Developing library leaders and leadership skills (part 2 of 3)
Developing leadership skills, as San Diego County Library Training and Web Services Manager Polly Cipparrone is discovering, is a continual process with plenty of surprises and opportunities.
Having been a longtime participant in Infopeople’s Master Trainer group, Cipparrone leapt at the opportunity to take workshops through Infopeople’s Eureka! Leadership Program and then attend the “Eureka! Leadership Program Institute” in San Diego earlier this year. She has, since finishing the onsite work at the institute, been working with colleagues to shape a project which will continue her development as a leader while making a major contribution to the San Diego County Library: helping to implement RFID (radio-frequency identification) service in several library facilities as a collection management tool and to streamline the entire process through which library members and guests borrow library materials.
“My project is to be an internal and external customer care agent partnering with our branches and our support services to help make the transition using RFID to affect the changes within the branches,” she said during a conversation earlier this week. “I’m trying to make it clear that I’m not there with a point of view, but to help bridge a gap. It’s really more of a communication thing.”
The project will begin with three branches participating, she noted: “Ultimately, the success of those three branches is going to filter out to the rest of the organization, so it’s really important that people feel that they were heard…so we can expand that experience out to the others.”
Among Cipparrone’s surprises was the realization that leaders play an important liaison role within their organizations: “I think that prior to Eureka!, my feeling was that somehow…you had to follow a certain path and you needed to improve things. …
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