The start of #alaac17 brings the end of the #alaemergingleaders program, which means an informative poster session! And bonus, because it was the 10th anniversary of the EL program, there was cake! Being on this year’s ALSC Emerging Leaders Team, I got to present our findings on the path to youth library leadership to a multitude of interested librarians.
Here’s the elevator speech: we were charged with the task to examine leadership development trends, the pathway to library leadership for youth librarians, and the needs of ALSC members. We discovered that leadership and management are not interchangeable. Management is hierarchical and leadership can happen at any level. Leadership is something that anyone can do at any point in their career, whether it is in their jobs or in an organization, like ALSC. But, the typical pathway for youth library leadership is taking on a youth services management position, eventually moving on to higher level management/administration. We found nine different needs of ALSC members in terms of leadership development. The one most asked about was emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is changing the mindset and attitude to one of confidence and taking risk to apply for and take on a leadership or management role. Finally, we provided ALSC with a few suggestions of how they can use our findings in the future.
All the emerging leader teams had great projects and posters, from “Advancing Diversity in Public Libraries” to helping create a “GLBT Round Table Archive.” The ten groups put in a lot of hard work to help their divisions and round tables to improve the library world for all. And at the end of the day we walked out of the room as emerged leaders!