 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We will not be offended. We host this, we do this show every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. Central Time, but all the shows are recorded so you can always go to our website if you haven't been able to join us on Wednesday mornings and you can see all of our archive sessions are saved there. We have recordings, we have any presentations people may have had, included handouts, links to any websites or URLs that were shared. We do a variety of things here on the show, book reviews, training sessions, presentations, anything that may be of interest to libraries and librarians across the country. The show and the show is free and open to anyone to watch so please do share with any of your colleagues out there any of our episodes. We have commission staff, Nebraska Library Commission staff that do presentations sometimes and we sometimes bring in guest speakers as we have this morning. On the line with us remotely is Jamie Leroux who is currently now the CEO of the Ruin Associates Consulting. He was previously the director of the Douglas County Libraries in Colorado and just recently late last year, early this year, I'm not sure exactly when, left there and has gone out on doing his own things which is great and I'm really glad we got to have him on the show here today. So good morning Jamie. Good morning. It's a pleasure to join you today to talk about succession planning and as Krista mentioned I recently left the Douglas County Libraries after 24 years. Wow. So I have now been independent for three weeks and it's been fascinating to me watching this kind of succession planning stuff and I feel like I've learned some things that I want to trial with your audience to see how much sense this makes. I think this is an issue that is kind of important in our profession right now. So to kind of get everybody oriented, the tool that I'm using is called X-Mind. It's a mind mapping program and what it does is I'll kind of be going in clockwise or you can see that I've numbered all of my topics. So first I'll kind of talk about why we're addressing the significance of succession planning today. Talk a little bit about what succession planning is not. I think it is frequently misunderstood and we'll talk about the steps that it takes to begin to plan more intelligently for the future. It begins with defining a governing vision and I'm sorry, I've got a couple of pop-ups here that we'll see if we can figure out a way to turn them off. So we'll talk about defining the governing vision then I'll move over to saying how do you assess the capacity of your organization today to fulfill that governing vision. I'll discuss some steps to be using succession planning as kind of an alternative human relations strategy, human resources management strategy. We'll talk about some of the steps of getting started and I hope to leave plenty of time for people to ask questions. And I should also point out that I've got a cold so I apologize in advance for this is the first time I've had a cold in two years. I'd never let myself get sick when I was director but now apparently I'm a man of leisure so indulge in being ill and then finally I tried to find a way to turn off various pop-ups from my email so I don't think that succeeded either so there may be surprises along the way and I hope my friends don't embarrass me by sending me email during the process. Not a problem. At the bottom you'll see contact information so I have a website www.jaleroo.com and anybody feel free to email me about anything that isn't clear. This is the first time I've walked to this presentation but I hope to flush it out for some professional articles and I hope maybe some consulting services. So I will then jump in. I'll kind of hoist these individual sections so you can see how things are connected. First why are we talking about this? Bottom line is there's a lot of turnover starting to happen at the top. For a long time our leadership in library land has been dominated by the baby boomers. We are approaching retirement age. Some of the statistics that we're seeing in Colorado is about 20% of the leadership of libraries is looking to retire in the next five years. So that's an opportunity for somebody and I know that those of you just getting in the field you've been hearing this for a long time and you think when or when will they leave but it is in fact starting to happen. What that means is that this is a time of change and that means that it's both danger and opportunity. One of the things I find sad is as I talk to school librarians in particular they're kind of reluctant to leave their professions because they're afraid not just of who might replace them but they're afraid that no one will replace them. School libraries in Colorado in particular are in a lot of trouble and often what happens is when the school librarian leaves first they get replaced with somebody who's a you know a tech person and then they get replaced with a volunteer and then they don't get replaced at all. So there is danger when there's turnover at the top. The second question is that I'm sure many of you in the audience have heard this thing about people are worried that there's even a future for libraries. They say things like hey I've got the internet who needs a library anymore and so the question is can we find people who will say I'm excited about libraries I'm interested in leading them and I want to step up to that. And the other both danger and opportunities that over the past 15 years we've seen a very consistent trend across the United States. Use of libraries is rising but support for libraries as measured in the successful passage of bonds, male-level elections seems to be falling. So leadership really matters and I think trying to identify how we recruit people to the profession, how we match them up well with our community so they can succeed is vital to the continuing success of our profession. And I put that a little note to myself about primate behavior here because I've been doing a lot of reading about evolutionary biology and a fascinating story was about chimpanzees. So people are reviewing, watching chimpanzees in the wild and as they're kind of milling around underneath the trees a hyena shows up on the edge of the camp and a cry goes up by some of the chimpanzees to say danger, danger. And then every primate looks and stares at the leader. They're looking for a cue. What is it that we're supposed to do in this time of danger? And it's fascinating that if the leader of the head chimpanzee freaks out, everybody else freaks out and there's panic and there's pandemonium and the hyena starts picking people off. If the leader is cool and collected and starts gathering the small chimpanzees and backing up to the tree and starting to get out of dangerous way, then the rest of the tribe stays calm and cool and they start to act. And I think that's the kind of weird truth about this is we are primates. We are herd animals. And we look to leaders to embody the best behaviors, the behaviors that we wish we could exhibit all the time. So choosing leadership, picking the head chimpanzee is something that might be important to our future. Okay, let's talk about what succession planning is not. Been watching a lot of my friend and longtime friends who have been library directors who have retired and I've noticed that they often think succession planning is picking their successor. Anointing somebody to say, okay, I like you best, you get to take over when I leave. But the thing I want to point and often, of course, they do pick very good people and they often make very good directors. But I think we forget that the organization doesn't belong to the library director, even when he or she thinks so and wants to control the succession thinks that they know best. The truth of it is, is that the organization doesn't belong to the CEO. It belongs to the community. And there's a marvelous opportunity here when things turn over at the top to say, let's find a way to do some deep thinking about what our community actually requires and gain control of this important community asset to contribute to the health and well-being of our community. So what should succession planning look like? After I bid us a library director for maybe probably a good 18, 19 years, we brought out a new library director, a library board member, who happened to have a very deep experience in organizational behavior. And she worked in organizational development for a large Fortune 500 company. And so she was ahead of my personal committee as I was approaching my annual evaluation. She said, what are you doing to address succession planning? And I thought, uh-oh, she's trying to kick me off. And she said, no, no, it's not like that at all. Here's what I've learned. The most successful institutions start at the top. And so the governing body, which for most of our public libraries would be a library board for a say library, it might be your city council for a school library, it'll be your, you know, your principal, but there's always a kind of a governing group or that's on top of you. It starts there and they need to have a clear vision of the future. Do they understand what their mission is? Do they keep that mission in front of them? Do they have a vision for the future, a clear notion of where the institution should be heading? Have they identified just three or four, not much more than that, strategies that they want to pursue to get forward and have they started to talk about tactics? Because the way libraries work best is not when a charismatic CEO shows up and says, here's how we're going to do things. There's a conversation with community representatives. And those representatives say, here's what we think. Here's our vision for the future of our institution. Here's how we think we could be of greatest use to our community. Well, then what happens? Okay, let's say that you've gotten all of that you've done a good plan, you've taken the time to bring the board to the table to discuss the various opportunities, you've got a clear notion of what you want to accomplish. Let me move over to this notion of assessing the capacity of the organization. So after you get clear, you say, what can we do? And here's a reminder for anybody who works with boards, the board really only has one employee. And that is to say, if you have an active library board, and I know this is a problem in many libraries around the United States, they're only supposed to be talking to the director. They say, this is what we're trying to accomplish, we've hired you to do that. And now, we'll keep our noses in to make sure that you're addressing the concerns we've assigned to you. But we're going to keep our hands out. The rest of the staff does not report to us, they report to you. And so then the board should ask this question. Now that we're clear about our future, does our CEO, does our director have the skills that it takes to move us there? And so when we talk about skills, skills tend to fall into about four or five different areas. Now I'll kind of name the ones that currently invoke. First, an effective director is an effective communicator. They have emotional intelligence. They have the ability to, to ask the right questions, to listen attentively, to encourage people to communicate information to them, to distill that information, to display empathy, to make sure that they're getting and connecting to the people that are around them. The second thing is engage but not just with the staff, but with the community. Any more, the success of a library absolutely depends upon strong community partnerships. And so an effective CEO probably is going to have to need to demonstrate the ability to leave the building, to communicate with the town manager to have a relationship with the superintendent to know who the newspaper editor is. And I recognize that in a smaller and more rural library, sometimes this can be a real challenge. But it's important that at least some not as made, not just to the people who already know that you're there, but to the people who don't have an idea that the library can be an effective partner for community development. The next kind of category for CEOs is people looking for strategic thinkers. They want someone to say, no, I'm not just thinking about the day to day business. And yes, the day to day business is important. But I think back to when I first got into libraries, my first job was the normal public library where I was a circulation clerk. And I would spend every night sitting there alphabetizing all of the cards to say, you know, by author for the fiction that had been checked out by the Dewey decimal number for all of the nonfiction and putting everything in order. If you just stay focused on all those tasks, you lose out on the fact that technology is coming in and boom, that job that I had no longer exists. People don't stay late at night to alphabetize the cards. It's done electronically. So you have to lift your head out of the day to day job to understand the environment in which you operate. That's what strategic thinking is about. Another skill that people are often looking for is project management. So if we assign a big task and we want to build a partnership with the food bank, does the CEO have the project management skills to see that it actually happens? And that means to build up a timeline to secure the resources to set some watershed moments to check in with everybody to make sure that you're still on task and to bring the project to completion. Often, particularly in rural areas, the job involves some fundraising. We don't have enough money to do the things we want. How can we connect to the community to find ways to raise the gap to fill the mind of the gap? And then people are now often looking for technology. They want their directors to be maybe not the ability to sit down and directly program an ILS system, but to at least be able to talk the language, to understand what some of the key trends are in technology and how they might apply to libraries. And then finally, often overlooked is this idea that I think to be a successful CEO, you not only have to have a relationship with the board, you not only have to be connected to your staff, you not only have to understand your community, you have to be connected to the rest of your profession. And so some visibility there helps you again lift your head out of the trenches, understand what's going on in the environment, seize the best ideas from some of your peers, and contribute to that professional knowledge. So once the board has gone through and said, okay, what are the skills that we need, then they say, does our CEO have these skills? Or can she or he get them in 18 to 24 months? And that's the significant thing. Nobody has all of the skills that you need at every moment, but it's fair to say, okay, this is where we've decided to go. This is the person that we have. We think they can get all of these skills within a one to two year period. And then there's a growth plan, a personnel development plan for the CEO to get them there. So that's how it starts. And recognize that there could be three answers there. In one case, and what my board member said to me is, you know, good news Jamie, you have all the skills we need. Great. She said, but now this is where your work begins. And I'll talk about that in a moment. She could have said, you're almost there. We don't feel like you are strong enough in project management. We're going to send you a project management class where they can say, you know, we need to be more savvy about technology. We see some opportunities coming up that we want to encourage you to explore. And in that case, I'm still working to try to fulfill the vision of the board. Or they might conclude, no, we have the wrong CEO. We have someone that we don't think and get to where we need to be in the next 18 to 24 months. And then that's a different conversation, because the job of the board is to move the library forward to fulfill that vision. And if they have the wrong CEO, then they have to get the right one. Unfortunately, I pass that test. So on to the next thing. So here the idea is that, okay, so good news is they have a CEO that they think can do the job. Now what? Then what my board member said to me is that now you talk to all of your people, all of your associate directors, the people at the next level, and you say, are you within 18 to 24 months of my job? And I know that there are some people who say, well, why would any director actively encourage mutiny, actively encourage somebody to go out and get the skills that they would have to take over their job? And the answer is the job of the CEO is to fulfill the vision of the board. And that vision is to make the library stronger. The more skills they have, the more skill everyone in the library has, and that's everybody from the shelver to the director, the faster the library is going to move. And if it happens that the director gets another job opportunity, decides to retire, decides that, you know, there's some piece of this job that they can't handle, then there's more capacity within the organization. So I sat down with my associate directors, because they were kind of a largest library and had a lot of different levels and said, okay, I've identified the two or three areas that I think you need some work on. And I'm putting that in your annual goals. I'm making this part of your annual evaluation. And so that evaluation is, what are you doing to gain the skills we need to move us forward as a library? So that's the goal part of it. And then at the end of the next year, you sit down and say, and how did you do? And I think often people when they do evaluations of their staff, it tends to be, oh, well, you know, you need to show up on time. Or, you know, gee, I'd like you to be a little bit friendlier, or let's work on that customer service. They tend to be very small behavioral traits. This is a different kind of evaluation. This is asking your people to really demonstrate that they understand the skills that the organization needs, and that they actually are being held accountable to them. When that happens, even if it's only one out of three goals to serve, really want you to work on the skill. It's a powerful tool for getting your organization aligned around that institutional vision. Continuing Education CE, the idea there is that that too should be part of your annual plan for the board and for evaluation. But please notice that continuing education doesn't just mean I want you to attend a class. It has to be something like you will use the information from this class to perform a particular project. Because just sitting in a chair, just even watching a webinar, no matter how good it is, isn't necessarily the same thing as learning something that is applied in the organization. So again, continuing education isn't just seat time. It's working on gathering the skills that you need to do something. The next area for succession planning as a human resources strategy is the idea of coaching. And coaching kind of falls into three categories. There's a kind of coaching that happens when you hire somebody and you're bringing them on board and say, okay, we want you to understand our culture. We want you to understand how we do things. These are some of the issues that we're working on. And then there's mentoring and many libraries kind of buddy up and they say a new staff person here is going to be working with Mary who's been here for three years and she's one of our best workers. And then the third area of coaching is something that doesn't seem to happen in libraries very often. It happens quite often in the business world and that's a national executive coaching. And here the idea is that someone is hired and the coach might call them up once day at the beginning once a week later on maybe once a month and say, just talk to me about your issues. What kinds of questions do you have? Think through some of the issues to have you got the skills that you need with sort of personal issues that you're facing. How will you how well are you doing with the community is to your board communications online and just kind of remind them of the things that they need to be successful. As I thought about this, I think where often succession planning breaks down is that there it takes time for a shift in the direction of a board to filter down to the hiring decisions. And ideally so notice this so far I've talked about succession planning is a top down strategy. The board figure out figures out what it wants. It tells the director where to go. The director starts to assess the strengths of the organization. They start building skills. But then it comes down. Finally, they have to hire people that at least have the capacity to grow those skills. And I notice that there is often a lack this idea about know what you're looking for. So the board knows what they want. The director knows what skills that he or she needs, but they're not actively recruiting for the skills. So when they interview somebody, they say, Okay, we're looking for somebody who really can be a community connector. Talk to me about the organizations that you belong to in the community. That's an aligned organization that really ties that hiring process all the way up the organization to say that's helping us to fulfill our goals. But too often, we continue to ask the questions that we've been asking for 25 years. And so when we were keeping people staying there late at night to follow all those cards, we said we need somebody who is very detail oriented. Well, detail oriented doesn't seem to be getting us the the community visibility of support that we need. And I strongly recommend that as you think about this idea of succession planning of moving people up the organization, you can't keep hiring for the things we hired for a generation ago. We have to start hiring for the things that the board is looking to get done today. And that's a change. The advantage of taking this approach to hiring is you start to build a reputation for moving people up. And that means that I started as a shelter. But by a year later, here I am, I'm running a project out at the community shelter. And that kind of thing helps you attract the most ambitious, bright, active, engaged community members that you can find. And I understand too that often in smaller libraries, there may not be many jumps from the bottom to the top. If you have a three person library or a two person library, there's not a big succession chain. But I think in that case, it's even more important to make sure that every person you bring in is performing at the highest possible level. Because ultimately, it's not just about the director. It's not just about the board. It's about the team. And if you can figure out a way to make sure that the skill set that you're trying to develop as a team are broadly shared by every member of the team, then your library is more effective. So again, the call here to say you are constantly recruiting. Often, I hear this when I talk to rural library directors, they say, well, I open up the job and I didn't have very many good candidates this time. Well, that's because you can't wait till you have an opening to start recruiting. You have to be on the lookout all the time for the people that have those skills that you're trying to develop. And if you've identified them, keep in touch with them, watch them so that when that job opens up, you don't wait for them to apply, walk in a new hand in an application and say, okay, this is, this might be the job for you. So constantly be recruiting people because succession starts at the bottom, too. So the goal of all this is to say that it's not just the director talking to associate directors, it's associate directors talking to branch managers, it's branch managers talking to department heads, department heads talking to librarians, it's librarians talking to paraprofessionals, it's paraprofessionals talking to shelvers. And every level of the organization you are identifying the skills that you need. You're hiring for those skills, you're training for those skills, you're evaluating for those skills, you're coaching for those skills. And the goal is you have a deep bench. So the minute anybody leaves the organization, you don't flail around saying, gee, we're not ready for this, I hope we can find someone that good. You're developing people, you have a deep bench to say, you know, there are three people who are ready for this job and I'm ready to move them up. And then ultimately you wind up with an organization committed to growth and achievement. So what does that look like getting started? And I think, you know, where do you do it and when do you do it? And the answer is you do it here now. And especially this happens at a time of executive transition. And again, I'm sure that some of you in the audience either have recently gone through this or suspect that you may soon be going through it. And so I think the level of services falls into something like this. This is, and I'll begin with the piece that I think is too often overlooked. And this is something that, again, as I think about getting to consulting, this is the kind of thing I think I am interested in doing because it's such a powerful technique to improve the quality of library services. It begins with interviews. You have a retiring director. Somebody needs to sit down and say, so talk to me about the state of your organization. Talk to me about the community. Talk to me about what you see in the profession. To sit down with the board and say, do an in-depth interview. Talk to me about what you really believe the community issues concerns and opportunities might be. Talk to me about the longstanding, again, advantages, disadvantages, strengths, weaknesses of your organization to date. What do you think really has to happen to move this organization forward? Talk to the staff and say, what's working? What have you succeeded at doing, and how do we begin to build on that? If you could change one thing about your organizational culture, what would that be? And then finally, because, again, too often, librarians tend to be internally focused, very library-centric. I think it's important to go out and say, I want to interview some people in the community to say, what's the reputation of the library? What percentage of the population actually uses it and is aware of it? How visible is the library within the community? And then, not just about the library. And now talk to me about what's happening with the demographic changes in your community. What are the big development opportunities coming up with the state of education in your community? And the goal is, out of all of those interviews, is to put together not a long-range plan, but an issues and directions statement, a paper. And it addresses two things. First, organizational development. Where is the library today? What kinds of institutional issues does it have? What kinds of opportunities might exist? What's immediately in front of you that should be addressed? Second, what's going on in that community? What are the projects that you might be part of? What are the outcomes that the community is trying to achieve? And the purpose of that issues and directions paper would be to identify, this is the kind of person that you might be looking for. So again, not a long-range plan, but it helps to get the board moving in the direction of coming up with that governing vision and getting the set of skills that they would be looking for to hire a director. A second stage of that succession planning for is to say, well, what does the hiring process look like? And that falls into three things, the recruitment, trying to run some sort of interview process and helping the board make a decision about who they hire. And then again, I want to end up with this idea about the thing that is often, that is very common in the business world, very uncommon in our world. And that's the idea of executive coaching. As the baby boomers step down, we look to say, what's the next generation? That would be the Gen Xers. And there are very few Gen Xers in the library world. And there are reasons for that or twofold. The first one is there are fewer Gen Xers and there were boomers, about half as many. And the second thing is, as the Gen Xers were coming of age and looking for careers, libraries were all talking about technology. We weren't talking about some of the more traditional things, we were talking tech. And because of that, many of the Gen Xers says, OK, well, if we're talking technology, I can make way more money in technology than I can in libraries. So the leadership clop there of the potential leaders tends to be pretty slim. On the other hand, we're now starting to see this big surge of millennials who are coming into the library world, the next generation down. Very savvy, very excited about libraries, very community engaged, rare and to go. But they have had very little leadership experience. And I would submit that if that's the case and you look around and say, OK, slim pickings for a Gen X leader, but a bunch of millennials that don't have leadership experience but have all the potential skills. But maybe you bring that person on board and say, but we're going to pair you up with an executive coach. We're going to find someone who has done this kind of work. And we think a few dollars a month is not a bad investment for us to help you move more quickly up to being an effective director. And I feel like there's a bit of content there. So that's that's kind of my broad outline. So let me kind of again go through and I'll again recapitulate what I've done so far. And then I'm very curious to hear your questions about this. So again, the big steps are you're defining a governing vision, and that means a board gets together and tries to identify the big thing that it's focused on. You assess your capacity. You start looking in a deep way about what are the skills that we need and level by level, person by person. You work through the organization saying, I want you to develop to develop the skills that move us as rapidly as possible towards the vision. Then it's the idea of using succession planning as a resource strategy. So embedding it in the job descriptions, embedding it in the evaluation process, embedding it in your continuing education. And finally, it's seizing the opportunity of executive transition to begin to build this plan. So what questions have come along and how can I respond to them? OK, great. Yeah. If anybody has any questions, please go ahead and type them into the questions section in your GoToWebinar interface. I'm monitoring that all here so I can grab any questions, comments, any thoughts that you guys in the audience have about this. Nothing came in while you were talking, Jamie. No, I think they're just listening intently following your process here. I thought it was very interesting myself. I'm not sure about others. I was especially thinking about it as you were going through that this is all about succession planning and you know you're going to need a new director at some point. You may know that the current one's leaving or even you don't know, but you want to plan ahead for what you would do when you need to find the new person. But it popped into my mind that some of this can actually be used by a person who is the current director and is not planning on leaving at all. That's accurate. And well, on the other side of that is that succession planning is not just for the director. It's for every position that you've got. So the idea is that whenever any position comes vacant and no matter what library you work in, you're going to be losing somebody eventually. You want to have a lot of good capacity within the organization so there's not this awkward period of, oh my god, we've lost somebody. Nobody has the skills that we need. And gee, we hope we can find somebody new. It's a lot smoother. No panic. Nobody panic. The thing in some of these areas that you're mentioning of things you want to look at in a director or things that you can do, like you were saying, you find someone who's got almost everything, but you need to train them in one area, that some of those things could be just something that that director or any staff person is just lacking in general. That's right. And you could grab some of these bits and pieces and say, you know, our assistant director has all of these parts. But that one thing, they could use more whatever community involvement, community engagement with the businesses and people in our community that, you know, grab from that. Just don't just think about, oh, when we lose something, what happens? But how can we upgrade who we have currently? That's right. Yeah. And I think that often people struggle with the idea of the annual evaluation. You know, it's just about correcting behavior. No, it's not. It's about building the capacity of your organization. And I think that that makes it a lot more interesting as an evaluation process to say, OK, I brought you in as a shelter, but I'd like you to know more about how the library works because I want every one of the organization to be able to move us forward. A lot of that cross training type thing. So somebody leaves, you have someone who knows something. We do have some questions that have come in now for excellent presentations, one person says. But how does the director help a weak board in embracing this process? What if you haven't? Yeah, some boards that are just not all in there are just kind of going through the motions, maybe. That's right. And I one of the other things I've been trying to do lately is this kind of it's the board workshop idea. So how do you make each other look good? And the problem is there are several different kinds of boards and in small communities in particular, people are used to working boards. So like if you're a member of the Rotary and you're putting on a festival, then all the board members show up and they're putting up the chairs and there's no staff to assign things to. And so when they find themselves on the library board, they have a tendency to want to step right in and give management advice. So they're doing micromanagement. They're not looking at the big picture. They're looking at day-to-day operations. And I think that the best thing that a director can do is to stop feeding that cycle. As I say, when we have a library board meeting, I'm not giving you a lot of really detailed operational stuff because I've got that. I'm handling that. What I need is that the director has to start to shift the conversation to the big things. You say, OK, so today, instead of reviewing all of our program statistics and how our logistics about that, I've brought in somebody from the community to talk about what's going on with our food task force. I brought in somebody to talk about what's happening with early childhood education. What should our response be to some of these community concerns and to try to keep changing the dialogue by framing it in this larger context? The big picture is what they're really. Yeah. It seems to be boards are a concern with a lot of people here now that I've looked through some of the other questions that came up. That was the first one was how does the director help a week board? But how do you get your library board to be engaged in planning for the future? And right there, you gave some examples, I think. Yeah, and I've been really intrigued by this idea, too, is that I went for a while. I was a member of the OCLC members council and the global council and Jay Jordan, who is the executive director of that, he would start every meeting by reciting the mission. It is our job to do this. And I think that what happens is the things that the director talks about are the things that everybody starts to think are important. And so if you keep saying, OK, well, you've told me that our mission is and you keep putting that in front, the job then is elevate the concerns from the mundane to that larger picture. The other site that I think is not talked about very often is about the recruitment of board members. Somebody actually asked that. Can you comment on these principles in relation to recruiting them, the board members? Yep. I absolutely believe that you can't just sit back and wait for accidental people to be appointed to the board. I think you need to go out and say, whenever you see a good community leader, you go up and say, you know what, the library would really benefit from you. I would like you to start thinking about that. You invite them to library events. You sit down and talk strategy about them with coffee. And so when that job opening comes up, you have people that are eager, interested, briefed, and ready to step in. The best single question that I found by the by to recruit a good board member is to say, tell me about all the other community organizations you belong to. And so instead of having just a volunteer who only knows one organization, they help to change the dynamics of the board by saying, well, I'm working with several community groups, and here's what I hear them talking about. We should be a part of that. Which is part of what you're saying of bringing in those community groups to help the board focus on what they want. You can get members who are already involved in that kind of thing if you're bringing it right in with the people. Exactly. Yeah. And the last board-related question I have that someone had here is, how do you suggest with dealing with a board that doesn't realize that they have only one employee? And I think that's some who thinks that it should be like those other types of boards they've worked with. I think you see even good examples of that. Yeah. And I had this happen to me once where we had a very active kind of volunteer. She was working in our book sale. She wanted to be on the board so bad, and I hired her for the board. And then she showed up at board meetings, and she would say things like, well, you know, there's a real problem at one of our branches here, but I promised the person I wouldn't reveal her name. And so I met with her privately, and I said, well, can you tell me what the problem is? And she said, well, no, I told her I would protect her. I said, well, then I can't fix the problem if I don't know what it is. And I think that sometimes it almost takes like a bad example to be able to go back to a board and say, here's the problem. When you step past your one employee and you start giving assignments to the board, to the staff, then they don't know who they work for. Do they work for the director? Do they work for each individual member of the board who can give them assignments? And when people bypass that chain of command, what they're really doing is they're sowing confusion and they're making it very difficult for the director to succeed. And so I think that to have some kind of frank discussion we come in and say, OK, these are the boundaries. The primary role of the board is vision and accountability. The primary role of the director is leadership. The primary role of an after leadership supervision and then the role of the staff is the director delivering the services. Sometimes it's easier for somebody outside the organization to say those things, which is why people like me, consultants and speakers go around and say, well, you bring this guy in to say something that they won't believe me when I say this. But I think the idea about just saying if you want the organization to succeed, then stay out of the director personnel management because it makes it harder for the organization to work. And I was just thinking when you're talking about making sure they know what their role is, job descriptions for the board members that they can have written down on a piece of paper, here is what you are involved in and allowed to do and something similar to that that they can refer to. Well, that's exactly right, Christa. And I think it's funny if you think about once I had a board member who said, why are you pushing for all this kind of new clarity of roles? And I said, OK, so let's imagine that for our staff there were no job descriptions. There was no interview process. We didn't do anything to train them. There was no annual evaluation. And then we kicked them off after three years. And he says, well, that's a crazy personal management system. I said, and that's exactly what happens with boards. There's no criteria. There's no job description. There's no accountability. There's no annual evaluation. And then if you have term limits, then you kick that off at the end. And if you don't have term limits, then you can have people who were never good at their job, but they're there for 30 years. So I think the idea is saying that the board is just as important to staff and should be managed, even if it does its own managing as professionally as you manage staff. If you have a high-performing board, you're more likely to have a high-performing library. Absolutely, yeah. OK, now we have some other questions getting off the board topic. Let's see. What if you're not at the top? What if you'd like to be mentored? How do you approach the people on top to get that grooming? So if you're not seeing that coming down, I guess obviously from your director, assistant director, supervisor, how do you approach them to say I'd like to have this kind of thing from you? Yeah, I think that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So kudos to whoever asked that question. This is a question about leading from lower than the top. How do you become a leader? And I think there are several steps. The first one is you let someone know that you're interested. You can let yourself get noticed. So that might start with, depending on the size of your library, you go to your supervisor and you say, I'm very, very keenly interested in helping this organization and I would like to work on some of my skills. Where do you recommend that I start? So it begins by notice me. I would like to have some opportunities. The second thing is, you know, and then if there's nobody between you and the director, he goes straight to the director and say, how can I help you look good? How can I help you fulfill the mission of the board? You show up at a board meeting if that's possible and start taking notes. And then again, so that you don't violate the chain of command, go back to the director and say, OK, I see that the board has this kind of idea of their goal. I would like to be part of that. How do you recommend that I start, you know, could we have an internal leadership program? Is there something that's happening in the state library association? Is the state library offering kind of leadership training? I'm very interested in growing my skills to help the library. So I think those are the two skills. Yeah. Did you notice and ask for help? Offered, you know, and pay attention to what's going on. Like you said, show up at a board meeting and listen and be aware of what's going on in your library so that you can get yourself involved in those different areas. Exactly. No, another question. One other thought before I leave that, and sometimes you can team up with other people on the staff. So if two of you go in and you talk to a supervisor and say, you know what, we've been thinking that we would like some additional help here. Sometimes there's some strength in numbers. Oh, yeah. So make allies. Something else coming from an employee point of view. How can an employee of a library help a new director transition into their new role? Well, that's a wonderful thing. I think that, again, in my mind, it comes down to, first, it's staff issues. So what are the organizational behaviors here? What are we really good at? What have you been trying to get done for a long time that you say now haven't quite been able to pull off? So giving some sort of synch summary about that library history is a good thing. I think the second thing is that anything that you can say about library use. So if you come in and say, okay, welcome new director, I'm starting to notice a lot of people, you know, more families are coming in looking for story times and foreign languages. This is something that's a new thing. So alert them to the trends of changing library use. And then the third thing is to say, I have a connection to this local community group and they're looking for a speaker, would you be interested in coming and talking? So helping to connect them to the community. Get them out there in the community. And this, I think, is especially important in, it depends on where you've gotten your new director from. If they were internal, they may be aware of some of these things, but especially if they're not, if you get brought in someone from outside of your particular library who's new to your area or just even new to your library or your branch, they hopefully would want that kind of input from the people already there to figure out what's going on here in this location. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a big believer in this idea of something that I call a appreciative inquiry. You don't walk into a place and say, okay, tell me everything that's wrong so I can fix it. You walk in and you say, tell me what you're good at and tell me what the next step would be. And often I find that the staff has a pretty good idea about how well they're doing in some area. And almost every library I've been in, most people who work in libraries are very conscientious. They're very intelligent. They're very alert. And they do have something that they can be proud of. But they're also aware it's like, but we're not quite as good as ex-library the next over. And so you can say to them, you know, this is what we're good at, new director, but this is the opportunity that we think we have to be even better. And I think that that kind of approach is positive. And it builds on your previous successes. Definitely. Another question. Staff in board related now, because you're mentioned about going to the staff meetings, or the board meetings, someone asked, so staff should be encouraged and welcome to attend board meetings. I guess maybe this is something that isn't usually, isn't the usual case. Are there staff attend them? I mean, whether they're officially open or not, maybe it's just not a thing that's done. Well, I think that often it's, you know, it's almost a cultural thing. Typically board meetings are public meetings and generally by definition open to the public. And so I think it's a useful thing for a board, you know, for staff to show up and say, well gee, how do decisions get made at the library? The danger of this one is, and I think the reason that some library directors discourage it, is that sometimes then the board steps right past the director and starts directly asking questions of the staff. And so, It may confuse them if it's not handled correctly, yeah. And so I think that there needs to be a discussion on the part of the staff with the director to say, okay, you know, I'm very curious about this, but I don't want to cross any lines. Can you frame this when you introduce the staff? And so then the director says, here's Mary, she's very interested in kind of what's going on here. You know, Mary's one of our better employees. I've asked her to come in here. You know, she is, she works for me, of course, but, you know, if you have any questions for her, please direct them to me. You know, just kind of set some ground rules about the engagement of the staff. Set the boundaries, definitely. I think it's a marvelous thing. That's right. Okay. Great. That was the last of the questions that I see on here. Anybody have any other questions? Just go ahead, throw them in. We still have about ten minutes left in the hour this morning. So plenty of time, if you have any other questions. Is there anything else you wanted to speak to here, Jamie, anything and wrap up on your presentation here you have. Yeah, I guess the question that I have is that as I've been thinking about this, is this useful to folks? You know, my whole notion about this is that it really requires a lot of accountability on the part of the board. And what I'm trying to do is to lay out a process that should be able to work for almost any library, small or large. So I appreciate any feedback that folks can type to you and you can pass along to me about what seems like it could work or what they are concerned would not work. Yeah, anybody has any thoughts on that about the different processes that were mentioned here in the presentation, what you think was good, bad, will work for you or not? Let us know. I think for myself, looking at it, I was seeing things it kind of like bits and pieces that could apply. You don't have to do every single thing on every part of this that you can sometimes pick and choose which ones are appropriate. I think each step needs to be thought about and decide what to do. But you gave a lot of different examples in each area of you could do these five to six, eight different things. But depending on the size of your library, like a lot of the small ones we have here in Nebraska, some of that stuff will not apply, but that's okay. Just make sure you think about each of these major ideas here and then pull the parts about it that will apply in your library situation and for the group of people that you have. That's right. Yes, we have someone here from Milford Library here in Nebraska says, yes, this information was useful, especially the Q&A. The presentation got me thinking, but the Q&A question and answer section gave me direction in how to proceed. Good, good. I'm not sure if they're looking for a director, just thinking about it for the future, but. Yeah. And here's someone who says, as a person working in the library looking to move up, this showed me what skills I should work on and how to market myself in the community and the library world. Very informative. And I know that's a thing that a lot of times we talk about is a problem. We don't talk up ourselves enough. And I think that's difficult and I don't, I know people say librarians don't. I think in any area, any profession, it's hard to for some people to do their own PR. It's just, you know, kind of can feel a little awkward. But there's ways to do it that aren't. Yeah. And one of the things I'll point out too is that I really believe that the future of librarianship is that we not only are strong library leaders, is that we're strong community leaders, we're civic leaders. And so for those of you in smaller areas who say, I can't move up directly, you could at least become a civic leader. You can say, I'm going to go out and I'm going to find an organization outside my job in the community. And I'm going to become a leader there because every skill that you learn first makes you more visible within the community. It helps you grow your skill set as a communicator, as, you know, an organizer, and eventually that will pay off as a leadership position within the profession. Mm-hmm. Yep. It don't just think inside the library box. That's right. Yeah. A whole bunch of more people come in. As a person working in a library, oh wait, that's what I just did. This has been a very informative session. It gives us a lot of examples where we can do a better job even in small libraries, also very adaptable to business structure. Yes. That's what I thought, too, yep. Another comment, it may be that people continue doing things the way they have always because they are so busy keeping up with the changes. Do you have any hints for people getting folks to continue doing things differently? Yeah, I think that, you know, I'll start with the harsh truth. If we don't lift our head out of the trenches, we're going to fail. And again, at a time of very rapid growth where our service has been really good, we are losing support. That's a business problem. And so it's clear that just doing what we've always done to say, well, gee, we're so busy. We're busy, but we're losing support. And so taking the time to say at whatever level of the organization can we take one meeting every quarter just to say, let's look at the big picture, let's lift our head out and then look at the trends of our statistics. So let's talk about some of the changes in our community and whether or not we're responding to them. I think you have to lift your head out of the details and get up on the balcony to get a sense of what's actually going on in the environment. And if we don't do that, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. Here's another comment. We are trying to get another employee written into the budget for a very specific job function. That would be ideal, but rather than wait for it, training staff who have shown some proficiency and interest would help us get there faster. So that's something they learned. Yep. Yep, absolutely. And again, I really want to emphasize, particularly in these rural areas, is that there's so many wonderful people. They have extraordinary talents that it would just never occur to them to work at a library. And so be on the lookout for them all the time. Yeah. And that's one of the things, too, that you see lots of articles and stories in the most recent years about libraries are more than just books. We do more than that. And there may be people in the community that don't realize that. You know what the cool and different things we're doing in the library. Get out there and let those people know and say, you do that thing, too. I bet you didn't know we did it also. Exactly. Bring their energy and excitement into the library. And I'll pass on one little... Okay, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. I don't want to change topics. Go ahead. Well, this is the idea that, so what does the library do that nobody does? The public library, I'm speaking about in particular, and this is wonderful report that came out in 2010 from the University of Las Vegas by a woman named Evans. And what she did was a study of 27 different countries over a 20-year period. And what she found, controlling for the wealth of the family and the education of the family, if you can get 500 books in the home of a child between the ages of zero and five, it's as good as having two parents with master's degrees. And so you tell me who else in our society is focused on emergent early literacy. We own that. And our ability to do direct story times to put a book in a child's hand to tell a story to them is something that cannot be replaced by Google and Amazon. There is no institution in our society that provides that function. And I think we need to be loud and proud about that because emergent literacy, reading readiness by age five, is the greatest single predictor of fourth grade reading scores and fourth grade reading scores are the greatest single predictor of whether you go to jail or be free, how much money you'll make, how much education you'll receive, and how long you'll live. That's pretty powerful. Determined for the success of our communities. Definitely. Yeah. I'll try and find that if we have a link to that or something that we can find that report online or information about it. So people can take a look at it. Okay. Yeah. Definitely. Okay. Here's a new comment. I find this very useful because our state has both and I don't know, I believe this library is from Texas if I'm not mistaken, I'm guessing. I find this very useful because our state has both advisory and governing boards depending on the type of public library. This enables directors to use both groups in the same way. Often the folks on the advisory boards feel that they have no serious role. Yeah. I quite agree with that and I've worked with both kinds of boards and I think that the best use of an advisory board is to say, first, it's an information gathering thing. Help me to understand our community. And the second one is it's an advisory body in the sense of I'm thinking about this policy. Can you help me plan that one through? So if I'm going to, let's say for instance, I've decided to do away with fines for all children's books. I'm going to have a governing body that the city is going to say, but that's a loss of revenue. That's the wrong way to go. But can you help me find some way to say, can we have parents show up and say, yeah, if I didn't have to worry about fines, I'd bring more books home for my children and we're trying to promote literacy. Can we kind of walk that through? The biggest problem that I see library directors make is that they keep the discussion too small. And if they elevate the concern and they're asking these larger issues and they get the community talking about those larger issues, they're more likely to earn support and they're less likely to have people interfering with these small kind of operational details. Get the community involved in your decision making so they feel some sort of connection ownership of what the library is doing rather than just, you know, being told, here's how we're doing it and you just have to deal. And a quick question for your group out there too is that, so what do they think about this mind map presentation? Again, the reason I like to do this as opposed to PowerPoint is to sort of see how everything gets connected. But how does that play for those watching the webinar? Yeah, let us know what you thought of this because I've seen you do this before so I've been aware of it. And I've seen we've had a couple other people on do it as well. So let us know what you think about it too. Yeah. One more comment about your presentation before those things start coming in. Thank you for the good ideas. As a trustee chair of a small library, it is helpful to be reminded of our ideal role even if we do have to help out with everyday tasks occasionally. I can see that in small towns, small libraries, small staff, even if you are on a board you still need to be the one that comes in and sets up chairs for whatever event in those little areas. When I do presentations about effective board director relations, the idea is that there should be a pretty clear distinction of the roles. The director needs the community to be that larger representative vision of the community. But no organizational structure is perfect and there will be times when everybody has to step over the line every now and then but you want them to be aware of that and you want them to be gently reminded to go back where they are most effective and most moving. Okay, now we have comments about your mind map here. The presentation style is great. This type of presentation is a welcome change from bullet points on successive slides. Yes, definitely. And I like the format. It's more visual and easier to connect separate PowerPoint slides. I agree. One of the things I was trying to do is to say, I don't know if there's a way to make all of this visible at the same time, but I would certainly able to send this to you so that you can see how everything when it gets expanded there's a lot of stuff on the screen. That's one question I was having is after the PowerPoints it's pretty easy we share the slides and people can go through them one at a time to look at them afterwards. I believe when we did this before you sent just like a JPEG picture of the whole thing like this opened up so people could see where all of these things connected. Because that's what my question was how do you now after the fact of doing this presentation with the things different areas popping out which is great during the presentation how does that work for sharing it afterwards? Yeah, I'll do exactly the same thing. I'll completely expand the mind map and I'll send it to you. Great. So that'll be available for people afterwards. And people are saying yep, they would yeah. So afterwards when we record the show the recording will be put up and this mind map itself will put that out there as well so you guys will all have access to that to see how it all worked out. And now what I have a question what is the software program whatever that you use to do this? This is called up in the upper left-hand corner X-Mind and it's free Oh cool and what I love about is it works on Windows it works on the Mac it works on the Linux so I use this on all the platforms that I can compute with. Oh yep, here I found the website for X-Mind.net I'll add that to our links for the show. Yeah, awesome. Okay. So yeah, we'll try to completely expand this and then I'll send it to you. Yeah, I like that you can see how everything connects definitely. And I know this is I think possibly but it's similar to Prezi which is another way of doing presentations but less animated which I know for some people and myself included Prezi's are this kind of connecting things which is nice but it's a lot of swinging swinging around and zooming in and out of slides and for many people it causes Yeah, yeah. That's trying to be nice people have issues I have had people who have said I had to walk out of a presentation the topic was great but I couldn't look at the screen because I was dizzy and nauseous and not So that's an issue with that and this one I think it does the same thing but without that that worry that some of your audience may have to leave. Yeah So Okay and last little comment thanks so much for well presented and helpful information My pleasure Yeah So it looks like the questions have slowed down a bit which is great we're a little earlier so I think we will officially wrap it up for the day All of you have Jamie's contact information there his website his email so of course if you have more questions you can reach out to him for that and thank you so much Jamie this was a really good session I'm glad we did get this good information out there for people to use and I think people will definitely share in the office today so unable to watch live but I'm going to be sharing this out to them definitely to say this is something that could be we should share even with more of our libraries in the state to make sure they are aware of this process and have what they should be thinking forward to Well I appreciate that and again I'm still kind of developing all this and I appreciate the feedback it will help me to make this even clear in the future I hope I can pull back control to my screen now there we go till it pops up there we are alright and somebody did ask where can I get a copy of the succession planning viewer well this is the website here that I just looked up xmine.net I did include the link in the show notes as well in our delicious accounts you'll have that as well but that is the software that Jamie is using one less comment someone says all staff and boards should watch this presentation definitely I would say it's a success yes so thank you thank you and thanks to everybody who showed up thank you thanks everyone for attending and thank you Jamie that will wrap it up for this morning the show has been recorded we'll be available later today for you to watch and share staff so that will be it for today I hope you'll sign up and join us next week when our topic is Hastings Public Library kicking technology in the glass specifically Google Glass Jake Rundle who's a librarian from Hastings Nebraska Public Library they got a hold of Google Glass and they're letting the community use it and try it out and bringing it out to schools and other locations around the area so he's going to share how they got it what they've been doing with it what you might be able to do with it and even going to do a little live Google Hangout we did test it out earlier this week so sign up and join us for that and for any of our other future shows that we have coming up our topics are all listed here if you are a Facebook user and Compass Live is on Facebook so definitely like us there if you use Facebook we do post updates and our show is starting here's my little notice this morning where people could join us on the fly for this morning show and updates announcements anything comes out here on our Facebook page so if you're big into Facebook definitely like us there other than that that will wrap it up for this morning thank you very much everyone and we'll see you next time bye-bye