Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that your week has gone well and you are looking forward to a lovely weekend. It has been another busy week here on campus and I’m looking forward to some relaxation this weekend. Weather is supposed to be lovely and I really want to do some more hiking and birding this weekend. But first, to the topic of today, I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently and wanted to write about it briefly today. I think being a good leader at any level is hard, but not complicated. Let me explain.

I know there are countless books on leadership and becoming a leader and leading from the middle, etc., etc. I don’t really want to get into all of that today. I just want to talk about what I’ve found from listening and learning as I’ve been working since I was a teen. All the people I’ve considered leaders, wherever they’ve been in the formal hierarchy, have had the same qualities: empathy, true listening, great communication, clear vision, professionalism, and the ability to get things done. These are the qualities and skills that I try to embody and keep in mind as I continue to work as a professional and want to just talk about a bit today.

There is no secret to great leadership. It is hard work, but it isn’t complicated. Basically, try to be compassionate and just and you are halfway there. Why would I say that? Because everything, except specialized knowledge of your field, are attributes you should try to hone in yourself to be a better human and better person for yourself and for those whom you interact with.

The saying may be trite, but it is true that “no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” Empathize with people, truly be empathetic. See the world from another’s point of view, be down there in the muck and help out, figure out what people care about and show that you care about them and amazing things can be accomplished. Not complicated, but hard. Check out Brene Brown’s video on empathy if you want to show someone how important empathy is to not just work, but to life.

Empathy requires true listening. To listen truly you must actively engage with that person, ask questions, figure out what they are trying to convey to you and to really understand where they are coming from. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) matter to a leader if your views are radically different, truly listening requires an openness that is infectious and an experience of empathy. You have to truly listen to find the good and the bad, what motivates and what is soul-sucking for the people in your life and in your work. Listening allows leaders to figure out what they should be doing and what they can be doing. Amazing things happen when we listen to each other.

If I could say nothing else about leadership, I would say the the best leaders I’ve known are amazing communicators. I think I could leave it at that because true communication requires empathy and listening and professionalism and vision and the ability to get things done. You know how people say there are two ways of saying anything? The first way that will offend everyone and get nothing done and the second way that will get things done? It is totally true and anyone who wants to be a leader needs to be able to communicate well. And communication is more than words on a page or your voice in a meeting. Communication is about body language and how you arrange your physical space. What are you trying to convey as a leader? What do you want to accomplish? If it is anything at all, you better be able to communicate.

Leaders obviously need to have a clear vision that can inspire others and help lead everyone to a goal or set of goals. If you don’t have a vision, how can you lead? But also, the vision needs to not be written in stone, but be malleable based on changes in environment, in the larger organization, etc. Perhaps more than vision, leaders need to have courage of conviction in order to lead and inspire others.

All leaders should be professionals. I don’t care what a genius you are or if you are a rock star, nothing gives another person the right to belittle, demean, or shame another human being. Leaders should always be professionals and insist that others in the organization be professionals as well. Professionalism, to me, is a requirement for leadership. If you aren’t professional in your interactions (which doesn’t mean you don’t have a sense of humor, leaders should have a sense of humor to be effective), I don’t see how you can possibly lead. No one wants to be led by a bully.

Finally, I believe leaders should have the ability to get things done. You need to be effective in your position in order to continue to be a leader. Doesn’t have to be huge leaps forward, but small wins which are shared and communicated. You can get things done if you are a decent human being and hopefully as a leader, too.

So leadership, to me, isn’t complicated. It can be hard and it is a lot of work. But it is necessary work and good work and honest work. We can all be leaders. Remember as Yves Morieux said at TED work is complex, but we don’t have to make it complicated.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, dear readers. I’ll be back soon with more news and notes. Allons-y!

Happy Friday, dear readers! It is lovely to be at the end of the workweek and ready for the weekend. I’m excited that we don’t have anywhere to travel this weekend and hopefully can do some reading and relaxing. With the term back in session, the weeks are quite busy. Today I have a couple of useful articles and some thoughts about starting a new year. So let’s get into it.

Lifehacker has a number of wonderful posts and I think this post on the best time to buy anything is particularly appropriate at the beginning of the year. Yay for savings! Especially if you are planning to buy anything big this year, timing your purchase can really help financially.

While I love having colleagues all over the world, scheduling meetings in multiple time zones can be difficult. So I’m looking forward to using World Meeting Time for my next multiple time zone meeting and hopefully it will make the planning easier. If you have any other tools you use for scheduling meetings for people in multiple time zones, I’d love to hear about it in comments.

Finally, some thoughts on the beginning of the year. I always find it lovely to have a fresh calendar at the beginning of a year. It makes it seem like anything is possible. It is just my first week back at work, but already my planner is filling up with meetings to attend, classes to teach, and more project deadlines. I’m hoping to be able to maintain some sense of calm as the quarter continues and make sure that I spread calmness and not anxiety in the library. So I’m going to be more mindful of my energy levels and how many projects I currently have in play so that I can devote my best energies to my current commitments and only add those things that I can also fully commit to doing well. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes. I’m also excited to be teaching again this quarter and hopefully by the end of the quarter my students will be excited to have learned a lot in class, too.

Have a wonderful weekend, full of all the things that you love. I’ll be back next week. Allons-y!

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you’ve had a lovely week and have something fun planned for the weekend. I have a couple of articles to share, well, actually an article and a slideshow, today before we all get into the weekend. So let’s just get into it.

Since many people are getting ready to leave on vacation for the holidays, I thought Lifehacker’s article on 10 household things to check before you leave for a vacation to be particularly timely. A nice list to check before leaving on your next trip. I’m a firm believer in checklists when packing for travel and getting ready for travel. Use your brain space for things other than remembering if you packed your toothbrush or not, so this was definitely a good article for me and hopefully useful for you, too.

Also, the holidays are a time for telling stories and often for catching up with family and friends. And who doesn’t like a good story? I love listening to people who tell good stories and reading work from author’s who write good stories. So I really enjoyed this slideshow on Pixar’s 22 rules to phenomenal storytelling. While it is obviously aimed at writers of fiction, I think it could be used for oral storytelling, too, especially during the holidays. Because, while we are catching up on what has happened over the year and that is usually non-fiction storytelling, “all good stories deserve embellishment,” as Gandalf would say.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and lovely holiday, wherever the road takes you. I’m going to be taking a holiday break from blogging, too. The Waki Librarian will be back in the new year. May you have a wonderful rest of the year and an amazing start to the new year. Allons-y!

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that your week has gone well and that you have a lovely weekend planned. I can hardly believe that we are a week into December already. Time is definitely flying and I have so much holiday baking to do! But for right now, I want to share some networking tips with you today.

First, I don’t like the term networking, but am using it since we basically can hopefully agree what it means. Because I’m not a fan of “networking,” but instead prefer to think of it as actually making a connection with a person instead of trying to self-promote or get something, I’m totally a fan of ways to make “networking events” more useful and enjoyable. I really appreciated this article on Lifehacker, how I became the kind of person who can work a room. I think probably just about everyone has had at least a moment of dread of stepping into a room at a conference, business meeting, or event when you don’t know anyone, so tips about how to join in on conversations are extremely useful.

Also, of no shock to readers of this blog, I’m a big fan of Susan Cain (aka the author or Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. So I really enjoyed the entire video interview from this article, network as an introvert with a “socialization quota”. Although I don’t fully agree with her intro analogy of women in the 1950s and 1960s to today’s introverts, I do think she offers a lot of useful ideas and tips for introverts for networking and socialization. Definitely useful not just for work, but definitely with the holiday season coming up and all the events that go with that.

Finally, because it is holiday travel season, one last helpful article: create an air travel emergency kit to survive common airplane woes. Make flying (and delays) a bit easier to take.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend full of good reads, good food, and good friends. I’ll be back on Tuesday. Allons-y!

Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope that your week has gone well, you’ve been as productive as you’ve wanted to be and have something fun planned for the weekend. I also hope you had a lovely Halloween, if you partook in celebrating it. Today I want to talk to you about something that has been pinging around in my mind for the last few weeks. I want to talk about caring and I want to tell about why I’ve been thinking about it so much at work over the last few weeks.

So I was feeling in need of some inspiration a few weeks ago and requested a copy of The Big Moo again through the library lending service at work. I really enjoyed reading it a year or so ago and there was a chapter in it I wanted to especially re-read. Unsurprisingly that chapter was entitled, “Care!” [Also, an aside, even if you don’t like marketing books, I recommend The Big Moo, it is quite good]

So I’ll let you in on why I was thinking about caring so much. At my university we are going through a lot of assessment processes at the moment, and gearing up for WASC accreditation visit. And I believe in assessment and figuring out how to do what we do better and connect more with our students and keep the morale of our staff and faculty up and really be the best we can be. What I’m not quite as much a fan of is writing a lot of reports and having complicated forms to fill out, whether that is at work or just filling out forms at the DMV. I know reports are important, and I also do my best in filling them out, but I agree with the author of “Care!” that basically things will take care of themselves if you care and hire people that care because it shines through in whatever they do.

Books and reports can only tell you so much if you want to improve your services or products, no matter if you are a library or a giant corporation. You really have to care and you have to talk with people to see what they like, what they need, what confuses or frustrates them, and how you can help. You may think you know what people need, but you really don’t until you ask and they’ll only tell you the truth, well most of them, if they can tell that you actually care.

I care deeply about what I do. It comes through when I’m on the reference desk and when I’m teaching, when I’m on committees and when I’m researching. It doesn’t matter if I’ve answered the same question twenty times today, it is the first time that I’m answering the question for this particular student. While I may be tired of answering printing questions, it is of the greatest importance to the students trying to print their midterm exams. When I’m teaching, answering emails promptly, reviewing tricky concepts in class, and taking the time to talk with students about the concepts that are giving them problems demonstrates caring. Enthusiasm shows people that you care. I might dislike committee work when meetings seem to eat up the majority of my day, but they are vital if run properly and vital to actually look people in the eye and say that “I hear you” and that we are going to work together to get things done. In my research, I care about being truthful to my data and to my respondents and caring in how I suggest implications for improving practice or theory or learning.

The saying is really true that no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care. That is why I believe that it is important to be caring in all that we do (or at least try, because we are all human). Caring will show up in policies and in how we treat not just our patrons, users, or customers, but our colleagues, supervisors, and supervisees. Communication is, as it always is, key to building and maintaining good relationships and caring allows one to do this.

So bring on the assessments and reports, give me the opportunity to tell you why our people make this library vibrant and vital, but please show me that you care and that we’re people to you. Caring makes it all worthwhile and much more pleasant, too, when deadlines loom and there is so much to get done.

And because one needs to care for self as well, here’s a lovely photo that will hopefully help you feel calm as you finish up the work week and hopefully plan some time for yourself this weekend:

I hope you have a wonderful weekend. I’ll be back on Tuesday with more. Allons-y!