 Okay, all right, so next up on our lightning round sessions, leaders and burnout, projecting your staff from you. Sounds not so fun, but Suzanne McCauley is from, this is the one presenter today, not actually from a library, but from a library system that serves libraries that are in a very rural area of New York. And she's gonna talk about how to deal with the burnout as a library director. Go ahead and take it away Suzanne. Okay, so today I'm just gonna talk a little bit about, I think I'm missing piece of the burnout conversation. I think that it's been something that's been talked about a lot. There's been conference sessions on it and articles and self-care and identifying burnout and making sure you are addressing it and taking care of it for yourself. But I think we're not talking about the leaders role in staff burnout, like the director, the supervisor, the department head and how some of their behaviors might be leading to some staff burnout too. So if you can go to yoga classes, pick up a new hobby, get massages, but if the burnout is being caused by something else, then all that self-care isn't going to matter. And the session isn't going to address rehabbing bad bosses or bad leadership because that's more than 10 minutes. But there are some really well-intentioned, well-meaning leaders that make mistakes or fall into some bad habits that can lead to this burnout. And I know that I've done it when I was the director of a library. I don't think that was a bad director, but there was definitely some times that I think that, you know, I fell into some habits or I did some things that maybe caused some stress for my staff. So that's what I'm gonna talk about today. So first we're gonna go through the don'ts and these are the things that you should try to avoid doing. And the first thing is don't create a can't take time off culture. I think sometimes, especially in smaller libraries, you know, maybe with the only full-time person or there's only two full-time people, we kind of create like this like library martyrdom, like I can't take off, I have to be there. I have to be there every day. I can't take my vacation, I can't take sick time. And it's just really important that you set the example and you know, you aren't working, you know, 60 hours a week and you are taking your vacation time and you are taking off when you're sick because otherwise you almost create this culture where your staff is afraid to take their time too because they are seeing how you're there all the time and they start to feel like I have to be there all the time. So make sure that, you know, you're practicing what you preach and if there's vacation time, you're taking it and your staff feels comfortable taking it. Likewise, don't email on nights and weekends. I know it's really tempting, but when your staff goes home for the day, let them go home for the day. You know, even if you're like, I'll just send this email, they won't see it. A lot of people have push notifications set up, they are going to get that email. So just schedule it. It's scheduling for 9.30 the next morning or just putting your drafts and then remind yourself to send it. Don't fire off emails at nine o'clock at night on Sunday night, on Saturday afternoon. Leave your staff alone. Make sure you're not attaching guilt to sick time, vacation time, PTO. I do think one of the benefits that came from COVID is that like people are going, are like, take your time off. You're sick, don't come to work. Whereas previously there was a little bit of like, suck it up. Don't you think you can make it in? Can you come in just for a couple of hours? And I think going forward, that attitude is going to change. But you know, people are entitled to their time, let them take their time and have a contingency plan in place. If you're a small library and if somebody calls out sick, you're like, we might not be open for the day. You know, have a sublist, get some subs together, have a contingency plan so people can still take their vacation, take their sick time, take their PTO and it doesn't impact library operations. Make sure that mental health days count as sick days. You know, better yet, don't even have your staff feel like they need to tell you why they're taking a sick day. If they're calling out sick, just trust that they're calling out sick for a reason. Like they shouldn't have to owe you an explanation, but attending to mental health is just as important as attending to physical health. So it's just really important that your staff or you understand that this counts, if somebody needs to stay home to address their mental health, that is their entitled sick time and let them have that. Don't micro-manage. Your way is not the only way to do something. So it's really good to check in with your staff, to touch base with your staff, but don't hover around them. Don't helicopter around them. Let them find their own path forward. As long as the end result is what you wanted, it doesn't necessarily matter how they got there and it doesn't need to be your way of getting there. Don't say we've always done it that way. Be open to new ideas, new ways of doing things. There's no one path forward, especially if you look at how much library services have changed over the past like two years, five years, 10 years. So why are you still doing the same procedures or maybe even have the same policies as you did five, 10, 15 years ago? Libraries are different now, so we need to change the way that we're doing things. And somebody on your front line, like your circulation staff says, hey, I think this would be a great way to do this procedure. Listen, they're on the front lines, doing it every single day. So consider their perspective. And don't assume that no news is good news. You check in with your staff and if they're always like, oh, fine, I'm fine, chances are things are not fine. So start asking some different questions and make sure that you're supporting them. Just don't assume because nobody's coming to your office or they're reporting that everything's fine, that everything is going fine with their work time or how they're feeling about work. So just to make sure that, just because you don't hear anything doesn't mean their staff isn't stressed out, they're not frustrated, they don't need something from you. Keep checking in with them and ask some different questions. So I'll move on to some of the dues. So you should always have your teams back. And this can be, this is like two different ways. One, forward-facing in front of your patrons, in front of your trustees, you should always be supporting your staff. You should never be disciplining from other people. You should never contradict them in front of other people. If there's something that needs to be addressed, that could be addressed later on in an office, in a back room, but forward-facing, you should always have their back. They should always feel supported by you. The other thing is, and I think this is another benefit that's gonna come out of COVID, is that you should always have your teams back, your staffs back when it comes to offering sick time, being flexible about working, having a working remotely policy. You just being as flexible as possible, understanding as possible, extending a lot of grace to your staff. It's been a really stressful time. Things will continue to be stressful. So I just think it's always important that your staff feels really supported by you in COVID and non-COVID times. Make sure you're paying attention to the hours worked by your staff. Just because you set a schedule, don't take for granted that they're adhering to that schedule, making sure they're not consistently staying late. Maybe five, 10 minutes to finish up a task. But if you notice that somebody is scheduled until five and they're staying till six, or they're bringing work home with them all the time, this could not only be a violation, maybe of some labor laws, because they're hourly employees, depending on your state. But maybe you are assigning too much of a workload to them, maybe they've taken on too much, and you should recognize that they're working longer hours, they're bringing work home, they're working on their own time, and make sure that you adjust that, you're reducing your workload, their workload, you're asking them, how can I help you? And you're assisting them, because this can really lead to burnout if this doesn't go unrecognized. And sometimes they're afraid to say to you, I have too much on my plate right now, can you help me with this? Because they don't want to look like they let you down, they're a failure, they can't handle it. So you really need to be monitoring this a little bit, and keeping an eye on it, and making sure that staff is working staff hours. Let your staff try new things. I know sometimes we think, oh, that's not gonna work, and we've tried that before, it's gonna fail, but sometimes it can surprise you. And I've been on both ends of this, but one time when I was a director, someone on my staff wanted to try a summer reading kickoff for adults, and I totally did not think it was gonna work, I thought we were gonna waste a lot of time and resources, but I let her try it, and it ended up being a really, it was a huge success, and we were a small library, and we had, I think like 45 adults show up, and they loved it, they were reading about it months later, so that was an instance where I was wrong, but what I thought was gonna happen, but I did let my staff try something new, and it really worked, and it was a win for her, and then she gained a lot of confidence in programming, and it showed me that I really, even though I was a director, I don't know everything all the time. Make sure you're communicating with your staff, your staff doesn't know what they don't know, so you really need to be communicating with them, we need to communicate in a variety of ways. My preferred way of communication is email, but that is not everybody's preferred way of communication, so I need to make sure that I'm talking face-to-face with people, maybe I'm picking up the phone and calling them, maybe I'm following up with our staff notebook, so just make sure that you're communicating information in a variety of ways. You're meeting your staff where they are, and you're not forcing everybody to communicate through email, because sometimes the tone can be lost, the messaging can be lost, but then some people just aren't comfortable communicating that way. Make sure you listen to your staff and really listen to them, so when someone comes in your office to talk to you, I know you're really busy, but you are the director, you are the boss, it's time to take a little bit of time and address your staff's needs, and that means turning off your monitor, shutting your laptop and actively listening, and when you're listening, you're not just trying to think of a solution to, you know, and you're like half listening to them, half thinking of what you're gonna tell them to solve their problem, just listen to them first, because they might not even need you to solve that problem, they just might need you to listen. There are times with my friend for us that I'll go to him, and I'll just like go through all the stuff and at the end we'll say, what do you need from me? And like, nothing, because I was able to just talk through it, and that kind of helps, maybe you leave some of my stress and help me come to some conclusions on my own, some resolutions. So sometimes you will need to solve problems, but sometimes they just need you to listen, and it can really be a great way off of their test if they know that their supervisor is willing to just sit and give them that time and listen. So make sure you are giving that to your staff. Make sure you include your staff in the decision-making process. I think it's really one of the most stressful things for staff can be when they feel things are happening to them and they don't have any control over the situation. So if you're thinking about changing procedures, workflow, make sure you're asking staff for their input, what they think, what they think would work best, or policies. If you're gonna change your circulation policies, it's really important that you're asking that frontline staff how this may impact their interactions with patrons, their workflow. So it's really important that you ask your staff for feedback, or if you're gonna change something in the library, like the layout, do a workflow with your staff and ask them to look at the library through the page and side, and you talk about it together. So ultimately you are the director and you're gonna bring this through the board trustees and they're gonna approve it, but you really should be getting that input from your staff. It should be like all this stuff happened, they had no idea that on Monday morning, you went in and you're like, this is the new way of doing things, but that's really stressful for people. So just make sure you're addressing their comfort level along the way. Make sure you're being consistent in your decision making and how you do things. It's another thing that's super exhausting is that the staff has to constantly guess, like how is my boss going to react? What is the decision they're going to make? Yeah, there's times where we have to adapt and be flexible and maybe change what we're doing, but on the fly, but ultimately, it shouldn't vary wildly from decision to decision. Be consistent, your staff knows what to expect from you, what to expect from day to day operations at the library, and that's a source of comfort. But if it's always changing and things feel really erratic all the time, that's definitely exhausting. And that's something we all felt during COVID, right? Because everything was changing and what we were hearing from the government and what we were hearing from CDC, like that was changing. So, be kind of like that before in the storm. So a few for my reminder before I wrap up, just remember, what we do in libraries is really important. I think we do really important work, really essential work, but we aren't life-saving doctors. So there is no reason where you need to like, I have to get in touch with my staff on a Friday night at 10 o'clock about story time. Like there's no need for it. So again, make sure you're scheduling those emails. Something can wait. And the other thing is two mistakes happen, but if mistakes happen in a library, it's okay. They're all fixable. So you shouldn't create this culture where everybody's so afraid of making mistakes and everyone feels like they have to be on all the time and they have to be checking their email all the time. It can wait. Our very important work is very important, but it's not emergency work. Your goals are not going to be everybody else's goals. So you can be totally passionate about the library and you want to eat, breathe and sleep, collections and services and programs, but it's okay if your staff does not want to be that way. Don't evaluate your staff based on your professional goals. Evaluate them on the job you hire them to do. Did you hire them to work at the circulation desk? And they handle checkouts in a very friendly, efficient manner? That's great, but they don't have to have the same goals. And if you hold them to these expectations, you have yourself that's really unfair. And again, least of these stressful burnout type situations. Make sure you're taking care of yourself. Take your own advice. All these slides where that you should be doing with your staff, make sure you're doing it for yourself. Close your laptop on the weekends. Don't be sending those emails on the weekend. Don't work on the annual report over the weekend. If you're stressed out or burned out, you're not going to be able to take care of your staff. You can't be a good leader if you're in a bad place. So just make sure, yes, you're looking out for your staff, but you are also looking out for yourself. And finally, just remember, it's supposed to be fun. Yes, there are stressful days at the library. Yes, there are really bad days at the library, but you should still be able to find that joy, that reason that you got into it, and you should be able to convey that to your staff. And you can even do this in little ways to celebrate birthdays, celebrate library birthdays, have like fun theme days. You can laugh. You can be silly. You can still have a good time as a director, but still lead your library with authority too. So just remember that ultimately through it all, it is supposed to be fun and make sure your staff knows that and make sure you're reminding yourself of that. So I will make these slides available a few to read after, because I do have some follow-up reading. And I think a lot of these were really, really helpful in just recognizing maybe some of the behaviors that I had as a leader that I needed to adjust in. So I hope that you picked up some nuggets today for your staff. And thank you for listening. Yeah, thank you, Suzanne. I think we did. We got lots of good comments. Wow, powerful presentation, loads of excellent info. Some wonderful information, a comment though. However, you do need to push the marker cap on until you hear it click. That's... Well, we did have a question. I do wanna have one question. I'm gonna show it here. And someone else kind of answered it, but I'll let you too. Someone needs, do you have suggestions for delegating? I tend to take it all on and staff has too much downtime. So taking on too much work. Yeah. I do. Yeah, I'm really mad at delegating it. It's something I've tried to work on a lot more. Well, now I'm not really in a supervisor level, but yeah, you know, it comes back to like, I always try to think of like that scene with Elsa where she's like, let it go. Like you have to let it go. Cause it's about control. Like, well, there's two reasons. Like one, you know, you can do it. You know, if you can do it on time and you know it's gonna be done the way you want it. But then also, if you're now a director, you have a lot of other things to do. So you do have to let that go. And you have to trust that it's gonna be done. It might not be done in the same way that you wanted it done, but it's going to get done. And that's okay. And then you can attend to your other things. So you do have to start trusting your staff a little bit more and it's so hard. And the other thing is like sometimes I'm like, oh, I feel bad asking somebody to do this. I can just do this myself. But you know, again, like that's how you start to burn yourself that way you're not taking your own advice. So, you know, if somebody, if your staff is like, a lot of times they're looking for work, they're kind of, you know, especially if it's a slow time and you're at the situation, it's like, I wish I had something to do. It makes them feel good that you came out and you kind of empower them with this task that you could have done yourself. But so it's just a little bit of trusting your staff, a little bit of giving up that control, a little bit of understanding that your time needs to be spent on other things now. Yeah. Our previous presenter, Abby actually has commented, you can have a task done exactly the way you want it or you can have someone else do it, but you can't have both. So if you have something that you really care about, how it's done, do it yourself, but you're gonna have to pick and choose which ones are and which ones are. It's okay, it gets done. That's the important part. And that's not what I need to be focusing on that. Yeah. All right, thank you so much. Is there anything we're gonna move on? We didn't get to everybody's questions, but you can always reach out to her or look online. We will move on.