What I love about where I work ... or Our Strategic Plan
Okay ... this will sound weird ... the three things I'm going to talk about are from the preposed revisions of our strategic plan ... normally. that'd be enough to make anyone nod off, but do me a favor ... read on ... 'cause this is cool stuff ...
We started with the outcome ...
“People benefit from Johnson County Library’s role in the community.”
The first of three strategies was ...
"Proactively create a culture of engagement within the library."
As you can probably guess, this was our way of saying that engagement starts at home ... we need our staff, across all dimensions of the organization, to think of their work as community engagement ... to that end we need to go to “engagement school,” or as we’re planning on calling it, the Ambassador Coaching Institute. This staff development activity will better prep our people (who were probably hired to provide utterly different services 10+ years ago) to more easily and ably deal with the library’s challenges of today and tomorrow.
In addition to our informal approach to readying staff for engagement, we also said that we’d need to establish formal liaisons to other organizations, institutions, and community groups focusing on neighborhood and niche service development. We’ve kinda kicked that off already, as we’re hired a youth services librarian to liaise between the county’s school districts and us. She’s only been on staff for a few months, but her presence has already brought us closer to the schools. Formal liaisons to county agencies, NPOs, and even industries can only be a positive as we try to lock in engagement networks across subdivisions, neighborhoods, cities, and the county.
We recognized that this shift to engagement would mean a shifting of resources ... so we’ve stated that we really need to examine the needs we’d have with regard to people hours and skills to create this engagement stuff ... I can’t tell you for sure what it will look like when we’ve done it, but I can guarantee it’ll be different than what you see now ...
Isn’t that cool!?!?! .... more later on the next two strategies ...
posted by ic-tim at 7:10 PM
2 Comments:
Two things: first, I am seriously waiting for the time when my nameplate might possibly grace your illustrious facility. What a concept--"Let's plan for change, and then involve staff in the change instead of ramming it down their throats." Insipring work, all of you. I will even keep what I think are the inevitable cynical comments to myself; I think you deserve credit just for TRYING.
Second: Go Shockers, indeed!
At our Boston Public Library public records of the institution are not readily available as the public records should be in compliance with FOI Freedom of Information public records principles, sunshine open public meetings principles, open government principles, intellectual freedom principles, freedom to read principles. So BPL departments' annual curatorial reports to the board and BPL president are censored. BPL consultants' reports, studies are censored similarly even where they are defined as public. Grey literature http://greynet.org of our favorite cities' public libraries should be available as study materials for long range planning and development. How ironical that BPLusers, BPL staff, BPL unions' stewards are kept at too long an arms reach from a process of long range planning that should be communities' constituencies based.
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