve different situations using their full potential and experience. Keep the written routines and rules to an absolute minimum as it is impossible to foresee what will happen and there is a risk that every situation makes you write a new routine instead of focusing on doing the job and solving the situation.
  • Brave – be brave and have the courage to let go of things. Delegate a lot and let others solve the issues in their way, using their skills and expertise. Be sure to enjoy when things turn up in another way than you expected.
  • Make mistakes and learn from them – ensure a culture where it’s really ok to make mistakes. A culture where you don’t try to avoid making mistakes or try to find who did the mistake and blame them. Instead celebrate the mistake and learn from it. Most important as a manager here is to really walk the talk and do the same thing as you say.
  • Communicative skills – keep the communication open and transparent in all directions so that everyone knows where to find the information needed and communicate when things needs to be acted on. Listen (don’t just hear) what people are communicating and act. Also use communication as a learning tool so that every day gives a learning experience.
  • Together – we do this together. This is really of utmost importance as no one can have all the skills, expertise, know the solutions and work on complex issues alone. No one has the answer by themselves. Especially the manager does not know everything in the complex world we are living in. Those working close to the library users usually are the ones with the best solution and they need to get the mandate and tools to act. Other businesses and organizations have skills within their areas. Find those, collaborate and network and make them flourish. We need to do it together.

For us at Helsingborg City Libraires it was also important to use the City Expo so that everyone within the staff could get the opportunity to learn new things from everything going on during the expo. We therefor decided that all staff could use up till 8 hours each, to take part and participate in different events to improve their skills and to get inspired by what others do. Often you can get new ideas for your library business by talking and listening to other kinds of services and see how they meet different challenges. We used this as a learning opportunity. And importantly, we did not ask for details on what the staff did, we trusted that they used this time to learn for their and the libraries’ future.

Further information on the H22 City Expo is available at: www.h22cityexpo.se

Information on different innovations we have worked on in the city can be found at: https://innovation.helsingborg.se/en/

by Catharina Isberg, Library Director, Helsingborg Sweden

SILL: leadership training program for Public librarians

Strengthening Innovative Library Leaders (SILL) is a freely foundational leadership training curriculum designed to build leadership and innovation skills for anyone who works in a public library. The training was developed at the Mortenson Center for International Library Programs in partnership with librarians around the world from Armenia, Bhutan, Haiti, India, Myanmar, Namibia, and Nepal[1]. The project is funded by the Global Libraries Program of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation[2].

SILL was developed to be used by trainers with different levels of training experience and familiarity with the topic. It is also designed to be easily adapted to the local library context and translated into different languages.

The training is divided into 4 interactive modules focusing on Leadership, Innovation, Planning, and Communication, The learning modules are:

1. Leadership Styles for Librarians

This module will define the concept of “leadership” and introduce Goleman’s 6 styles of leadership.
2. Library Leaders as Innovators

This module will introduce library innovation trends, approaches, and strategies.
  3. Library Leaders with a Plan

This module will outline how to create realistic goals and plans
4. Library Leaders as Communicators

Participants will learn about the 4 communication styles and identify the style they use most often. They will also practice communicating with different styles in a work setting.

 

Photo from SILL website

In addition, the training components emphasis on less formal lecture and more focus on group activities and discussions, the components include:

Icebreakers; leaning activities; minis lectures; problem-solving activities; individual handouts and team summaries

In order to start training you should begin by reading the “Getting Started with SILL” guide, which contains all of the information you will need.

This is indeed one of the amazing resources that really deserve to be highlighted and worth seeing as it offers free training program on leadership for all librarians

References:

[1] https://blogs.ifla.org/cpdwl/2019/12/10/cpdwl-podcast-project-episode-3/

[2]https://www.library.illinois.edu/mortenson-leadership/about/

 

Knowledge Café 2014: Next wrap-up

Here`s the next wrap-up of the table Creation of staff training and development teams.

Creation of Staff training and development teams
Moderator: Vivian Lewis, McMaster University
Raconteur: Juanita Jara De Sumar, McGill University

The group was presented with some base information and offered the McMaster University case as an example of successful implementation.
Participants discussed the benefits of having a strategic plan in place before the training programme is established. The value of having a clear sense of need was also identified. (In the McMaster case, ClimateQUAL data illustrated a strong need for training and an anonymous survey indicated what kinds of sessions staff wanted and how they wanted the content delivered.)
It was argued that a committee requires a library of a certain size, as otherwise there will not be enough people to take or deliver sessions. Many participants noted the value of bringing experts in from outside the library.
Soft skills (interpersonal skills, etc.) were identified as very important. In choosing trainers it may be necessary to offer everybody the opportunity to apply.
There was strong agreement in all three groups that staff must take some ownership of their own development. Staff must take an active role and apply what they have learned and the team must assist everybody. In reality, we find that some people expect the organization to make decisions for them in terms of what they need to learn.
We also discussed possible obstacles. Staff may be suspicious of the Administration having a hidden agenda. For the team to work, it is necessary that staff be confident and trust the committee leaders.
Another topic was the level of power of the committee. The team can be purely advisory, with management making the ultimate decisions. The group can simply coordinate the training or it can do the actual delivery. (In the McMaster case, the group did a mix of coordination and delivery.

They organized the purchase of Lynda.com, scheduled webinars, peer-to-peer sessions and guest speakers. Specialists from the Continuing Education unit were brought in to do project management training.)
Some of the comments suggested that resources could be used from the local library school. And it could be a good idea to provide some sort of continuing education certification.
Most participants in the first round remained for the second round and continued contributing to the discussion. All three rounds were lively and informative.

Juanita