 Hi everyone. This is Dr. Cheryl Stenstrom. You were just listening to Dr. Susan Allman. She and I co-chair the Library and Management Advisory Committee PAC for the School of Information at San Jose State University. I see we're recording. Sue, let me know if there's any technical issues I need to be aware of, but otherwise we will get started just with a brief introduction to what we're doing here today. And then I have the great pleasure of introducing Dr. Melissa Fraser Arnett today, who is our speaker. So very quickly for those of you who are joining our series for the first time, the School of Information's Leadership and Management PAC for some time now, over the past year or so, has talked a lot about how new MLIS holders are often reluctant or don't quite understand how quickly they'll find themselves in management and leadership positions. And so we talked a bit about the skills needed for that, what the job looks like when you're in those positions, and how we could best get some of that messaging across to students, potential students, and some, even our recent grads and other new grads with the MLIS degree. So out of that, the four-part series of guest speakers who are out in the field was born. Today, as I said, I have the great pleasure of introducing Dr. Melissa Fraser Arnett, who is on the Leadership and Management PAC. She very generously gives us her time and advice during those committee meetings and other working sessions that we have, as well as she is a fellow graduate of the Queensland University of Technology's PhD program, which is held in conjunction with the San Jose State University School of Information. So quickly though, before I give you a full introduction of Dr. Fraser Arnett, I do want to say that Dr. Allman and I are very grateful to Jill Cleese and Kim Doherty at the University's Career Center, who played a part in helping us develop this series, coming up with some of the ways that we might best promote and convey the skills that we're talking about, as well as the entire library and management PAC. They've been instrumental in getting this going too. And of course, in particular, Dr. Fraser Arnett and without further ado, I would like to let you know a bit more about her background. So she has worked experience in a wide variety of libraries. I've known Melissa for, oh gosh, must be 10 years or so, and I have known her through a number of jobs, but I didn't really understand the extent of her experience, very broad. Right now, she's the Chief of Integrated Library Services at the Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Canada. She has a team of 14 embedded librarians who provide in-depth reference services to different parliamentarians within government. She's worked in other government departments. She's worked in non-profit organizations and in public libraries as well too, including the Oakville Public Library and Ottawa Public Library. Some of her other government experience includes the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and the Centre for International Governments and Innovation in Ottawa as well. She also has taught, and I believe on a regular basis, in the Algonquin College Library Technician Program, where she's taught management and reference collection management, technology training and instruction. And as I mentioned, she completed her PhD through the San Jose Gateway PhD program, which is in partnership with the Queensland University of Technology and her MLIS at Western Ontario University in London, Ontario, Canada. She has research interests in competencies, how fitting for us today, professional identity and knowledge management. So, without further ado, Melissa, I think I'd like to hand it over to you and we'll get started. Thank you. Thanks for that introduction, and I want to thank Dr. Stensher and Dr. Allman for inviting me to speak today. It's always my pleasure to participate in SJSU events. I'm a proud alumnus myself, so I'm always happy to participate. And the timing for this presentation for me was wonderful. I've just made a transition myself in my career. I spent eight years at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in a very small library. I was the head librarian there of a team with one person, and I was doing, like many people in small libraries, in small special libraries, I was doing a little bit of everything. And then I moved into, from that would have been considered a supervisory level role. I moved into a middle management role with a team that was 14 when I started. It's grown to 17 people in the past couple of months. And so it's been a time where I've been reflecting on what leadership means to me, what management means, how roles change when you make those transitions. You'll find through your careers, and many of you have already probably experienced this, is that you have a major transition first when you first graduate and enter libraries. And you may be doing, and whether you're working immediately in a supervisory role or you're working in a frontline role without direct supervision. You have another transition when you move to middle management, and then there's another transition if you move into senior management. We've heard some of the speakers in the series talk about that, that moving to senior, that the senior executive roles. And so I'm sort of focusing on the move to the middle management role, which I think might be one that, that there might be some of you who are considering that right now. And so I'm going to give you kind of a general introduction of my understanding of leadership, responsibilities, focusing on competencies, how they can be developed, what they look like. I'm going to give you an idea of my view of leadership, and then I'm going to open it up for your questions. So I'm doing this in a little bit of a different format than the other speakers. But I welcome all the questions that you have. I'll give my presentation first. I'll try and be as brief as I can so that I have time for as many questions as you'd like to ask. So I wanted to start here with what I called my understanding of leadership, and I know this is a text heavy slide. But I really wanted to kind of frame this presentation by stating that leadership is different for everyone. There's no one best way to be a leader. I'm not here to tell you that I'm the best leader out there. My leadership style is the best. You should emulate the style if you want to succeed. Because what will make you successful as a leader and a manager is following a style that fits you and following an approach to leadership that fits you and matches your values and matches the way that you feel comfortable working. And that means sometimes you'll find that your style is a great fit with where you are. Sometimes you'll find that your style is not a great fit with where you are. But you need to learn that and know that. And you develop your style over time. You're not going to wake up one day and be a fully fledged leader. Nobody is completed their leadership journey. We're all in the process of learning and developing and growing. And it starts from the time you're very young. It starts with your early observations of leadership in the world around you. I know a lot of my values in leadership and a lot of the things that I do as a leader and manager are based on things that I learned from watching my parents. My father was one of my first leadership coaches. So everything that I'm presenting about responsibilities and competencies I'll grab my values, my observations, and then what I've learned. So we'll move on to the next slide and start getting into those responsibilities. So when I was thinking about my role and what I do every day as this is the day in the life of a leader series, I thought, well, a lot of what I do I can probably group into a couple of categories and describe how those work for you. Because we hear a lot about the glamorous aspects of leadership and there are some very exciting, stimulating parts of leadership and there are also 14 parts of leadership in management that it's good to remember because you might find that you might feel like some of the aspects of leadership are a little bit intimidating but you might also discover that some of them you've already been doing throughout your career, throughout your learning, throughout your studies and you might actually already have a good foundation in some of these areas. So it's not a big leap to make it to get the full skill set. So the first of these that I want to talk about is obtaining resources. When I look at my usual day at work, getting resources, getting people what they need to get the job done probably takes up most of my time and that couldn't mean anything from making sure that you're fully staffed. I mentioned my team has grown in the time that I started. I started in September. I had one or two vacancies when I started and then we had a bunch of people go on assignment and I had a retirement and we had all sorts of unexpected things so suddenly I was very short staffed and I had to dedicate a lot of time to staffing. It's making sure people have the physical equipment they need. Do they have the right ergonomic setup? Do they have the right software? Do they have the right hardware? Is everything working? Are things breaking down? Do they have procedures in place in order to be able to do what they need to do? There's a lot of things that people need on a day-to-day basis and if they don't have that, that's your basic foundation. If they don't have what they need to do the job, they're not going to be able to do the job. So it's not glamorous but as a leader sometimes your job is to work with the different functions at your office to figure out how you can get people what they need. And the second most important aspect of the job is building relationships with people. As building relationships with the members of your team, building relationships with the other managers in your organization, building relationships with functional specialists like BHR, that could be finance, that could be material management. If you're in a public library, building relationships with any of the stakeholders and decision makers, your town councils, municipal councils, anyone who's on your library board within universities, you're looking at relationships with deans, with provosts, with other university executives and with your library users. So you want to have relationships in place so that you know people and you know what they want, you know how to help each other in order to achieve your mutual goals. The third leadership responsibility that I found is advocating for your team while supporting the organization. You'll find that there's a balancing act involved in leading and managing. Your team has certain needs, your team has certain constraints on what they can do, and the organization has goals and objectives and your job is to support your organization's goals and objectives, but to do that while supporting your team. You don't want to take on so much work that your team is overwhelmed and stressed out and they're all getting sick and they're all banking lots of overtime and aren't happy. You need to know what your team is capable of and it could be knowing where they can stretch and learn and grow and take on new tasks, but you really have to know that balance and know that you're working through the organization but you're supporting your team. Assigning tasks and setting objectives is another bread and butter activity of leadership where you've got to know what needs to be done in order to meet your organization's objectives. You've got another right balance too in terms of how much guidance that you provide people and this is going to vary from person to person. It's going to vary from task to task and it is a challenge to learn how to assign tasks instead of objectives properly. You might have taken tasks from delegation. Delegation is one of the things that people find very challenging when they're first becoming supervisors, first becoming leaders. It's something that we all work on is figuring out what to task people with and how to help them to complete those tasks. Sometimes it's not just delegating. It's also for tasks that are part of someone's regular routine, knowing when and where to provide advice and how much of that advice to provide. I work with a reference services team. I've done reference in the past. Reference is fun and exciting and sometimes people come to me and they'll tell me about a reference question they're working on. My first impulse will be to ask them which sources they've checked and give them advice on certain sources but you've got to resist that because your team are competent, they're capable. If they want you to give them advice on how to do this, the nuts and bolts of the job and how to develop a certain strategy, they'll ask you. They might just be there to share with you an interesting story or share a challenge. Understanding when to provide advice versus when to listen is something that I would put within this bubble of assigning tasks and setting objectives. Finally, we get to the big one that people think about when they're thinking about leadership which is providing strategic direction and context. This is where we get into the vision setting and the strategic priority setting and aligning work with strategy. It can be one of the most enjoyable parts of the job if you're someone who likes to think about the big picture. It flows through all of your work but it's not something that you tend to spend a lot of hours on every day. It's something just to think about that you have to have an awareness of your context within your organization but also within sometimes the larger world of librarianship. Know what's coming, know what trends are emerging, know what technologies are potentially coming that could impact your team. That to me is sort of the big categories of the leadership responsibilities that I work on. My day-to-day, I spend my day-to-day in a couple of these bubbles that you always have to be, you can always find ways to build your skills with all of them and keep thinking about all of them as you go through. The next slide. In this one I've looked at, well, we've talked about the responsibilities. So what are the competencies, the skills and knowledge that you need to actually fulfill those competencies? And for me, there were three areas or groupings of categories that I need in order to be a manager and a leader. The first of these is functional knowledge and this is what you're gaining. This is what you gain in library school when you take management courses. This is what you gain on the job as you're learning to do different tasks. You're learning about how to do the work. So it could be anything from learning how to budget, learning how to manage people, learning how to run an effective competition, writing a good job poster for a new position, learning how to manage your time and organize tasks and prioritize. This is arranged. Some of these are hard skills, some of these are soft skills, but there's a lot of great course offerings that can teach you a bit of this. SJSU has a lot of courses, the single credit management courses, which can give you some good insights into each of these different, you know, a lot of these different functional skills. The second is contextual knowledge and this is going to vary in every role that you're in because it really depends on the organization you work with. You know, it's not enough just to know how, you know, for example, budgeting works. You need to know how budgeting works in your library because budgeting works, you know, there are principles in place, but the specific nuts and bolts of who do I speak to, what kind of things are most likely to get approved, how do I frame my argument in order to get things approved? That's going to vary from context to context. So you want to really build that organizational awareness and you also want to start training the people that you work with to give you, to look for that themselves and also to, you know, keep you in the loop to share information about that context so that your team is all, you know, sort of build that organizational awareness with you. And then the final bit is yourself knowledge. It's understanding how you work and how you like to, how you like to lead and how you like to manage. This means finding out what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, you know, being willing to, you know, the other presenters in this series have mentioned owning, you know, owning your strengths, owning your weaknesses and that's very important. You know, you need to know what works for you, what doesn't work for you, where you can grow and all of that will, you know, it impacts your happiness on the job and it impacts the happiness of the people that work with you. Because if you're miserable, if you're in a job that's a bad fit, if you find you're always, you know, trying to use competencies that are a stretch, you know, it's going to be tough and people are going to sense that difficulty. Now if you can, you know, if you're facing your strengths and weaknesses and you're letting people know this is a growth area, this is a health, I'm looking for mentorship, you'll often find there are people that will help you, but it's just, you know, developing that base of who you are, of knowing who you are and where you stand and where you need to grow. All right, so next slide. So when I'm thinking about the way I lead and what I do on the job, I have a list of questions that I try and ask myself and some of these are scary questions and my objective is to be able to answer, to be able to answer the, if I can answer yes or if I can answer positively to these questions and I feel like I'm doing a good job. And the first is, and you'll see they're related to my, to my values and to my response and my list of responsibilities. And my first question was, do people in the organization trust me? This is key to relationships. Have you built up credibility? Have you built up, you know, authority? Have you built up trust? You know, have you shown that you're someone who can get things done when people ask you to do it? If you don't have trust, then you're not going to have good relationships. Do my employees feel they can come with me, to me with new ideas and initiatives? For me, I'm a very strong believer in collaboration and employee empowerment and engagement. So I want to see people, you know, starting ideas. I want people to feel like they can experiment. And if people are not, you know, coming to me with new ideas, I want to know if it's, you know, is it because they don't feel that they're able to, you know, is it an issue in our relationship? Is it, you know, a lack of, you know, is it something structural? Is it something that they maybe don't feel confident about themselves? So I want to see, you know, I try to create environments where people feel like they can, you know, take risks and introduce initiatives. The next one is probably the hardest. Do my employees feel like they can question or criticize my actions to me directly? And this is one that nobody likes to be criticized. No one likes to hear they're wrong. But I would much rather, if my employees think that I'm wrong about something, I would much rather have them come to me directly and tell them that I'm wrong, then to hear through the grapevine that people don't think that I'm on the right track. And if people think that I'm wrong, then it gives me a chance to reflect and try and make better decisions if I'm not making good ones. I might not have all the facts. I might not be aware of certain historical elements of a situation. So the more open conversation I can have with my teams and with my peers and my supervisors, the better I can work for the team, the better I can work for the organization and the more I can grow. Do my employees feel that they were heard and their opinions and needs were taken into account in decision-making processes? This for me, as someone who believes in collaborative reading and creating a collaborative workplace, this is really related to that value. You're not going to make everyone happy all the time with the decisions you make. It's inevitable that there are going to be people who don't like what you've decided, but can they live with it? And part of whether they can live with it or not is if they feel that their objections have been heard. You might not be able to change what you're doing. You might not be able to change a process. You might be in a position where you're pushing through a change that was made at a much higher level where you may or may not agree with it, but do you feel that you had a chance to state your objections, that your objections were considered, that there was an adequate answer when your objections were raised? That's something that I would look at. And it's part of making your decisions defensible and justifiable if you've thought about alternatives. If you've thought about the impacts, that to me is an important part of decision-making for leadership. My next question again for myself relates to leadership, to relationships. Did my actions help to build a relationship or did they damage a relationship? I found early in my career I was very concerned with being right. I came out of library school thinking I've got this degree. I'm now an expert in libraries and management. When I'm presenting a model of doing something, it's based on the evidence and it's based on all the best practice about how metadata should look. So people should just accept that and move along with it and you can imagine the reaction that that type of attitude had. Over time and working with projects, you realize that it's is it more important to be right or is it more important that you've got the project, that you've achieved the project's objective, that you've got a team that functions. And so you focus more on the relationship than winning the argument. My next question that I asked myself is do people feel that I respond to their requests and questions effectively and efficiently? One of the key roles in being a leader that I sort of I realized didn't put on my responsibilities chart but one of your key roles is as an information conduit. You're bringing information to the team, you're taking information from the team and passing them on to your managers. So are you a good information conduit or are you a bottleneck where information is getting lost? That affects trust, that affects ability to get things done and that's sort of the second question after that. Are you specifically thinking about information flows? And then finally, am I able to defend and justify my decisions? Have I looked at the evidence? Have I considered the team? Have I considered all the stakeholders? So these are questions that you're not going to ask yourself every, you know, you're not going to get a chance to ask yourself every minute of every day. But it's good to take time to reflect on these. Especially if you're having if you're having a time in your job where things are tough. If you've made a transition to a new role. If you're working on a particularly difficult project. If you are, you know, transitioning to a different role. If you're preparing for the start of a project and you're figuring out how to put a plan together. You're not going to achieve all of these all the time. We have bad days. You might get in an argument with an employee. But you always have a chance to rebuild the relationship later. You always have a second chance to try and work towards your ideals. Because we're all growing and we're all learning and we're all developing. So that was my that was my very, my very quick review of my my view of leadership. And so now I'm open to any questions that you have. Thank you very much for the overview and introduction, Melissa. I just following on Melissa's lead everyone. We're going to open the floor to questions from any of you or comments. You can put those in the chat. Or raise your hand if you want to do that. We can get you to unmute your microphone. But in the meantime, while you're thinking about that, Melissa, Sue and I have a couple of questions we'd like to ask you to. I think maybe you've seen some of these before. But one of the things that we hear from students a lot and the career center has heard as well too is just around you know the kind of fear of taking on a management role and leadership role because of the human relations aspects involved. So what role did you have in your supervisory experience? Did you have before you took on your first management or leadership role? Let's see. Before my first role, my previous role before this one, I did have a staff person. I did have one employee who worked for me. So I was in a supervisory role then. I had unofficial supervision in roles before that. I'd supervised volunteers. So you sort of learn that supervision there's two aspects for it. There's formal supervision and then there's sort of the informal relationship building. When it comes to formal supervision, you're actually very strongly supported in most organizations. You have human resources department. You have suites of HR policies. So I learned in going through whenever I had to do anything on the job that involves like a formal aspect of supervision or giving a performance evaluation, there were always things that I could model that work on. I'd go speak to my managers and get advice from them. I'd go speak to HR and they'd help me through the process. So I never had to do any of that alone. When it came to the less documented aspects of human resource of supervising and human resource management, that's your interpersonal skill. So I mean those are things that you learn through all your relationships with people over time. You know it works, you know it doesn't. You learn your style of relating to people. So you start learning that when you work with teams in school and not just in your master's program but throughout your educational career. So I had a fair bit of supervisory experience over the years because I always found even from my first role, you're always at least supervising a volunteer. So you're never working in isolation. You always have some people who are working for you. So right from the time you graduate when I moved from managing one person to managing 14 and then 17, it was I was a bit worried because it was a big leap. But I found that the principals are there. It's just the complexity comes from the fact that everyone you're working with people and everyone's different. So you learn about, you build a relationship with people over time and there's no there's no secret to it. There's no magic to it. It's not different in the work context than it is in other contexts of your life. It's something that you apply a lot of what you learned elsewhere. That's so true isn't it? That idea of transferable skills and I know you are well familiar with that idea of transferable skills. For those of you who are participating today Melissa has written a wonderful article around transferable competencies when we're looking at moving between library types or even two jobs that are not that are non-traditional. So some of Melissa's work is around librarians who have the skills and use the skills from your MLIS degree and work in other kinds of settings. And so she thinks and writes a lot about this idea of transferable competencies. That leads me into my second question for you Melissa. So maybe timely. You just talked about how when you came into your current position last fall there was kind of a bit of drama in terms of a few people left people got conned or whatever you had to rebuild your team and bring on quite a few people and you spent a lot of time getting new members up and running on your team and so those of our participants who are in the program right now what would you say to them as an employer and as someone who does some hiring when you're hiring people into those positions or any position or a leadership position what do you think are the most important skills or traits or qualities that stood out to you during that period of hiring or if you were to hire again what advice would you give our students about things that they should try to convey when they're looking for jobs that involve leadership? Well it's those transferable competencies right and it's a lot of softer skills that we look for so for example when we're hiring we look at things that are related to emotional intelligence we look at your ability to listen active listening is vital your ability to teach others and I don't mean formal having you know formal training and education but your ability to listen to what people need to adjust your communication style to match what people need so that you're not talking down to people but that you're also not using too much jargon and making things too complex for people to understand we look at time management is vital in my workplace we work for the Library of Parliament so we serve Parliamentarians so members of Parliament and Senators in Canada so these are very these are very busy clients they're very high profile clients they have a lot of information requests and they're all VIPs so when we get requests we have often very very quick turnaround time we often have very high volumes of requests we cannot keep people waiting when they say something's needed at a certain time it's got to be there so we do need people who who can juggle large amounts of work and that organization time management it's also communication with your team sometimes it's negotiation with clients sometimes it's learning to work with a team to be able to understand where you can get help we don't want to see people try and be superheroes and take everything on alone you need to be able to talk to your colleagues and let them know when you need help and that's not a sign of weakness of really understanding yourself and what's needed and understanding what goes into the task writing and writing abilities are also very important because in our context we have most we respond in writing we provide written reference responses to people so you need to be able to write very clearly you need to be able to organize your thoughts you need to be able to provide something in a good quick structure that someone can read and understand very quickly in Canada we're a bilingual country so we actually do respond my team responds in French and English to questions that come in but it's that communication that organization that being able to speak with people and have good relationships with people those are the things that we really look for that make people stand out as being able to do the job and I think that's not unique to our setting I think that those are skills that people look for no matter what type of library they're in thank you so much Melissa and I want to encourage people in the audience to type in any question that you have this is an opportunity for you to find out at any level about management or leadership but Melissa I have a question you had said at the very beginning that you observed your father and got some leadership training at a very early age are there other examples that you can think of either people that you have worked for or observed who were either strong or weak leaders who have influenced your style I think I've learned from a lot of people over the years I think really every there are so many opportunities for learning and you want to try and take advantage of as many as you can and I learned different things from different people I think my I spent eight years at the Office of Privacy Commissioner of Canada and my manager there was excellent because she gave me what I needed I had a manager there who allowed me to experiment and redefine the boundaries of my job and try new things and that's something that I appreciated so much and I passed on to and I try to pass that on to the people in my team I learned from the people that I went to school with I really love Dr. Stenstrom's work on influence she's looked at influence and really highlighted relationships and that's a lesson that I've really pulled into a lot of the work that I do because of knowing that if you want to get things done for your library you've got to build liking and relationships with the people that you're trying to work with and that you're trying to influence that can have an impact on your library's budget in terms of leadership that I've seen in the past that hasn't gone well I've had some lessons stellar experiences in my career I think we all do I think we've all had jobs that weren't a good fit and I think one of the worst fits that I had was a case where my manager was actually very new to management as well and I think that that med made her a little bit a little bit more inclined to micromanagement a little bit more inclined to having very harsh reactions to any mistakes that I made as an employee every employee makes mistakes but how you react to that is really going to set their tone in the job I made a mistake in that role and I was punished for it for months because my manager felt that any mistake that her team made reflected poorly on her and they had to be discouraged from ever making mistakes again and so I'm not inclined to take that kind of approach with people for me because I know I've made mistakes, everyone makes mistakes and I'd like and you move on so in terms of other influences in addition to watching what people do and reading on management and leadership there's also a lot of popular culture that you can kind of look at and study and this kind of started with my father who believed he was I guess he had intended for me to be a manager so we'd watch movies and he'd say well look at what the leaders doing in this sometimes movies about military movies are actually a great place to start where you can see teams in action and sort of look at what files you like and what's working, what's not working so there's plenty of examples and models you can look at there is a question in the chat I don't know if you can see it from where you are but I'll read it out loud I am a strong introvert and just getting started in professional service leadership what are some tips for introverts on leading I am also pretty good at written communication I struggle sometimes with verbal communication how can I improve I can relate to that I'm an introvert as well for those of you who are familiar with Myers-Briggs I'm an INTJ so I'm not a naturally gregarious person I'm not the person who comes into the room and socializes with everyone but I've seen people like that my mother is one of those people who can go into a room and have a 30 minute conversation with everybody in there and it's a skill that I've admired that I've never had I'm not going to be that person so I find some of the tips are first off you can be a leader without being an extrovert there are quite a few introverts who are leaders and strong leaders part of it is your strengths are going to be different than an extrovert you might not be the one talking on the fly that doesn't mean you're not coming up with good ideas you can encourage you can try and find platforms to share your thoughts in ways that work for you if you don't want to give an oral presentation you can send your ideas in writing in some cases if you do want to work on verbal communication there are different courses and different activities you can undertake to do that I'd say practice with presenting practice with small safe groups first if you're in a small work team ask if you can make maybe a presentation to your small work team on if you've gone on a training session ask to give a summary of the training session to the group just to get you started there if you don't want to do it in the workplace there are groups like Toastmasters Debating and Public Speaking so there are ways that you can work on that I was actually involved in community theater when I was in high school and I find that for me as an introvert if I have a purpose for the conversation if I have developed a speech if I have a script that I'm working on if I know the objective of the interaction that helps me to do well rather than going and having to completely improvise on the spot there's another question have you had any issues with being a woman in leadership? that's an interesting question I think it's one that I think every woman is going to and being a woman is part of when you are a woman it's part of who you are it is going to impact how people react to you I had I probably had people react to me negatively in ways that I may or may not have noticed I think for me the bigger I've had more issues with people thinking I was too young for leadership rather than having an issue with me being a woman in leadership and it might be even because I'm a woman that you become a sectionality in that if I were a young man I wouldn't be quite as much they might not have reacted as much as they would to me being a younger woman I find if I always try and turn a disadvantage into an advantage when I'm faced with people who I think are not giving me the same amount of respect that they would if I were in a different category whether it's whether I'm perceived as not being experienced enough or if people have issues with a woman in leadership and sometimes I find that it helps you I'm trying to articulate this the best example is when I was in university I got involved in debate and I remember I was in a session where I was it was a historical debate and I was the only woman in the room all the other debaters were men and I noticed that they wouldn't be quite as harsh I think they didn't want to fight with me because I was the woman so they were kind of trying to be gentle on me well I wasn't gentle on them I kind of turned it around and I ended up being one of the most one of the most awkward people in there it was a historical debate on Suez Canal crisis and I think I was representing you with the Flavia so in the model you went to debate that would not have put me in a good position to make any points but because I did work extra I think I probably worked extra hard because I was the only woman in the room and I ended up winning a prize for the debate so it's I think we always have to we're never going to be in a situation where aspects of ourselves are not going to either give us privilege or potentially take away from our privilege but we have to be aware of how it's playing out what are the dynamics in the room and then what can we do about it we can't influence how other people are going that we can certainly we can raise awareness when we see aggressions, when we see microaggressions we can raise awareness when we see that structures are set up in a way that disadvantage women and then we can try and do our best to overcome them because it is possible and there are ways to overcome it I think I also want to mention before I took this role I saw the coasting for this job right as I was coming back from maternity leave and part of me thought well should I go for it I've just come back from a year of maternity leave I have a baby at home can I take on the challenge of working a much more senior role and having longer hours with a baby at home and the answer was yes I won the role I worked out with my husband different ways of managing the house different ways of managing daycare pickup so it's there are some extra challenges but there are ways to overcome it you can overcome it in your own actions you can overcome it by working with the people around you by working if you're lucky enough to have a supportive partner at home by working with them I'd love to say no there's no issues being a woman in leadership and it's all easy and it's all good it's all different some people are going to have a harder time than others but you're not alone and there are ways to help that you can find help there are people you can talk to and I would encourage you to do it if you're in an organization where you really feel like women are disadvantaged go and talk to other women in that organization because you might find that when a couple of you are working together to raise it you can have a bigger impact in leadership skills either through a mentor or through professional associations can you talk about either of those and then before you do that I'll say remind people please enter any questions you want in the chat so on finding a mentor I'm lucky that I can talk about my own experience and also the experience of participants that I interviewed when I did my thesis and a lot of the people I talked to did work with mentors I did participate in a formal mentorship program in a library association when I was a new librarian and that was great I met with a senior librarian we went for dinner, I got to ask questions I tried to shadow people on the job I watched what my bosses do I've got to meet people in associations through not formal mentoring programs but just participating committees and watching what people do and learning from them learning in the SJSU program you get to meet people who have a lot of great experiences coming from different types of libraries so I got to benefit from that I think mentorship doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be formal it can be an informal it can be as simple as just going for coffee with someone asking questions and you'll find them within a library community they're really open they're really willing to stop and talk so I would just say if you reach out and ask someone and I'm sure you'll find there's a lot of people out there who will be happy to answer thank you for that answer Melissa I've got a question for you first again while everyone might be thinking about any of their last questions to put in the chat and take advantage of you and your time while you're here but kind of a big one for you personally, what drew you to leadership and why were you considering taking on these bigger and bigger challenges was it about the work that felt that you made you want to apply and become a leader within the sector I think for me I like to have an opinion and I like to be consulted like I want to have an impact on what's happening in my world I don't like to just sit back and let things happen to me or let decisions be made without having a seat at the table and you can't if you're not going to be a leader you're not going to show leadership and you're not going to have a seat at the table that's what happens now you don't necessarily have to move into management to have a voice but it does make things easier there's still a lot of higher teeth in this world we're not in totally flat organizations we may be moving towards flatter models but if you want to really have a voice you need to be willing to take the risk and jump into decisions of greater responsibility so that's for me why I did it I'm the kind of person that just I can't sit back and let others make good decisions I had to have a seat it's great it sounds like a combination of you were brought up from an early age with that attitude and also the nature of your personality as well too we're going to put out another call for questions from the audience again while we have Melissa on the line I have a quick one for you I don't know if you can answer this off the top of your head Melissa one of the questions we've been asking some other participants is if there's anything that you've read lately or anything that stands out to you that you would recommend that people read on the topic of leadership and management okay there's a couple and so this is going to I'm curious what people think of this or if they've read it in the last couple of years that really made me think and reflected on the values that I have is how to win friends and influence people because it really focuses on having relationships listening to people focusing on having not just being after your own interests but working to achieve new goals so for me that really spoke to where the place that I lead from I've read a lot of different management things over the years there are a lot of the category of management fables their fun read some of them stick with you more than others I think there are a couple of change management that are good fun and nice quick reads I think one of the other presenters talked about my iceberg is melting who moved my cheese I think I actually found that one more fun which is also about change management and the need to constantly be moving forward and thinking about new challenges and new strategies but I also would recommend the Harvard Business Review is a big one if you don't have time because I know a lot of people are very busy you don't necessarily have time to read read a lot I would say if you have a subscription free subscription for the Harvard Business Review like tip of the day which is it's a paragraph of text it's based on research that's in the business review so I'd say if you only have a couple of minutes today and you want to get a good mix of different management advice just sign up for that those are all great titles classic that's the question that I don't know if everyone saw this in the chat I was scrolling by a little bit but the question Melissa is what's the male-female balance at your workplace and do you have anything to share with us about managing males and females okay interesting now I feel as a woman leader I feel very privileged that I have often worked in workplaces with a lot of female managers and senior managers and part of that is in libraries where women tend to dominate numerically at the office of the privacy commissioner we actually had a couple of commissioners during my tenure there I was there for eight years but two of the three commissioners that I worked for were women I remember sitting at the senior executive table at some meetings and seeing that women outnumbered men in the executive positions for a while there and here at the library of parliament the parliamentary librarians it's just the assistant parliamentary librarian is a woman so I've always had a lot of strong female managers and senior managers to look up to in terms of staff I tend to have more women and men work on my teams again probably because in librarianship we still tend to be about 80% female but I think that the difference that I found in managing people are less related to their sex than it is to other aspects of their personality I pay more attention to whether people are introverts or extroverts than I do to their sex because that really affects how I plan meetings my introverts hate it when I throw a new topic a new brainstorming topic a discussion topic at the meeting without any advance warning so when I'm actually planning strategies I think about communication style I think about those kind of preferences more than I do about the sex it's a great point you know often management so much more than just sort of those single traits even though gender can make a difference there's a whole package to everyone that you're supervising any last questions from our crowd and let me extend that to Dr. Alman is there do you have anything any other questions you'd like to ask before we wrap up no I think we're all set and I just wanted to thank Melissa so much for taking time to share her thoughts on leadership with us it's been very enlightening and thank you for all your suggestions thank you for having you it's been my pleasure Melissa I'd like to thank you too it's always a treat to speak with you and hear you speak with other participants as well for coming today great turnout again and for those of you who've been to our other two sessions you know that this is being recorded so the link gets posted on our website as soon as our technicians have a chance to get that all set up usually within a few days and I would invite everybody to come and join in on our last of the four part series next week same time Friday I believe 10 a.m. Pacific we're all in different time zones so for me it was 2 o'clock in the afternoon so check the time on our website and we look forward to having you there otherwise thank you again Melissa wonderful discussion and have a great weekend