I'm Jennifer Peterson and I'm helping to host today's session and I'm so glad that you all are here.
We are going to move into our second session and begin our regarding.
I would like to welcome Melanie Hawks from the University of Utah, and Heather Sostrom from the NEFLIN, the Northeast Florida Library Information Network, and I'm going to go ahead and pass the ball on over to Heather and we'll let you unmute yourselves, Heather and Melanie.
Welcome!
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Thank you so much.
Welcome, everyone, to session two.
As Jennifer mentioned, this is building on successful examples and exploring programs that work.
But first we'll begin with our introductions.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Hi, everyone, I'm Melanie Hawks, I'm the organizational development manager at the Marriott Library, at the University of Utah.
I have been in this role for about the last eight years, but I have been kicking around in the training and library fields for about 20 years now, including a five-year stint at the association of research libraries as their program officer for training and leadership development.
I'm going to talk to you a little bit later on about two programs that I have implemented here in a large research library.
>> HEATHER SOSTROM: And my name is Heather Sostrom, and I work as the continuing education coordinator for the Northeast Florida Library Information Network.
Just a little bit of background about NEFLIN, our office is located in Orange Park, outside of Jacksonville, Florida and we are one of five multitype library consortium in the state.
We have been around for about 23 years as a regional library and we draw from a 24 county region in northeast Florida.
We serve more than 550 public, academic, special and K-12 school libraries.
So the people that we work with come from a variety of backgrounds.
What we do is provide members access to training and resource sharing, research and development.
I'm personally responsible for planning all aspects of NEFLIN's continuing education program and NEFLIN classes are free of charge for all Florida library staff, not just those from our membership area.
Personally, I have been working if libraries for over 20 years.
Prior to my work here at NEFLIN, I worked as a branch manager for a small branch in a large public library.
And I worked in youth services, government documents and I have been a media specialist in a K through 5 elementary school and done some variety of front line staffing positions within academic libraries.
I'm also a graduate and current mentor in the sunshine state library leadership institute, developed by the state of Florida.
And I sit on ALA's Learning Roundtable executive board.
That's enough about me!
Why the symposium?
So as Jerilyn mentioned in session one, this symposium came together because of a perceived lack of management within the library profession, and its prevalence in library organizations.
So after an informal survey of Learning Roundtable members, volunteers came together.
So what began sort of as a series of conversations quickly turned into an opportunity to share experiences with supervisory skills development.
This is session two.
This session covers the what of supervisor development.
Melanie and I will discuss several successful examples of programs currently in place.
We'll cover actual real life supervisory skills very maniment programs that you can learn -- development programs that you can learn from.
In the first session you learned about best practices to help you construct a program in such a way that works for your target learners.
The third and final session will look at how to position supervisor development so this is an easy sell, both at the organization and the individual level.
For the rest of this hour, we'll be delving into the what of supervisor developments.
We are going to look at some successful models and learn about how those models drivers, those challenges and opportunities we have for improvement.
We are going to be asking attendees to interact with us by typing questions and comments in the chat box, but also by using WebJunction's annotation tools.
Jennifer, did you want to talk about those?
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Certainly, I can do that.
So those of you who weren't here in the last hour know that we are asking folks to find the annotation tools under the small marker at the top left corner of the slide.
If you are on a Mac, those might be at the bottom, but go down afterway to the -- what may be a square at this point.
It may be a check mark for you if you have been here.
And pick that check mark and that's what we will be using and feel free to practice on this slide.
Excellent.
Look at all of those check marks!
All right.
And then we'll have you pause your practice and as we move to next slide, we'll ask for your input.
>> HEATHER SOSTROM: Okay.
I have think everyone has got it.
So by way of introducing the what of supervisory schools development, I think it's important that we all have a similar idea of what those skills are and what we are developing.
So is leadership the same thing as management?
Is being a good leader the same thing as being a good supervisor?
So I have some questions here.
You can go ahead and put some checks in the box that you think makes the most sense to you.
And I'm going to offer a few generalities.
As I do so, I will ask you to use your check marks to put the check marks in the area that most align with your views.
Leaders focus on the fewure and the road ahead.
Supervisors focus on daily functions.
Leader know where to go but supervisors know how to get there.
Leaders are responsible for influence, mentoring, counseling and motivating people to get the job done with high efficiency and productivity.
Supervisors manage resources, such as finances, products, planning, et cetera.
Okay.
We can pause.
It looks hike many of you have given me your opinions.
Thank you.
Some of you are still offering some ideas.
Well, the difference between the two is not always as cut and dry as it may seem.
So your own definition may be influenced by your experiences, your thoughts, your beliefs, your perceptions, your organization.
I'm curious where each of you stand in the leadership versus the management debate.
Let's talk about this.
So if you would, please just take a moment to add a simple definition to the chat box.
What does leadership mean to you?
Or what does supervision mean?
If it helps to define it, maybe type in some of the skills that are needed for each.
You must all be thinking.
Empowering others, being versatile.
Yes.
Oh, I love that definition, Tricia.
Leadership means growing others and motivating.
Yes.
I can see that many of us have some similar ideas on what makes a great leader, and, you know, how that might differ from what makes a great supervisor.
Leading beyond yourself.
I love that one.
Well, there are a lot of great -- great definitions in here.
Excuse me if I miss some of them, but I'm reading quite a few.
Setting an example, excellent.
Okay.
We're going to shift gears for just a minute and describe to you some examples of successful supervisory skills training models.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Okay.
I will begin by talking about the first of two programs that I implemented here at the Marriott Library, a little bit of background, we are a large research library with about 200 full-time employees, another 150 or so part-time, non-benefited employees.
And currently, about one-third of our full-time employees actually have some type of supervisory responsibility, and it ranges in everything from, you know, folks who have 10 full-time faculty direct reports, to people who might just be supervising one student intern for a semester.
So it's a very broad range that we're talking about when we talk about supervisors in our organization.
So I'm going to ask you to think a little bit about your own workplace, for just a minute.
Okay.
And ask you to -- in a moment use those annotation tools that Jennifer described to you and respond to a question that I have got on our next slide here.
I'm going to ask you to place a check mark in the appropriate box, in response to this question.
Which is how often do supervisors at your library meet as a group?
Would you say regularly, several times a year or just occasionally, whenever it's needed or pretty much never?
Okay.
Wow, good.
I'm glad to see a lot of those check marks going into the regularly several times a year box.
Okay.
We've got a quarterly coming into the chat box.
Okay.
Well, it looks like most of you have supervisors who are meeting regularly or at least several times a year and that's great to hear.
So at my library, when I started here in 2008, I would have put our check mark in the rarely or never column.
We did have a monthly meeting for managers, but that was for folks who were at the department head or above level.
It wasn't for, you know, those folks who might be supervising our student employees or for the people who might be just supervising one or two full-timers -- within a work unit.
Okay?
So when I came in 2008, I looked at the situation and thought we needed to do something about it, okay?
One thing that we factored into this was just the sheer number of supervisors that we had.
We actually have more now, I have think, than we did then but we probably had about 50 people in some kind of supervisory role.
And that's a really -- obviously a really crucial group of people.
We wanted to start doing things a little bit more consistently, and an organization as large as ours where we are relying on supervisors every day to be making important decisions, and affecting the lives of our employees, we wanted to make sure that employees all had a consistently positive experience and that we weren't inadvertently setting ourselves up for problems down the road by having supervisors doing things very differently from each other.
We wanted to create a more inclusive and participatory environment as far as decisions went and people giving input into the kinds of things that we, particularly in the human resources department were doing that would affect them.
I should back up a little bit and say that we actually have an HR department here within the library, with three people in it.
So we wanted to make sure that we had a way for supervisors to give input and feedback about things we were doing.
Okay?
And then in the first session of the webinar, earlier today, there was talk about supervisory development as part of an ongoing conversation.
And that's really what we were trying to do with this program, that we called supervisor's round table.
Which was provide a venue where we could engage in this ongoing conversation with supervisors to clarify policies, programs, needs, issues, et cetera.
Okay?
So the format for the supervisors roundtable.
This is as near an approximation as I could get.
I couldn't find a great picture of how we set ourselves up.
We meet every other month for just an hour.
And we sit facing each other.
We arrange tables and chairs so we are kind of around a big, hollow square there.
Okay?
And we also created a list serve that we use to send out an agenda for this meeting, but also to communicate with supervisors on an ongoing basis and actually that's one of the biggest benefits.
So we created this in the fall of 2008, and it's been ongoing ever since.
Since that time, the management meeting that I talked about earlier has actually dissolved.
But this has remained and I think that's a testament to the power and the benefit of it.
Okay?
So what do we do at supervisors round table?
Sometimes it's just giving information.
It's an opportunity for us to pass on information about policies at the university that are changing, procedures that might be changing.
It's an opportunity to provide training on occasion, where we have got, you know, 40, 50 people all gathered in a room, as a captive audience, and we can bring in folks from campus, human resources from OEO, or even do our own training on topics that are relevant to all supervisors.
Okay?
It's also a great way for us to get input about programs that we want to roll out new policies and procedures.
As an example a few years ago we created telecommuting, and we used the round table as what were the people's concerns about these policies?
What should they look like?
And what should they not look like?
And that was an iterative process with multiple drafts in will we got something that I think the majority of people felt would work.
Then we also have tried to get supervisors to talk amongst themselves about best practices, what they are doing as supervisors that works really well, or issues and challenges that they are facing that they want some feedback on.
Okay?
The main outcomes and benefits of having the roundtable has been that first of all, we just -- we have a forum.
We have a way to reach supervisors through the lisserve when we have an urgent need to get information out to a large body of people.
We don't have to call an ad hoc meeting every single time we want to talk about a policy or every single time we want input on something.
So we have a really great communication channel that's both face-to-face and over email.
And that comes in very handy, again, when we want to get out urgent information across the entire organization.
It's been a great benefit to us in HR, because, you know, a lot of things that we are doing, obviously, are going to have a big impact on supervisors and their employees and this lets us have direct access to that front line expertise, to make sure that we are doing things that take into account the day-to-day reality and the implications for those people.
Some things that -- that I get you to think about, if you don't have an existing forum like this, and are looking at creating one, in an organization of this size, keeping our membership list current is a bigger challenge than it seems like it ought to be.
You would think, well, we are HR.
We will ought to know who is a supervisor, but it's constantly changing.
I mentioned before that we'll have somebody supervising an intern for a semester.
You have to remember to add that person and then delete them.
So keeping the list current, keeping it accurate, has been much harder than I ever anticipated.
I had originally envisioned this as something that would be a lot more supervisor driven than HR driven.
I think that might have been idealistic in my environment.
We haven't had supervisors necessarily step forward and want to take on a role as far as bringing a lot of issues to the group, crafting agendas, et cetera.
So it's become a little bit more, I guess, top down from HR to supervisors, than I would ideally like.
I'm not sure what we would do in our environment to change that.
We also realized just a few years ago, that there were some misconceptions about what the meeting was for and who it was for and who could come.
A lot of the meetings in an academic library tend to be somewhat restricted or representational.
So you can come to this meeting if you hold this role and in talking with people in the group, we realized that we wanted this to be a much more open meeting, where people could bring others from their department if this was a topic that was going to be particularly relevant or of interest to them, or if a supervisor couldn't attend, they could send somebody from their department in their place.
And I think that's been a real relief to a lot of people and I think it's actually increased the attendance.
Somebody has asked how large the group is.
We have about 70 people on our list.
We probably have about 45 at any given meeting.

>> HEATHER SOSTROM: I just wanted to jump in and mention your topic in terms of it being HR driven.
Sometimes I think that that sort of structure is appreciated, and, you know, in some cases, instead of trying to continue to ask for supervisors to take on some of those roles, sometimes it's -- it's because they appreciate that.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Yeah, I have to agree.
I think sometimes, particularly with my background in, you know, experiential training and organizational development, I have a tendency to want things to be a little bit more organically or employee driven than -- than other people even necessarily want.
So that's just another thing to consider in implementing a group like this, what is realistic to expect and the fact that when you -- in asking people to contribute and take the lead, sometimes they done really see that as a benefit.
They see it as another job.
And they just -- they want come to the meeting and be told what's going on.
And be given some direction.
>> HEATHER SOSTROM: Right.
Right.
Well, the second model we are going to look at is a lot different.
I mentioned in my introduction that I was a mentor currently in a leadership institute, but this one is going to look at management institute.
NEFLIN conducts an annual survey for all of our members and year after year, administration, library management, supervisory skills, those are the topics that consistently rise to the top are issues that our members need to learn more about.
Also things like customer service, dealing with difficult situations.
Our new supervisors report feeling overwhelmed, having problems establishing community relationships, finding funding resources, and leading and managing library employees so the drivers for the MTI were to increase 9 performance of employees, working in the various member libraries of NEFLIN's network and also succession planning, to ensure that participating supervisors will be prepared for future professional opportunities.
Overall, it was developed to develop new skills and tools to address the gaps in preparing librarians for management roles.
So we have all been there.
New or maybe not so new on the job, and the expectation is that you already have all of these skills in place, right?
If you would, please just take a moment to share with me here in the chat box.
So did you benefit from a peer learning environment in your first months or years as a new supervisor or, you know, how would peer learning help to cement some of this type of training to develop new skills?
Cheryl, that's right, sometimes having a mentor in the mode of a previous supervisor can be so helpful.
Not everyone has that.
Yes.
Peer learning too, invaluable.
Okay.
Yeah.
So Lauren says that she was flying solo and unfortunately that's what's been reported by a number of our members, which is one of the reasons we decided to focus on that management training institute.
Oh, good.
Lots of great information in the chat box.
Well, I'm going to talk a little bit about how this works.
The MTI was designed by a training consultant.
We used Michael R Clark with input from the NEFLIN staff and the member libraries.
You can find out more about him in the experts compilation provided as part of the symposium, but the program was designed with the traditional instructor-led approach that includes face-to-face participation in six monthly sessions.
And participants have homework assignments to be completed between each sessions that focuses on applying the information that they learned.
We chose to be selective.
So participants were required to complete an application that was reviewed for completeness, level of interest in attending the institute, pom to use these new skills conpettently and also how active the individual has been in the library profession.
Participants did have to currently be employed by a NEFLIN member library, with five or fewer years of library management experience.
We really wanted the newbies.
And they were then selected by committee to participate.
The management training institute was developed with content in mind.
So it focuses on leadership, motivating and communicating skills, what we think of as everyday supervisory skills but also customer service, performance measurements, process mapping, ways to transition into a lean environment.
Focusing on problem solving and critical thinking skills, things needed to build successful team environments and our profession is constantly changing.
So change management skills are essential.
As is effectively coaching, mentoring and training employees.
We also chose to focus on conflict management and corrective feedback.
Skills that help new supervisors better deal with the employee performance issues.
So I would like to hear from you again, what do you think?
Do you think that the Management Training Institute covered all of the content areas you think are important?
If you would, please take a moment to type any thoughts you might have about this into the chat box.
What are the top issues facing the supervisors in a library environment or are there concerns that you have that are not addressed by this program?
This is a new program for us.
So it's evolving as well and I would love to hear from you.
Okay.
I see some great information here.
Support for personnel issues, absolutely.
Personnel management.
Yes.
I see that coming up a couple of times.
Dealing with negativity is something that we address, but emotional intelligence, yes, Elizabeth, of course, we have part of that definitely in the beginning of some of our sessions.
So good.
There's a lot of information here in the chat and I'm glad that we will have a record of this for later, because this is definitely great.
Okay.
What about outcomes?
So the most important question for any program is did it do what it was supposed to do?
The Management Training Institute is in its first year and it's still in progress, however, as part of the design phase for the MTI, we decided it would be successful in if the supervisor training program, reflects NEFLIN, of NEFLIN's board and of our member organizations.
It would be successful if we could determine a decrease in turnover rate so something based on the idea that training could be used as a motivational activity for employees.
And keeping an eye on a need for a succession planning.
If staff are prepared for promotional activities in the future and its behavioral changes occur as a result of the training, we are looking for things like improved performance, productivity, quality operations and libraries, but also more identified innovative practices, increased employee and patron satisfaction and improved communication practices.
Communication is big.
Finally we measure success by how participants apply to what they learn to issues within their organizational cultures.
So this means they are resolving real issues as they progress through the program.
They are bringing in the real issues to the institute and working with them in a peer environment.
We owe a great deal of gratitude to our consultants and facilitator.
However, if we had to do this over again, we might do things a little differently instead of offering this institute as a one-time training opportunity, we would love to be able to make development an ongoing conversation and provide ongoing development opportunities.
So the institute is a six-month program and after that, it's over.
But wouldn't it be great if we had some ongoing development incorporated?
If we did this again, we might like to explore using a variety of modes to deliver ongoing content.
We could use, like Sandra mentioned earlier, self-paced training modules, remote learning, in addition to the multisession themed training which might foster a sense of continual growth.
And we really would have loved to include a mentor component to this institute.
We did have that peer learning.
It is essential but having a trusted point person to go to for advice would offer additional perspectives for participants.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Okay.
I'm going to talk now about a more recent program that I coordinated last summer and one that I think was long overdue for us, and that it looks like others of you might say is long overdue in general and perhaps long overdue at your own institutions based on some of the things that I have seen in chat.
In was a program called supervisor essentials.
Okay?
And it focused very much on employment law, library policy, university policy.
Okay?
So I'm going to ask you, again, using your annotation tool to respond to the question I have got on the next slide.
Okay?
If you gave your supervisors a pop quiz on employment laws and policies what do you think the average score would be.
Go ahead and use your check mark there.
Okay.
So it looks like some of you in that 675 and above -- it looks like you have probably done some training, I assume on these topics.
Okay.
But the majority of our check marks are coming in at 50% and below so far.
Okay.
A few more in the 75.
Good.
So, you know, I don't know if it's ever possible or even desirable to try to get all of our supervisors to score 100% on such a quiz, because the law is always changing.
Policies are shifting.
And frankly, the last thing I want is people feeling overconfident about their knowledge about these things.
So I think, you know, if we are in that 75% or so range, that might be a more realistic thing to shoot for.
So I wish I could answer this question definitively and I had an opportunity to be able to do so and I missed it and that's one of the things I will talk about as far as the lessons learned from the supervisors essential program.
We did a program without really assessing it.
So it's hard for me to know exactly how effective it was, other than some type of anecdotal information.
Okay?
I do think people would score higher today than they did last summer.
Okay?
But I don't have anything to back that up with.
So let me tell you a little bit about this supervisor essentials training that we did and what drove it.
Okay?
Last spring, summer, we had some pretty significant changes in the organization.
We had a new strategic plan rolled out.
That plan focused quite a bit on employee development but also open things like diversity and inclusion, which have implications for the way that we supervise and hire.
We also had an organization -- a reorganization over the summer that ended up putting a lot of people into new supervisory roles for the first time, and as a lot of you indicated in your chat comments, we found a lot of people who were now supervising peers, supervising people who were significantly older than them, supervising people significantly younger than them.
So this was a pretty -- a pretty big shift.
We also had some new hiring procedures that we put into place, where we are now using search committees for staff positions, as well as faculty positions and that really made it imperative that even more people really understood some of the implications of recruitment and hiring from a law and policy standpoint.
And then I just felt like there had always been a missing link in the training that I had been doing here at the library.
Most of what I have done over the last several years has been focused more on management and leadership.
I have done the sort of, you know, multiworkshop-themed training around things like performance management.
In 2013, did I a very extensive leadership development program that included a required two day management workshop people had to attend before they could even apply for the leadership program.
That had really been the focus, but I always felt like something was missing.
And I, for various reasons had not really been in a position to deliver that, and that was more the kind of day-to-day supervisory stuff, particularly the stuff that if it's not don't right can get us into really big trouble.
 -- done right can get us into really big trouble, either with the university, the law or not having the right kind of environment that we want to have for our employees here.
So because -- and particularly because of the organization and having all of these new people in supervisory roles, I finally sort of had a good reason and excuse to do a training I had wanted to for a while, which, again, what was very much focused on laws and policies.
Okay?
And I had originally envisioned creating such a program in an online format so it would be available on demand to any new supervisor and also so that we could verify that, you know, people had done it, and we could have little quizzes that people could take, things that would really kind of help us on the compliance side to say, yes, these people took this course, they scored X, they know their stuff.
The things I have found pretty consistently in terms of our audience here at the library is that it's really best for us to talk about a lot of things face to face because we are a very large and complex organization and there are always a lot of what ifs and a lot of questions that are -- are very difficult to answer in a definitive kind of way.
They are not black and white.
So I decided that the best way to deliver this training, particularly with such a large audience, I was now trying to watch all supervisors and that was 70 people.
It was going to be face to face.
So this took the format of a one-shot.
Okay?
And it was done in a very traditional classroom instructor-led environment.
In part, that was because we had a very large number of people to train in a short time.
I had two other members of the HR team who I needed to bring into this, and my main goal was getting people to show up and I needed to create something that could be delivered realistically to a very large audience in one hour and it was mostly informational.
Okay?
So this shot of the room, that's literal room where we held this in, in our library.
Okay?
Now, we followed this up, this one-shot session with a whole bunch of other trainings over the summer.
And some of those were delivered at that supervisors round table that I talked about earlier.
So that came in really handy as a forum for being able to do these other trainings.
One that I forgot to put on the chart here, that I have been reminded of today, is a transitioning to a supervisory role training.
That's one I have offered here a number of times over the years.
It's based on a workshop that I did when I worked at campus human resources in the training department, and it addresses some of the things that have come up in the chat, since as what if you are supervising people who used to be your peers?
What if you don't necessarily want to be a supervisor?
So that was another one of the follow-up trainings that I did to address that kind of unique challenge of taking on a new role like this in your current organization.
Okay?
So the content of the one shot supervisor essentials was, first of all, informational.
We wanted to just tell people things that they had never been told before.
Our job descriptions for full-time staff, for instance, say exempt or nonexempt.
People literally did not know what that meant because they had never been told.
So this training covered things like the fair labor standards act, what it means to be exempt versus nonexempt and what that means in terms of how you supervise different groups of employees.
Okay?
So the Fair Labor Standards Act says that people who are nonexempt are eligible to earn overtime, that their time must be tracked accurately, et cetera.
Okay?
And those are things that people had just never heard before.
The other thing that we did was try to help supervisors understand what the expectations on them were and what those expectations weren't.
So, for instance, as a supervisor, it's your responsibility to know which of your employees are exempt versus nonexempt.
It's your responsibility to make sure that exempt employees accurately record their exceptions, vacation, sick leave, et cetera, in Chronos, which is our payroll system.
And it's important that the exempt, that they don't go into overtime status and if they do, it's approved, et cetera.
We also talked about what the responsibilities weren't, in terms of, you know, if you have an employee who needs to us FMLA.
It's not your responsibility to guide them through that process.
It's your responsibility to notify us.
Then it becomes your responsibility.
And then we tried to put things into context for them to say, okay, if a particular situation comes up, here's what you should do.
Okay?
Such as, you know, if an employee needs to us FMLA, you know, here's what you should do.
Come to HR.
If you have got an -- you know, an employee -- a nonexempt employee who is going to go into overtime status, you need to come and talk with us.
We have a form that needs to be filled out from campus HR, et cetera.
So it was, again, a combination of sort of giving them information, to help them understand why certain things need to work a certain way.
Then clarifying what the expectations of them as supervisors were, and then giving them some contextual information about how we wanted to handle different kinds of situations within the library.
Okay?
So the particular topics that we covered were things like the Fair Labor Standards Act.
We covered a number of laws that are administered by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, the age discrimination employment act, et cetera, and we also covered FMLA which is the Family Medical Leave Act.
Those are really the three -- the three big areas for us.
Okay?
So the great outcome of this, personally, for me, I felt really relieved.
I was very relieved that we had finally done what I thought was our due diligence for giving supervisors this very basic information.
They got accurate information and they got as clear direction as we could possibly give.
A really great benefit for us was that we learned about some things that were going on around the library that were inconsistent or out of compliance, either with university policy or federal law.
There are -- there are a lot of myths that tend to go around about what's actually the law or what's actually the policy and what isn't.
In the state of Utah, there are very few employeement protections beyond federal.
I mean, we have the federal minimum wage.
We don't have a state minimum wage, for example.
The university has some protections and policies that are -- that are beyond the federal, but a lot of people have worked in other states or they have worked in other kinds of organizations where they had laws or policies that don't apply here at the university, but that they thought were like a federal law, such as taking a lunch break.
There's no requirement our university or in the state of Utah that an employee get a lunch break at all, but there's requirements for -- you know, employees -- nonexempt employees who do clock out for lunch to perform no work during that time.
So this really helped, I think, to bring issues to the surface, that managers were handling on their own, on the fly, thinking they were doing the right thing when they weren't necessarily.
This just helps to start a conversation with supervisors.
Our real main takeaway message from this training was come talk to us.
Don't try to handle this stuff on your own.
Don't assume that you know what the law or the policy is, because sometimes we don't even know.
You know, we have to go to campus and then they have to go somewhere else.
So some of the things that I would rethink or get you to think about if you were going to do such a training like this I wish I had done a pre and post test to measure confidence, knowledge, attitudes or something that would demonstrate how effective that one shot actually was or wasn't.
I alluded to this earlier, every question that we answered led to another question.
Well, are employees required to take a lunch break?
No, they are not.
Okay.
What if they -- what if I want them to, but they refuse to?
It gets really, really difficult to give a large group of people definitive answers that apply to everybody.
So, again, that's why our takeaway message was come talk to us, because a lot of times the answer to this stuff is it depends, and we don't want to give inaccurate information in a group setting like that.
We also had to make sure -- the supervisors sometimes fell a little bit sheepish or even nervous when they realized that they were doing stuff that was not in compliance, or not ideal, and so we had to make sure that they felt safe to come to us and say, okay.
I have been doing things this way that I now know isn't the right way, and we need to correct it.
So we -- you know, we made sure everybody understood you have amnesty.
Come and tell us what's going on.
You are not going to get in trouble.
We are not going to chastise you.
We will figure out how to correct this and how to make it work.
>> HEATHER SOSTROM: In preparing for this session, I polled a number of experts, practitioners and others for their thoughts and ideas with supervisory practices.
I found many of them echoed the same sentiments throughout.
So these experts are detailed in the handouts you have for the symposiums.
Number one, libraries need these programs because of change.
Library world is changing and we need supervisory practices to change right along with the industry.
Not only are libraries changing but the leadership demographic in libraries is also changing.
So these programs are needed to offer foundational training to prepare supervisors for success.
Libraries need to continually seek to improve.
So ongoing professional development and supervisory skills training are essential.
And many of our consultants offered some sound advice.
Basic, such as having organizational commitment and buy-in were noted.
As well as simply participating in intensive training and development this is how to lay the foundation of growth.
The impact cannot be overstated.
So Christine Kreger, professional development consultant for Colorado state library, library development was very kind to share some detailed information about the successful supervision workshop the Colorado State Library coordinated last year with facilitator Pat Wagner of pattern research.
Their format was shorter than those we presented today, but she agreed that continued growth and ongoing development are what the benchmarks for success.
So, we still have some time, but as our presentation comes to an end, we are just going to go over briefly what's been covered.
The what of supervisor development, what it is, what it looks like, what it should include.
Successful examples.
You heard about two innovative programs that they are doing at the University of Utah, as well as a program we are using here in northeast Florida.
And we also shared input compiled from our experts, consultants and practitioners.
We have quite a bit of time.
So with the time we do have remaining, we would love to answer any questions you might have for us.
I know that I saw quite a bit if chat.
So maybe we can tackle some of those.
Please enter any other questions or comments you would like us to respond to in the chat box, and I would like to remind you before we do that, that if you are interested in these topics and a follow-up to the symposium, if you want to learn more or become involved yourself, please go ahead and click on the link provided in the chat box there to answer a brief survey.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Excellent.
Thank you so much to both of you, and, yes, please post questions.
There was a very meaty question earlier on about -- questions about more specific topical issues that were covered.
I think it was when Melanie, you were talking about your training.
And then this question -- I thought this -- and I will say that there were some topical issues shared certainly in chat when Heather was presenting, and I would say, if folks are interested in diving deeper into topics, that's something that they could provide the feedback in this interest survey that I posted the link to as well.
I think it's interesting to hear some of the variation when we have been hearing from Melanie and Jerilyn, how some of those issues may be different than perhaps public environments.
That's something that could be sussed out if there were some follow-up opportunities for you to all work together.
I thought this question was really powerful.
How does supervisors hold their administrators' feet to the fire on issues of consistency and transparency?
So many of you on the call are in those supervisor positions and perhaps want to have the tools to put that consistency and transparency opportunity to administrators.
I would love to hear from both of you on that question.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Yeah, that's a big one.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Right?
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Especially in -- our organization is very large.
And I think one of the things that we tried to do was, again, tried to position our HR team as the people that you come to.
So that supervisors don't feel like they have to necessarily challenge a higher level administrator on their own.
Not to suggest that people run and tattle to us.
We always encourage people to talk to, directly to a person who they have a concern with or whatever, but we tried to position ourselves so that we could be a kind of coordinating and communicating body.
So that as these kinds of issues surfaced, then we would take it on to kind of answer the question, deal with the issue, and then communicate out to everybody how it needed to be addressed library-wide.
I know not everybody has an internal HR department.
>> HEATHER SOSTROM: 
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Yeah, I think communication came up in many different ways.
I think that communication piece could be a focus for the organization, certainly to learn together, but especially between administration and supervisors.
Melanie, there was a question when you were describing your online supervisor essentials training, somebody asked if you could share the slides for that training.
I don't know.
We haven't talked about the meta level of sharing our training resources.
Do have any comments for that?
>> MELANIE HAWKS: Yeah.
Well, just let me clarify.
This was a face-to-face.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Okay.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: It's one I had originally envisioned as being online but I realized it wouldn't work for the audience we needed to reach and just for the fact that, again, any question we answered leads to a thousand more questions and you can't deal with that in the online environment.
You cannot answer the question of, well, what if X happens?
So I actually steered away from online, and what I'm doing now to meet the on demand need is simply doing a one-on-one 30 to 45 minute session with new supervisors.
And it's -- it's proven pretty effective so far.
That face-to-face is just super -- super important, I think, when it comes to some of these topics.
I'm not sure about sharing the slides.
Some of the stuff was very specific to our institution.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Right.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: I would need to talk to the other folks who distributed to those slides to see if I have their permission to release them.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: Right.
Right.
I think that's often the case.
Hopefully, though, you all feel empowered to connect with each other in that way and I will say WebJunction is always eager to share templates and examples if people do in the gathering here today have things they want to share, even if it's more specifically around some of those topics, you know, as you all know, we -- we love to R & D, rip off and duplicate and encourage others to do so because you all -- many of you are doing great work in these specific topic areas.
With that said, I encourage you if you are interested in any sort of follow-up beyond what is covered in today's symposium, that survey is definitely important to complete.
I know Learning Roundtable as well as WebJunction are very committed to exploring the additional learning in these areas.
There are some excellent resources that are being shared.
I love this idea of a session on how to manage up, some additional resources and suggestions are being shared there.
There was a question in -- well, it's sort of a statement question.
Even with the presence of an HR department, a challenge for HR is working with that management and leadership team who don't feel they need the training.
And I know that we'll talk a little bit about this from the next session and in getting buy-in from the top down.
So we've got buying from the top down and from management up are definitely hot themes as we transition into the next session.
Heather, do you have any final comments before we wrap up?
>> HEATHER SOSTROM: Just to touch briefly on some of the comments that are coming in, yes, absolutely.
I think in my -- in speaking with our experts, organizational buy-in is essential for supervisors to have success, which is why we do focus on some things, I think it was mentioned in the chat box earlier, you know, developing emotional intelligence among your supervisors and managers so that you can develop your team.
So that communication is improved.
I'm looking forward to the next session, because I know that both Sandra and Angela are really going to dive deeply into that.
>> MELANIE HAWKS: And if I can just chime in on the buy-in thing.
Part of -- the only way I was able to do the supervisor essentials training was that our dean bought into it.
And that was in large part due to that reorganization.
I mean, not that she would have resisted it otherwise, but I think it -- it surfaced as a high priority at that moment in time due to the reorganization.
And because of that, I was able to say this needs to be required, and get back up for that.
We very infrequently require anybody to attend training, other than, you know, very specific job-related training.
That was a huge part of the ability for me to do that.
>> JENNIFER PETERSON: I'm glad you touched on that again.
I think -- when we have even talked about just folks learning together as a cohort, people emphasize that having -- sharing a common language, having the same vocabulary, moving into his work was just in and of itself very powerful.
All right.
Well, I will wrap this session up and, again, like I said earlier, it's so exciting to know we still have one more.
So as we head into our next session, we'll take another 15-minute break, and feel free to stretch your legs and we will be back in 15 minutes, and thank you again to Heather and Melanie for all of your great work and for bringing your expertise to us today.