My name is Jennifer Peterson, I'm really excited you're -- Jennifer Peterson, we're going to get started with our presenter and our recording. I'm really excited to welcome to today's session our presenter Jami Carter, she comes to us as the director of the Tooele City library in Utah and also is a very busy person serving as the current president of the Utah library association, and we are all big fans of Jami here at web junction, we featured her and her teammates in a webinar a couple years ago focused on their self-directed achievement model, and she's going to talk a little bit about that but I just want to thank Jami for being here today, I know she is a really busy person but a passionate learner, and she's passionate about sharing what she learns with the broader library community, so we're so fortunate to have you here, Jami and welcome. >> Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. So can you hear me okay? >> Yep, you sound great, thank you. >> Okay, great, great. So the tension for me is building, and as we all know Jennifer does a great job of introducing all of us to all of these features, and I never realized until today how calming her voice is, so I'm going to go ahead and get started. Thank you, Jennifer, for calming me down a little before we get started here. All right. Let's see. We're going to start with a spoiler. Here it is. There's not an exact formula to create a learning organization. If you think about it, the nature of learning isn't linear so it makes sense that an entire culture of learning would have a lot of variety. So today our objectives will be to identify patterns that lead us to our most impactful learning opportunities, to consider some best practices and mindsets that will allow us to grow our learning culture, believe it or not, we get in the way sometimes. And to share with each other learning strategies, methods that we're using already in our systems, things that are working one place may not work another place, but we certainly haven't all thought of all the same things. So please share. I assume those of you who are listening have a variety of motivations for spending your time here. You might be drawn to learning like me. You may want to motivate other people to learn. And you might supervise really great people who want to learn, and you are here to figure out how to help them do that, how to help them learn. Or you might be here because you watched our previous webinar that Jennifer referenced on self-directed achievement, and you're curious on what craziness is happening now. Whatever your reason I'm thrilled that you're here, and I'm really excited to hear from you so please, please, please use chat when you have something to share. A thought, a question, a method. Just say hello to people, whatever you want. I hope at the end, actually, to see a lot of additions. I can't wait to read through the chat, so don't be shy. All right. So what is a learning organization? Most of us can say that we already learn at work. We will attend trainings or workshops, and we like to learn, and learning is even encouraged in our organizations, so what is the difference between that and the true learning organization? In his most recent brook Russell Sarder offers this. A learning organization promotes and supports learning at all levels and in a variety of ways. I want you to notice these words. Promotes, supports, all levels, and in a variety of ways. So how is your organization doing in terms of this particular definition? Is learning available, or is it really promoted? What does learning support look like in your organization? Is it, yay, good job learning? Or is it required to learn? Are people -- excuse me. Are the same people always involved in that learning? You've got your people who constantly go to conferences, to workshops, and the rest of the organization doesn't engage. So when you look at that, you can see if there's possibly room for improvement in your organization. Peter Senge, the author of the Fifth Discipline offers another definition to this. A learning organization is a place where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire. This speaks to the engagement of staff in their own success. It also speaks to the engagement of your staff and the values of your organization, and when I read this, I thought, I want to work in a place like this. So as an administrator, I think that I need to try to create a place like this. So just as a side note, both of these books are included in the bibliography on the web resources -- excuse me, on the resources page of the webinar so you can refer to them, looks like Jennifer posted links to those, too. Here's the reality. Why would we try to build a learning organization when we're already so busy? We have libraries to run, we have deadlines, day-to-day tasks that we have to complete and the today independence of our creates are really overwhelming, and the demand from our community consistently grows so why would we do this? Here are a couple of things to consider. It's really logical. Learning is our industry. Library visitors include us in their own learning processes every day, so staying close to the process of learning makes us better librarians. When you think about it, it isn't learning or stuff that is what we do, the process of learning is actually our product. When we engage in learning, we know what it feels like. The curiosity, the delight to finding an answer, the frustration, even the times when we feel really foolish, we know what those emotions feel like, and we see those in our library users. So when we are learning ourselves, we can better identify with them when we see them in our library users. Since a library is a learning place in our community, I think it's ironic that staff learning practices aren't actually considered essential in every library or required in every library. Most often we consider them discretionary or optional. So here's just something to think about. How can we possibly sell our product if we don't even use it? According to business experts, learning organizations have some crucial advantages. They can respond more quickly and effectively to change. Successful organizations provide various strategy to achieve a balance, and when that balance is thrown off by internal changes or most often external changes they can totally handle it because their existing learning practices keep them really agile, and they're ready to rebalance and continue forward. They're better able to keep ahead of competition because they come up with innovative products and services. They are less likely to become stuck in inferbancy, able to address problems -- inefficiency, able to address problems quickly and attract and retain the best, right employees. This is something that as an administrator that's really important to me. My favorite reason is that it is just more fun. Learning is just something we all relate to. We started out that way. I didn't start out walking, I'm sure I looked like a pretty big moron when I was trying to learn but here I am, walking. So I just want you to engage in this side of it, too. There's always this practical side, pragmatic side to learning and what we do, how we run our organizations, but remember to let it be fun because it really is. It connects us all. There are a few ways that we can trip ourselves up. So I want to talk about a few key concepts that might help us adopt successful learning practices. So back to that original spoiler. There's not one right way to be a learning organization. There's no magical combination of activities, one size doesn't fit all. And the right formula for your system is really only right for right now. So you should be ready to adapt it as it seems necessary or helpful. Learning is messy. In fact, I think the most impactful learning is the messiest. So have you ever had an idea to try something new in your organization and so you attend a conference session or a workshop, and the thing that you learn at that workshop is that this is not the right thing for you to do with your organization. Realizing you will not use that knowledge is extremely valuable learning. Even learning the wrong thing can save you time and money and energy and most often your own sanity. So don't get caught up in making things nice and neat. Learning is a practice. It's not a project. Too often we approach training as a project or a program, usually after we were inspired by a training activity ourselves so we'll get geared up and lay out a plan and tell everyone to just start. But we need to remember that we're creating a learning culture. By definition, a culture evolves over time so at very least we need loads of patience. Culture is transmitted from one generation to another, and it can become the DNA of our organization so this really shouldn't feel like a race. Mastery is a terrible learning goal. We'll never be done learning about any topic. A person can master a task, but learning is so much different, it's on a continuum that really never ends, and honestly I'm so glad it's like that. It's really exciting to have your mind open to something new, a new possibility or a new concept. There's not another feeling like it, and I can tell that I am one of those learners that I love to learn what I don't need to know, I love to learn and figure out what the next question is. I know there are folks out there that feel that same way, so embrace that. This is kind of a concept that's more geared toward an administrator. A learning organization doesn't own the learning. And it's easy to adopt that mindset without even realizing it. Administrators are pressured to produce all of these quantifiable results for all areas of library operations including staff development. This pressure can lead us to feel like we own and control all the aspects of learning opportunities made available to our staff, and it really feels logical. The organization bought the learning, spent time coordinating its delivery, and then so we feel like we should try to keep it. But this mindset is really a mistake, and it can be counterproductive for a learning organization. Frankly, we can't control or capture, and we certainly can't take back all of the learning that happens in our organizations. So leaders, I want you to take a minute to really consider this. Learning is an opportunity that we have the ability to give to a person. Because most people want to do well, most people will give that learning back, and they'll create successes in our organizations. Some of those will be measurable, and some won't. And yes, there will be a few who don't apply the learning for whatever reason. Those folks are likely underperforming in other key areas as well. So really, learning is the least of your concerns with them. So I want to tell you a little bit about our library story. There are some scenarios that illustrate why we turned to learning to be more successful, and I think some of you may identify with that experience. In our library, the perceived performance expectation was to be precise and to be correct when we helped people. Complex questions resulted usually in a supervisor being called and not because the staff member couldn't handle the question but because they were really afraid to be wrong, and most importantly they wanted that person that they were helping to have everything that they needed. When I watched this practice repeat itself, I thought, why, why don't we know that already? And why don't we just trust ourselves? At the time, we used on-the-job training almost exclusively. Our staff members were super talented, I had every faith in all their abilities, so when I was seeing this I knew we were somehow out of balance, anxiety was a regular part of our day. So I asked people how I could help, and when I did, I received requests for training. So that was my job. That was my goal. I set out to make that happen. I started with typical and familiar methods. We started an annual staff development day, I'm sure that this is familiar to you. And then I budgeted money to cover travel expenses for localized -- more localized training events. My goal at that time was at least once a year every staff member would be able to participate in at least one training activity. So at that point this is what our organization looked like in terms of training. On-the-job, staff development day, outside training, we had tuition assistance and then topical training as well. Most of this was live that we used. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these ways of training. So I want to talk a little bit about the advantages and disadvantages, and it might start to paint a picture of what balance might look like in your organization. So on-the-job training is great because it can be individualized, and it can be built on a learner's current skill level, and they can apply it right now. The disadvantages to that are that it is time-consuming especially for supervisors, if you're involved in one on one training for every person in your organization. And it's really limited to task-based training, which is great for processes like creating a library card or assisting someone to check something out. But what we really wanted to encourage, I wanted people to feel comfortable using their critical thinking skills which that didn't help us as much. Staff development day, obvious advantages, camaraderie and team-building, we had a great time, discuss questions, share things and ideas, and it was a familiar environment, kind of like a classroom, which is something that we -- most of us feel very comfortable with because that's how we grew up. But the disadvantages were that eight hours a year in one chunk was like force-feeding someone information. Retention and application of skills is difficult, and I -- really impossible for so much -- with so much information for digest all at the same time. It also assumed that everybody that attended the training began at the same skill level. Every skill level. That is just not the case. So we would lose people in the middle of a presentation, and then the rest of those pieces of learning would be lost. And I didn't -- wasn't comfortable with that. Outside training when we would attend conferences or institute UPLIFT here in Utah for training, like staff development day we could ask questions and share ideas in a classroom but the best advantage to outside training is we're introduced to other librarians, and we're introduced to the ideas that they bring with them. Disadvantages to that is it wasn't consistent, and I certainly couldn't send everyone. We had to free up more significant blocks of time which was difficult to do, and we had to run the librarian. The training topics don't always completely align, that are available, don't always align with where you're at as an organization, too. So sometimes if you were relying on that for a consistent source I think that's unrealistic. Even with these intentional learning strategies in place, I still knew that something was missing, so as workshop training was embraced, I started to see this gap, and the gap was widening. There were people who grasped and applied training content really quickly, and as an organization, we started to recognize those folks as experts. And as they say, because old habits die hard, instead of calling a supervisor for help, a less confident staff member would call in a coworker, someone that they felt was an expert. I'm assuming some of you have those folks who are considered experts in your organization. In and of itself this is not a terrible thing because you're relying on your team, and it can be positive. But when I thought about it, I thought, why don't they know that they can handle that question? So I realized the training strategies that we were using hadn't taken into consideration the assortment of skill levels that we had. How could a person feel successful at work if they constantly felt inadequate or reliant on others? How could eight hours of training a year at the same time possibly be absorbed? So I added that together, and I had a new challenge. It was clear that I needed to add a method or methods with consistency and frequency and flexibility. So ultimately we ended up creating the self-directed achievement model to fill those gaps in our organization. For detailed information about this mechanism you can follow the link in the learning resources to that full webinar. We love it, and of course I recommend it, it's my baby, so I'm super -- very excited about it, happy to talk about it but I'm not going to go into too much detail. In hindsight it's clear that our librarians were driving growth because we had growing pains. They were working really hard to serve our community, and they were willing to say that they wanted help, which is not always easy. We don't always get that. I see now that we were on the cusp of growing from a traditional organization to a learning organization. If this type of thought process and observation sounds familiar to you, you may be on the cusp of a transformation as well. The assessment of your library's learning strategies will be you meek, again, not one size fits all. So to get started, a simple exercise. Make a list of all of the learning activities and support available to your staff. I included an Xcel document which is a blank version of the one that is on your screen. It's in the related resources section of the webinar page, and you can easily adjust that. Insert your list of learning activities, and then map that expert -- the expectations that you have for participation, for content selection and for frequency. A little bit of advice, though, when you do this. Don't get too far into the weeds. Just capture basic information and only intentional strategies. There's lots of unintentional learning that happens throughout our day. If you are administrative staff, it might be good to do this from your point of view and from the point of view of a staff member. What we know is available is not always what our staff feels is available. And I know that this is really rudimentary and simplistic but it is really an effective start. So we're going to talk now a little bit about some best practices, and there are lots and lots of best practices out there. In fact, everything that we're going to talk about isn't even listed here. But although this is not an inclusive list, all-inclusive, it's a decent stab at best practices in a learning organization. I hope you'll consider designing at least some of them into whatever your culture is. So be intentional. We need to abandon the idea that learning is discretionary. Leaders of learning organizations know that learning is an essential cost. Now, these leaders that I'm referring to are not leaders in libraries and schools but in fortune 500 businesses. Since our business is learning, we should be the best at it. They should be learning from us. Every person should be included as a learner, no role should be overlooked. Allow a variety of learning methods. This accounts for different learning styles. There are some links and several ways that you can figure out what your own personal learning style is as well. The way that you choose to learn something can affect how successful you are. This is another reason why you're going to want a variety. For example, I wouldn't advise learning to swim by reading a book. Reflection and renewal are essential for people. It's not advisable to always be learning, to always learn something brand-new. Time to reflect and digest concepts improves learning and application of that learning, and that's kind of where we get caught up as well. We want the learning to be applied. This is a good time to figuratively pick up a concept that you've learned and just turn it around and look at it from all angles. Another great reflection activity is objection. So when you're thinking about something that you've learned you can spend some time observing in your library, watch people move around in the spaces, look at how they absorb and interact with those spaces, and keeping those concepts in mind you may be inspired with new ideas. That kind of critical thinking also helps solidify that learning, and a person with time and space to reflect, that person can be really, really innovative. Renewal is a term that's most often associated in the emotional intelligence sphere. It's appropriate to recognize learning burnout, it's a real thing. Normally this is because we're gorging ourselves at the learning buffet, I'm guilty as charged, I do it all the time. So I've had to learn to step back and do some reflection and some renewal practices. So we need to allow that and design in some flexible opportunities to renew. Now, this one is -- self-directed learning is, of course, very close to my heart. When learning is prescribed, the content has been determined by the organization. This is particularly useful when everyone needs the same information at the same time. It's a system-wide change or a new-hire training, a new database or a new user interface. It's really useful when everyone needs to be on the same page really quickly. Self-directed learning means the learner determines what they're learning. With this, a person can play to their strengths because they understand how they learn best. Self-directed learning means the learner is in the content driver's seat which sounds great until you realize that only one person can be in that seat. It can be uncomfortable for a supervisor or an administrator to hand over those keys, but it's really not as risky or unpredictable as it might feel. It's a really powerful method, and I strongly suggest committing to some self-directed learning in your organization. Be sure to use positive accountability. Generally accountability at work means you're required to do something, and if you don't, bad things will happen. I like to look at accountability in a different way. For example I ask for training logs from our staff members not only because I need to account for their training hours but I love to see them recognize their own progress. They see everything on a spreadsheet that they give to me that they've learned over a couple of months or a year, and it's really rewarding, I've heard that comment from many staff members that, I can't believe how much I learned. I also acknowledge learning efforts in performance evaluations, not just their big accomplishments, and not just the learning that I see poo replied but the effort that they put into learning. We can't reasonably close every learning gap at the same time. So I'm going to take you back here. Do you remember working in the stacks of your library for the first time? I totally do. I found errors on spine labels and series out of order, and I thought, this is chaos! I intended to stop everything I was doing and fix it all until the shelves were absolutely perfect but then a colleague gave me some great advice; that these issues will work themselves out through weeding. If an item can still be found your energy is better spent on something else. I use this same advice when I decide if a learning gap needs attention, and if it needs attention right now. It's possible it might be resolved in another way, and I have to look at does this gap really affect our ability to serve the public. Because when we say yes to approaching one gap, we say no to approaching another. Remember to use your energy in the best ways to believe. It's a long-term practice, you really have plenty of time. I also implore you to hire learners. Savio Chan, president and CEO of China partners had something to say about this. I believe the people I hire must one thing: An open mind. They must have minds that are open to everything and attached to nothing. Once you find the right people with the right attitude, you can always train for skills. So you hire for attitude and train for skills, you don't go the other way around. I really believe this. In interviews, I suggest you ask questions to figure out if someone is a learner. It's another piece of data that you can decide in this person will fit into your current culture or the culture that you're intending to create. You will really reap the benefits indefinitely when you hire learners, and they will reap the benefits of working for you when they are learners. So we're going to do a little recap. This is what we've covered so far. Why we are going to become a learning organization. Places where we can get tripped up. Strategies and best practices. I'm interested to know if any of you have shared your thoughts in chat yet. Jennifer, do you -- are there questions? Comments? >> There have been some great comments, not any specific questions yet. It was great to hear from Wendy when you were -- when you were talking about some of the aspects of why to choose a learning organization. She mentioned that those are actually qualities listed in the ACRL information literacy framework so we put that in chat as something else to explore. And yes, certainly that learning can be messy, Wendy actually describes research as a bowl of spaghetti, hence being messy, if you do it right. >> It really is. >> There's a great question here. How do you determine if someone is a learner? So are there questions that you could ask, perhaps, in an interview to understand that somebody is a learner? >> We ask -- so anybody who is possibly going to apply for a job here will know this question ahead of time. But we ask about the last time that -- you know, what was the last time that you tried to learn something new. It could be a personal thing, it could be something at work. But you -- as people are -- we also ask what steps they took to attempt to learn that. It tells you a little bit about somebody's thought process in learning. So a lot of people want to learn, and they say, yes, I love, love learning but they expect to sit down and tell them what's happening. So you can be a learner or a self-directed learner. We're a more self-directed culture so we ask that question. Then we've had answered like someone learned to ride a bike for the first time as an adult. And what happened. I mean, seriously entertaining. Some are very work-oriented, others are, you know, learning to knit, pottery. But you can tell if somebody has a -- you really can tell, it's just a sense that you have in the interview that someone has this passion for finding out things, you know, being curious, and then just diving in to figure it out. That's one that we use. I'm sure there are others. I'd love to know if somebody else does that. >> They are chiming in with other suggestions, so definitely keep those ideas coming. There are some other great questions. Somebody wanted to get your suggestions for how you incorporated positive accountability. I don't know if you have some tips on how to make that more intentional or perhaps -- I know that you've read thousands of books on all these great topics if you have suggestions for who to explore. >> Okay. Tell me -- tell me again the first part of that question. Of course I was thinking about book titles as soon as you said that. >> Well, you talked about the -- in your -- just in the bit about creating positive accountability, how could you make that more intentional and incorporating positive accountability as, you know, as a manager or as a colleague? >> First of all, you need to determine what you want somebody to be accountable for. So whether you're wanting that person to be accountable to apply that learning or to make that learning effort. I think in the realm of accountability it's also very individualized. So there are folks that -- I have to be careful not to share personal stories in -- from folks that I've worked with. Accountability sometimes looks like trying. We'll talk a little bit about growth and mixed mindsets. If somebody's in a fixed mindset, for me to expect them to be accountable and the award comes in organizational-wide that this person did this and applied to learning, that person will never get to that point. Well, not "never" but not very quickly. So they're making effort. So individually as people turn in their training logs, we'll ask sometimes what's the most impactful thing, you know, what have you used in the last year that was really, really helpful? We just make it more about them. I do also, in our performance evaluations, make sure to note the number of hours that they've contributed to learning in the organization. So I don't -- I don't attach an accountability that is if you applied the learning and if you're the best at it, because I feel like in our organization that was a negative, a negative thing. I think it really has to be quite -- quite flexibility in your organization to be the most effective. >> Excellent. That's great. There are a couple of questions that get at the issue that I know comes up in many situations. How do you deal with folks that are resistant to learning, maybe they're apathetic, disinterested or maybe even hostile to a learning organization? How do you get folks aligned with the learning vision? And I know that you touch on this in your self-directed achievement webinar, so I encourage folks to explore that, but just knowing that there's that resistance piece, either individuals or perhaps a larger group. Somebody mentioned the issues of dealing with perhaps union shops where maybe there's a different kind of a culture around shifts in how learning is done. >> It -- with a union environment, I do not have experience with that so I'm going to let someone else tell us how that works. >> Okay. >> For folks who are resistant, I think that that has a lot to do with fear. It has a lot to do with confidence. Again, I'll talk about this a little bit with mindsets further on in the presentation, but we tend to kind of demonize people like that. And I'm learning more about how to take a step back from that. Really, everybody that works -- no one wants to come to work and suck at their job, like I just don't -- I don't see that. That's actually why that person is not engaging in the learning is because they are protecting themselves. So I think you just have to take a step back, and instead of forcing that learning, one of the things that we talk about in our self-directed achievement webinar are embrace the people -- let those self-starters go. Let them, like, just stay out of their way. The other folks in your organization will attempt to keep up at some point or they will become very, very uncomfortable that they're not trying. You just watch them stew in their own juices, it's true. The trick is this: As a supervisioner of somebody who's engaging in this and requiring this learning, and it's not coming in the way that you want it to, you can coach and positively guide that process one on one with that person. There will be a point where they flip a switch. And as a leader you have to let all that other stuff go. You have to just let them reset and start from where they're at and get out of their way, not harbor those feelings like, "we had this conversation a thousand times." As they tell you, I found this really great idea, and this is what I want to do, you can't think, I told you that six months ago because they're finally there, we just need to get out of the way. A lot of humility from our supervisors and staff members. >> I'm realizing that an emotional intelligence webinar should be on our upcoming list of webinars. >> Yes, it's amazing. >> Excellent. There are definitely folks continuing to share in chat. I'm going to let you keep going, and we can circle back and address any others that you haven't touched on as you move through the rest of your presentation. >> Okay. Great, great, all right. So here we go, keep turning in chat, people, I love it. Okay. So where to again? This is usually the question that is the most frustrating, and I think as a leader we look at where to begin because we want to know where we want to end up, and until we have this plan completely laid out in our head we're almost resistant to do it because what if we don't do it right. What if we don't? It's totally fine, we're just as human as everybody else. All right. So first of all a learning culture can't be built overnight. Again. It's a product of carefully cultivated attitudes, commitments and management processes. So now you've mapped out your current strategies. You can take some actions now. Start with the things in this list, and -- that we're going to discuss that feel right for your library. Don't try to do all of them at once. So step one, un-learning is a prerequisite to learning. It's important to remember that. We need to actively forget information and get rid of nonuseful information and practices. So to do that you need to encourage un-learning, you need to meet about un-learning, you need to say it out loud together, give verbal permission to unlearn. In "managing transitions," the author says that before a new beginning can start, the old way has to end. So you need to communicate, consider and communicate what will end. This same logic can be applied to learning. The question generally comes up, what if I un-learn the wrong something, something that's really important? The worst-case scenario is that you relearn it. It's fine. And you might actually like relearning it. So I think we are a little doomsday. We need to be careful with that. So we need to create the right environment for learning as well. There are barriers we have in our organizations. So we need to change those unnecessary procedures and rules and regulations, any structures that get in the way. One way to figure out if you have some of those is to ask your staff or to Intuit whether it's more trouble than it's worth to take time to learn or to attempt to go to a conference where they have to write ten reports and put together a presentation for your staff. That's a very common way that people hold others accountable for the learning. If you go to a conference, you need to teach -- bring that learning back and teach the organization. But we don't think about the fact that what if you're going to that conference and all you learn is that this was not a great conference for us to go to? But now you have to go back and teach something that you feel like is kind of lame and not helpful for your organization. We don't think about that. We think there's always, always, always going to be something valuable. Sometimes the most valuable thing that you learn is that you don't need that information. So allow that to happen. We need to encourage also in our environment an open exchange of ideas and information. We need to stimulate that exchange of ideas, and especially ideas that are controversial or things that we don't agree with. We also can welcome ideas, suggestions, criticism, and mistakes, failure is a great teacher. People can really be thrown off when they struggle to understand something new or if there's new skills that they need to master. It's human nature to try to resist something new if you're afraid that you'll look foolish. So it needs to be safe to do some stumbling at work. So this particular thing is easier said than done, so you do need to be prepared to work at that one and keep your finger on the pulse of how failure and stumbling are regarded in your work environment. You can also begin using a competency model as a guide. A competency model is a framework that describes critical success factors. So what people need to know to accomplish their job at the highest level. We can use competency models to create a usable learning initiative. You ask yourself what do we want people to be able to do, and what do they already know how to do? The space between those two questions is the playing field for learning. I'm not going to go into too much detail again on this one because honestly it could be a presentation all on its own. I will say that WebJunction already has this tool for you to use, the competency index here is fantastic, I refer to it all the time but please note this, competency models in your organization will change so treat them as a living document. You will review them often. Then when you find a place they need to be updated, update them. This can be a confusing and very overwhelming thing so I would encourage you to keep it simple and not get lost in the weeds. Look at the big picture. I'm a firm believer that too much scripting of people's learning is really wasted energy. This quote on the screen, I love how it unknowingly describes our everyday jobs. You know, the people operations, vice president of Google, is describing a library. We pull together these disparate pieces of information every day and I don't have to have a super high I.Q. to be good at my job. Learning goals and performance goals are different. The primary distinction between them lies in how we frame the instruction. A performance goal frames the instruction that the performance of a task is what's important. A learning goal frames the instruction in terms of knowledge or acquiring a skill. This quote here from Russell Sarder is learning goals help people grow and expand. They encourage employees to think for themselves, find new ways of doing things, and feel more empowered at work. I love empowerment, I've never been disappointed when I've seen staff members be able to take something and run with it. So I hope we're still chatting, this is just the reminder. One thing that I'd really, really love to see in chat is what learning strategies do you use in your organizations, lunch and learning, Michael Marquart is on my reading list, fantastic. Here's advice for leaders. As a leader, in a learning organization, you will constantly learn. You'll learn about yourself, your culture, individuals in your organization, and you will make lots of mistakes, you will learn from failures and from successes. You don't just get to lay out the plan and watch it happen, delighted that you brought this wonderful thing to the world. You will find that you're not happy about some things along the way, and you'll be surprised and super happy with unanticipated successes that happen. You can really be in the way of all these successes if you're not prepared to just let go a little. So I advise humility. You don't know everything, unfortunately as a director you're responsible for everything, but you don't know everything, and that's okay. As your focus turns to learning, your structure will become flatter and probably more flexible. Certain core competencies become more important like facilitating, collaborating, peer leadership and things like that. So looking down the road your supervisors may want to focus their own learning on better coaching, facilitating, allowing things to happen, and shaping failures into successes. I think everyone, especially supervisors, should read mindset by Carol Bweck. It's a great read on a personal level and for a supervisor it can be a God send. For me as we discussed before the most helpful thing on the slide is a sill wet of a mind of bricks. Before I read this, those bricks represented subornness, unwillingness, not engaging, even hostilely. These are frustrating emotions to receive from someone especially when you feel like you're doing something positive. But after studying it those bricks represent something else. Like I said before, they represent protection. People in a fixed mindset are trying to protect themselves. They give up because they cannot be vulnerable, they cannot be wrong. They even protect themselves and say things like they already know exactly how to do that, they don't need to know anything more, they're unwilling to accept helpful feedback U but thinking about that, growth isn't just uncomfortable for a person in a fixed mindset, it's terrifying, it means that they're an awful person, in their mind. So employees who are in a fixed mindset need different coaching and guidance than those in a growth mindset. Just remember that that learning curve, it differs for everyone. Supervisors who act with this knowledge will be more successful at cultivating talent in their departments and honestly much, much happier. There's nothing more frustrating than it feels like you're beating your head against a wall. Just be aware of people's mindsets. For some of us the term "ROI" is a dirty word so I'm going to be gentle. First of all, to have a return on investment we have to have an investment so that's what we're going to start with. We are responsible to coordinate operation in our libraries. Becoming a learning organization, you have to determine what you're going to allocate in terms of resources toward learning. I did a ton of research about this. There are differing models of investment used by lots of businesses about learning. Examples include anywhere from 2% to 10% of their total budget, which is a lot. Or just salary costs which is a little less. But I feel this way: Since our bottom line is not built on sales or profit or loss, I keep tabs on our most valuable commodity, time. For this, I simply add up all the paid hours for the entire staff for the year in one pot. And then I combine all the reported training hours for that year in one pot and just figure out the percentage. In this instance, for me, a successful learning year for our library is an investment of 2 to 3% of our total hours worked. Since part of our learning strategies include outside training as well, we'll sometimes bring in a presenter for a small fee, and hopefully some conferences. We do have a small line item in our budget to cover those hard costs, but the most important data point is the percentage of time. So this leads us to the return on investment, such a debacle. How do we measure learning? What is the appropriate combination of metrics, and is it worth it? For this I really don't have an answer, I mean hypotheses and -- >> I'm sorry to interrupt but your audio is getting choppy so if you could repeat your formula for ROI I know somebody typed it in. I'm hoping it's some weird blip in your audio, but just know that you are sounding a little choppy. >> Okay. Keep me posted. >> Will do. >> All right. So a successful learning year, the formula would be you take all your hours worked for your entire staff, put them in a pot, take all the training hours that are reported, put those in a pot, then just figure out your percentage. And the magic number for me, and again, this will vary based on your system, the size of your system, your people, percentages, you know, should be good for really any system because it kind of takes into account the size, doesn't matter. But 2 to 3% of our time being spent on learning. It's really not a big investment but it's just huge benefits. All right. So Jennifer, how did I sound there? >> It sounded a little better. >> Better? Okay, all right. So -- >> It's definitely something a little funky. >> Okay. Well, I'll sit very still. [laughing] All right. So this leads us, this investment question, leads us to a return on investment question. Is it worth it? What's the right combination of those metrics? So I don't have an answer for that. When I was looking through and researching ROI from lots of businesses, I found just lots of jargon and hypotheses, my head ached by the time I was done. I did find, though, a couple of things that were really interesting. I found a suggestion that when you compute ROI it should only be done with the most expensive training endeavors. It's a really complex process, and so that made sense to me. We don't want the cost of figuring the ROI to cost more than we spent on the training itself. I also found this great blog post from John, a senior learning executive at ADP. He said this. No one ever did an ROI exercise on e-mail when it first arrived on the business scene. It was easy to see the value of it, and folks were quick to talk about how great a tool it was. If the learning we design meets and exceeds the business needs and is valued by employees, we have all the ROI we need. As I hunted for these credible ROI methods, I began to see this really curious pattern. Measuring ROI sounded an awful lot like our conversations about how we prove the value of our libraries. Learning departments in big businesses were managed by very familiar pieces. Content, delivery, technology, marketing, and administration. These are all pieces of libraries. Content is our complexions or our -- collections or resources, technology, marketing and administration. So this is really curious to me. What it sounded like was the most effective businesses that have learning organizations, they design a library, and they call it a training department so that's something for us to all chew on. So to learn more, to really dive into this product, info people has a learning inive next January about building effective learning cultures. I like that you register in teams, it's experiential, virtual with a learning component, I think I'll be part of that virtual mentoring as well, super excited. There's also a link to that there in chat. So I think we're done. Oh my gosh, only three minutes left, goodness. I cannot contain my passion for learning, I really can't. We can't cover every concept here in one webinar in one hour, and I really feel like our whole lives are a big learning adventure. It starts at day one, it's super messy, uncomfortable, and it is the best thing ever, it's our most powerful gift as individuals, and if we want our learning environments at work to feel great, we want our libraries to feel wonderful, why not, why not attach to learning and just really push through with it. I know that my learning is successful when I come away with information and another question. So I hope that that's what you've all found today. All right. Is -- are there any questions that we can answer in two minutes? >> Thank you so much, Jami. There were a few more questions, and lots and lots of sharing going on, lots of folks whose job it is to focus on learning within their organization, even some really cool new job titles that include learning organizations. So it's exciting to know that this is happening in many of your libraries. And thank you so much for jumping in and sharing as well. There were a few other questions that actually I encourage you all to reach out and contact Jami, there was a question about your tracking spreadsheet, and definitely I really encourage you all if you're not yet watched the archive for self-directed achievement webinar, lots of the other kinds of questions that have come up around motivating staff to share their learning with each other, a lot of that is addressed in a lot of other work that Jami's done at her library. So definitely explore that. There were a few other resources that Jami mentioned that I did not have listed on the event page, so we'll be sure and circle back with her and add those links as well. And thank you to those of you who chimed in with your own favorite resources as well. And I'll just mention a couple of things as we wrap up. I will be sending you to a short survey as you leave that you can collect feedback for Jami to help us guide our ongoing webinar program. I will also be sending you all an e-mail later today once the recording is posted, and we've added all those other great links to the event page. And I'll also send you all a certificate for attending day, and again, you can always send other folks on your team to the learning, and they can get certificates for watching the recording in our catalogue. So know that lots more learning opportunities that you can integrate into your learning plans are available through WebJunction. I think we're going to wrap it up, Jami, any other final comments? >> Nope. I will give you more resources, though, there were a Grundle of books and resources. >> I saw what you posted about the stacks of learning related books so I know you've got more. Thank you to our captioner as well, and thank you so much, Jami, really, for all the great work you're doing for your community as well as for the entire state of Utah and all of the other libraries that were gathered here today. Thank you so much. >> Thank you.