Leadership Breakout Session - Untapped Opportunities
Host: Maureen Southorn and Penelope Klein
Scribe: Kat Buturla

In leadership position - have to balance putting out "fires" and finding opportunities for finding untapped resources
Collaboration - goes with idea of people with "hidden" leadership skills/talents

Personnel
Google's corporate model - assigns employees a percentage of time to do whatever they want; ends up being something productive and employees are coming up with new services for Google because they are so interested in. Can use this as a model to create opportunities for employees

Professional development time - days designated for this; utilize these days for in-house training/workshops
Fund employees to help them take professional development courses

Important to make time and schedule time to allow people to become more involved and participate
Encourage professional development; make resources available to employees

Cross training allows for no lags in service - everyone can do any aspect; helps eliminate "silos"; brings more fluidity; satisfaction in learning new skills and being able to do more than one thing - more interest in the day

How can you motivate staff to cross-train/learn new jobs/etc?
- Play on personalities - need you; when you're not here - we can't function; everyone has a point of leverage
- Not giving up something/lessening their services - but helping to enrich others with their expertise by teaching other staff what they do

How do I connect with the leadership and effect change? How can you work within the hierarchy?
- They need to see it first-hand; reading a report or seeing a presentation does not always get the point across
- People with the power of the purse string needs to understand what is going on

Funding
Other untapped funding opportunities:
- Corporate funding
- Grants

Problems: competing with own organization for same funding pool; asking too many times; individual department funding may hinder institution funding

Information Resources - how do you approach
Ask - the worst they can say is no
Offer something in return - you do something for me and I do something for you

Technology - how can it help with leading organizations
- What is the context of it? Does it apply to the situation?
- Will assessment help or just hinder?
- Listservs are good ways to learn - observe discussions, ask questions
- What do the users want?

Other Ideas
Survey other departments/libraries to see where they are getting funding/resources

Tap into the users
- What can they do to be more involved? Use them to help with programs/services
- How do you do this? Make connections with users; create a dialog with users; it doesn't hurt to ask

See the library from the users' perspective - document (visually, written) how they use the library, how they use the resources

Non-traditional library services (cafes, gaming) is an innovative way to tap into non-users

Smell of coffee - always welcoming

Need to actively promote the library