4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 25 March 2011

This was a very serious day of all days.  We had to wind up, this means we had to stand in front of the group and who knows who to do a presentation.  Uncertainty, anxiety and all scarry feelings were in my mind. 

For the morning session, we had three presentations which I wished were not there so to prepare myself.

International vs. African Librarianship / Dr Buhle Mbambo-Thata

As librarians we have to reflect moral equality with the rest of the humanity.  We have to represent our organisations and Africa with dignity to other contries.  We have to be accountable and contribute informed and well researched ideas.  If we are not sure of ourselves as a profession and refer to us "just a librarian", the next person will not see us as valuable.

We have to think globally and act locally.  We need to be innovative and be active within the LIASA Body.  If we are serious about our profession, we should look into being active internationally and join international bodies like IFLA.  This will will really make us grow.  Librarians should strive towards being teachable individuals and excel in what they are doing.  We need to be reliable and brand our image/culture so that we may attract the younger generation to the profession.  As leaders we must be accountable, ethical and responsible for our profession.

The vision for libraries in SA - DAC Perspective / Puleng Kekana of DAC)

Session cancelled

The way forward for libraries in SA / Christine Stilwell

Christine shared with the group what needs to be considered to take our profession forward.  These were some of the things that were identified:

Identifying community needs so to provide the right services

Focus on libraries as social spaces and provide resources as needed

Focus on families (all university community in a university setup)

Inculcate the culture of reading

Focus on access ICTs

Balance the physical and digital environment

Brand libraries for best reputition

The following are the main issues of the day:

Information literacy

Funding

ICT's

Education and training

Assertive LIS professionals

Developing a culture of reading

Equitable services

Lunch

Group presentations

Groups were given assignment to work on that had to be presented on this particular day.  Everyone had a part the they would present and powerpoint was used as a presentation aid.

All went according to plan and the storm was over.

Feedback

Ujala wrapped up and individuals shared their experience at the academy.  It was a very emotional session, we all were tired but it was difficult to say goodbye.

Gala Diner

The mood changed, everybody was dressed up for the final occassion.  The venue was up to standard and were treated like kings and queens.  There were speeches in between meals.  Food, wine and softdrinks were served.

What an experience!!!!!  Carnegie Leadership Academy is a must for all Librarians.  I am more than grateful for the opportunity and experience.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 24 March 2011

Marketing, Branding and effective communication / Prof Ronel Rensburg

The main objectives of the presentation was to alert us to the following issues:

• Organisational and/or institutional communication: This is basically the communication that takes place on a daily basis in orgainisations be it internal communication through intranet or grapevine etc.  We learnt learnt about the benefits of each type of communications medium.
• Marketing:  We dealt about selling the organisations products (in a library, it is about informing our users what we have and what we can offer them).  It is very necessary for the library to go out there and invite people to maximally use the services offered.
• Branding: Reputation management. As examples we looked at well known brands like McDonalds, Mercedes, Nike, Nelson Mandela, Oprah, etc.  We looked at what they are, what they stand for and if they could live up to their brands. 

Having said the above, libraries need to define the impression that they want to be remembered about.  We need to develop a memorable professional identity that others will remember about us.

Gaining a competitive edge / Dr Nisha Sewdass

Dr Sewdass addressed us on issues of competitive edge which is a systematic program for gathering and analysing information about your competitors' activities and general business trends to further the company's goal.  Competitive intelligence is not just information, it is what managers need to make decisions.  Competitive intelligence is a process.

Libraries are support structures.  In an academic institution, the library must provide books, databases, journals and other information sources relevant to teaching and learning.  It is the duty of the librarians to ensure that the service that is rendered to university community is suitable.  This would mean that library goals must be in line with the strategic objectives of the university.

Changes in the marketplace must be taken into consideration, i.e. technology, products and services change everyday and so is the ways and means of delivering information to users.  Librarians must improve their knowledge and meet the demands of users.  Legislation, procedures and policies pertaining to information provision must be well communicated to all staff in order to provide the services fairly.

Funding is always a problem in the library for purchasing as much as the library would like.  There are other common problems like bandwidth, leadership styles and lack of innovation within the company that may lead to resignation of highly skilled staff.  

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 23 March 2011

This looked liked a very long day with 5 workshops! 

Ethics and the dynamic organisation / Prof Deon Rossouw

We learnt about the overview of the following:

• core ethics concepts and distinctions
• why ethics matters
• building ethical organisations

There is no institution that functions without Good ethics.  Business ethics are the values and standards that determine the interaction business and its stakeholders.  Values refer to convictions about what is good/desirable/ important.  Strategic values in organisations are about direction.  We need convicted individuals that know how to do their jobs.  Ethical values determine how we interact as individuals at work.  As libraries, we must treat our clients with respect so to retain them.   Institutions must build and maintain cultural ethics for their organisations.

We learnt about the strategic importance of for business which is trust and unlocking human potential.

Trust is built by the following:

• openness
• competency
• integrity
• benevolence
• history of interactions

Due to unethical treatment on employees, the following could be the consequences:

• job dissatisfaction
• high employee turnover
• absenteeism
• theft
• sabotage
• inhabitance of creativity

Respect for this individual is the key to unlocking human capital.

Innovative gaming for Information literacy / Bettie De Kock

It is highly important that libraries become innovative and come up with new ideas.  The following are examples of new ideas that libraries need to implement

• get online tutorials for information literacy
• avail up-to-date information brochures
• have an "ask a librarian" online facility
• have library competitions on how to find information from books, sets of encyclopedia, etc

The session was very informative and fun.

Client Services / Hilda Kriel

Everyone in a University is the library competition.  We depend on the same bag of money.  We have to have a reason to get more or equal share to everybody else's.
As a library, we have to work hard to make everyone to take us serious and value us as a unit.  The following are some of the environmental indicators that we need to look into:

• staff perceptions about the library
• clients perception about us
• client satisfaction
• readables (spine labels, shelf guides,etc)
• financials (charges for photocopies, etc)
• cultural - disables/physically challenged clients  

Library staff rewards and opportunities for staff development are essential for job satisfaction.  Client Service is action and quality management.  It is not only for Service counter staff but for everyone in the library.

Advocacy Toolkit / Karin Kitching

Library advocacy is about building trustworthy relationships and maintaining them.  It is about increasing the perceived value of the library and creating support for the library among customers.
As librarians we always need support for funding among other needs, we therefore must constantly create visibility and awareness of the library.
We have to identify strategic contacts and treat all of them like Presidents.
We have to give our contacts a chance to tell us what they expect of us.
We have to develop a "ready to deliver speech" to use as an elevator speech for the library

We were given guidelines on how to write an elevator speech for our libraries. 
Generally, Karin informed us that the US embassy will be opening a Virtual library and we are welcome to join to have access to it.  The library will have 25 databases to access.  She also encouraged us to apply for a Fulbright scholarship and handed application forms to all of us.

Mobile Technologies / Janice De Wee

This was a practical session using our smart phones.  We were given instructions to download some reader software that would enable us to use the smartphone for the session.  We created twitter accounts for ourselves and interacted.
We were shown how to use Bluetooth and shared some data via it.
As libraries we need to learn to use the mobile technologies to attract more Digital generation.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 22 March 2011

The dynamic organisation / Johan Greef

This was a day after we had visited the Constitutional Hill.  Johan greef made us aware of a  "living organisation".  We have to learn from the past but find ways and means to carry on and make a difference.  We  as leaders and librarians have to be constantly aware of political, economic, natural, social and technical issues to made decisions.  Time has come for librarians to manage libraries as business units.  Librarians should choose to adopt to the relevant issues. 

We had an exercise of looking through an object that was placed on the table and covered with a cloth with holes on it.  Each one of us had to share what he/she could see through the hole.  In conclusion we realised that from different angles, different size holes we could not all see the same picture.  Through comminication and sharing, we managed to guess what we thought it is that was covered by the cloth.  This shows that teamwork is better that a individual effort.

We learnt about the importance of having objectives and sharing them with staff.  The benefits are that human resources would be fully utilised, role conflict and ambiguity would be reduced as everybody would be sure what is expected of them; objective appraisal criteria is provided and it makes it easy to identify problems.

The most important lesson for all of us was the effectiveness of teamwork.  Individual and team performances need to be managed in order to ensure effective performance improvement and growth of individuals.  Also, the importance of recognising achievement and celebrating successis very necessary for motivating employees.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 21 March 2011

Multiculturalism in the workplace / Sean Moodley

We learnt that we need to take reality into consideration when dealing with diversity issues  in the workplace.  These are race, culture, sexuality, religion, etc.  Diversity issues are there and will not disappear on their own, we need to deal with them.  It is true that we all feel comfortable with people tht look more like us.  We must be tolerant and learn to accept things that we do not like but cannot change.  It is highly important that we have a broad understanding of where we are at the moment as a country, be it politically and economically. 

Transformation is the buzz word of the day. It is the process of change.  To transform, as an organisation, we have to begin with individual transformation.  South Africa as a country is moving forward but it seems individuals are left behind in terms of transformation. 

It is important that as leaders in the library, we need to make our colleagues understand the reason for them to transform, what it is that they need to change and the "how" would come naturally.  Libraries must change with time and serve the communities with information that is valuable to them.  As libraries, we need to explore means and ways to make our libraries useful to our users. 

We have to evaluate ourselves and the services that we render and transform where necessary in order to be efficient.  We have to improve our skills, knowledge and services on an ongoing basis. 

Visit to the Constitutional Museum and Court

www.constitutionalhill.org.za

This visit was to create awareness of where South Africa is coming from.  It was suitable for the day as it was Human Rights day. We watched a video of the apartheid era where victims were sharing their most painfull experineces of the time.  We then had a jail tour and saw exhibitions that celebrate South Africa's journey from its struggle against apartheid to the new South Africa.  We also visited the Constitutional court.

It is important for all South African youth to visit the Constitutional Hill so that they can see and learn about the History of South Africa.  This will make them understand where South Africa is coming form and maybe they would grab all opportunities that are available to them with open hands.

This was a very touching event, I cannot say much about it, it makes me very emotional.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 19-20 March 2011

This was our free weekend, we used the time to work on our group projects, catch up with our work and went out to have fun, most of all we rested!!!

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 18 March 2011

Friday the 18th of March was marked as a full week since we arrived at the Villas Hotel for the Carnegie Academy.  We had 3 presentations for the day i.e

1.  Responsible leadership/ Prof Derick De Jongh
2.  Introduction to knowledge management / Marietjie Schutte and
3.  Innovations and thinking outside the box for South African libraries/ Prof. Johannes Cronje

Prof Derick De Jongh raised the following important issues about responsible leadership:

• Global crisis and leadership interventions when dealing with disaster management. 
• Ethics, the ability to distinguish between right and wrong
• Active consciousness, to do what you believe and to live an examined life taking the right decisions.

Introduction to Knowledge management

We learnt about the need to have knowledge management in our organisations.  Amongst the benefits of implementing knowledge, I have identified the following as most crucial ones:

KM helps to drive strategy; It helps individual employees to do their jobs better; keeps people up-to-date; develops a professional code of ethics to be followed by employees; builds organisational memory.

The lesson I learnt is that Knowledge management helps employees to know more about their customers, products, technologies, and peers in order to perform better.

Innovations and thinking outside the box for South African libraries:

From this topic I learnt that we as librarians, need to protect our users information overload.  We should use our expertise to direct our clients to information that is useful to them.  In academic libraries, we should have faculty libraries for instance whereby users would not have to sift large volumes of books that are not relevant to their studies.

We learnt about group dynamics and the relevance of team work.  Individuals must understand the benefit of positive interdependence to reach a common goal.  For further understanding of the subject one need to read the book 7 habits o highly effective people: powerful lessons in personal change/Covey, S.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 17 March 2011

This was a day that everyone was looking forward to , when we would be out of the Villas for the first time after five days.  I learnt to appreciate travelling to work never mind the traffic.  I missed everything in my usual routine.

We embarked on a shuttle at 7h30 to visit University of Pretoria, Merensky library for the morning and would spend the afternoon at the National Library of SA. 
At UP we had two presentations, one presented by Christa North about "Quality assurance" and the other by Robert Moropa on "the strategic organisation in pracitce and locating the library on the management radar screen".

About Quality Assurance, I learnt that quality assurance is not about the following:
compliance; lots of paper; fabricated evidence; nor is it compliance with externally set minimum standards.  Quality Management is a mechanism to ensure that an organisation's plans for success are met.  It is about improve the way the organisation functions.

The information that I got is relevant to me as my institution will be audited in May.  I am now sure what is happening about quality and I will be able to transfer my knowledge to my colleagues when I get back to work.

Robert Moropa took us for a tour to see the renovations in the UP library.  I like UP's library structure of having subject specific libraries according to faculties.  My library is still the old fashion type arranged like a public library.  I will definately propose that we subdivide our collections according to faculties.

In support to the University core function of teaching and learning, Robert spoke to us about placing and keeping your library in the radar screen.  He encouraged us to be leaders and play our role to finding the solutions to institution's porblem.

We had lunch at UP the Burgandy restuarant and then proceeded to the National Library of SA.  The library is the best in the country, a real state of the art.  It functions differently from public libraries but is useful in that patrons can visit and use the collections and other libraries can request resources through ILL.

There is lot to brag about in the National library but what impressed me is that it matches libraries of other coutries in the world.  For more information please visit:  http://www.nlsa.ac.za/

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 16 March 2011

We continued with John Moalusi but today it was a different topic: "MAXIMISING HUMAN CAPITAL". 

We learnt how to formulate a strategy for Human Capital and considering all the legislation about Human Capital i.e the Constitution of RSA; Labour relations; Basic conditions of employement; Contract of Employment and common law.  This is done because of the relevance to treat all individuals fairly.

It is importatant to guide individual employess in the work place, communicate with them, give them a chance to give you feedback, monitor them and reward them for the work well done.  This will ensure job satisfaction as well as production in the organisation.

I  learnt that it is important to identify talent and nurture it, communicate problems and find solutions to them.  Accept critisism and work on it.  We need to form communities of practise, share our knowledge with fellow colleagues so to retain the expertise within the organisation even if people leave the organisation for various reasons.

Organisations should strive towards being employers of choice by enticing potential employee to want to work for their organisations.  Employees should optimise performance, organisations should offer attractive packages in order to maximise the strength of the business.

The topic was very educating and interesting.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 15 March 2011

Organizational Leadership was the topic of the day.  The presenter was John Moalusi.  From this workshop we were drawn to the following:

• the need to redefine library science and make ourselves visible to the world
• come up with strategies to deploy information to the people
• as leaders, librarians need to recreate the world of library science
• understand that leaders always do the right thing, they live by conviction and they are guided by  social dynamics
• we learnt that managers go by the book, they do not change anything i.e policies/procedures
• leaders create followers but also, they develop other leaders
• leaders observe and allow others to speak and lead
• as librarians we need to become leaders and take our services to the people
• library managers should blend their management role with a touch of leadership otherwise they may destroy the library institutions

These theories were coupled by group exercises whereby groups had to give examples in the form of a case study per group to reflect the difference between managers and leaders.  We learned to distinguish between social and personal competences.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 14 March 2011

It was another day not knowing what to expect but I made it.  It was raining for the first time since we came to the Academy.  I had nothing to protect to protect myself from the rain but then it did not matter as all venues were nearby.

We started the day by an interesting and informative session presented by the National Librarian, Mr John Tsebe.  This was to give us information on the location of libraries on the National agenda.

The next presentation was LIASA and our leadership roles.  We were made to understand that we Librarians are LIASA and it is very important that we become active in the Consortium and take the library profession forward.

After the teabreak, we had to motivating and inspiring presentations by Prof Bothma followed by practical exercises of where we are currently, how we want to be in future and what we would like to achieve as librarians. 

The next presentation was presented by Rene Schoombe.  She shared with us  her development to where she is with her carrier and she showed us examples of how she raises funds for the Rustenburg school library where she works and also showed us some video to ease our minds.

After lunch Ujala Satgoor facilitated the Campbell leadership tool descriptor tool activity.  We were grouped into four groups and used the results of all individuals in the groups from the tool and see which were the strong points in the each tool.  We then discussed each group's results and identified the groups' areas of development.  The activity was very interesting.

The last activity for the day was a game named PAMOJA.  This was confusing at the beginning but was fun and made us to think deep after time was up.

It was then dinner time and time to do homework thereafter.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 13 March 2011

I was not sure if I would make it from 8h30 to 21h00 on a Sunday but I had to wait and see.  The program looked quite interesting but I did not trust my energy levels.  To my surprise, I managed to wake up without an alarm clock, I prepared myself for the day.

I joined the group for breakfast at 08h00 then proceeded to the conference room.  The first session was HBDI (Herman Brain Dominance Instrument) personal and group profiling.  The facilitator was Prof Ann De Boer of the Department of Information Science in the University of Pretoria.  Wow! she has a remarkable personality.  She kept us on our toes, we laughed our lungs out right through the presentation and before we knew it, it was time for the next session which was graduation (of the previous group that attended the Academy before us) lunch.

The venue for the lunch was well draped with colourful table settings.  My group set on the same table with the graduants.  The graduation and the lunch took almost 3 hours and it was very motivating to see graduants receiving their certificates and listening to their motivational speeches.

After lunch, it was back to square one, the conference room to continue with HBDI with Prof Ann De Boer.

The last session about Campbell Leadership descriptor was postponed due to unforeseen circumstances.  It was 18h00 when we finished and we went for dinner.

4th Carnegie LIASA Leadership Academy 12 March 2011

The Villas Hotel and Conference Centre

We all arrived at the Villas hotel and conference centre on a Friday the 11th of April.  We registered, got our conference bags and we were welcomed by Ujala Satgoor.  We went for dinner and came back for individual Introductions by the Academy attendees.

–        My  expectations of the course

I am hoping that the course will transform me to be a better person.  I hope I will understand clearly what leadership is and be able to lead.

–        A reflection on what you intend doing with your new knowledge

I intend taking back with me tips that will improve my institution as a whole.  I will identity information that would be suitable for the various sections within my library and share ideas with personnel concerned.

All in all I hope I will be able to make a difference when I get back to my library.

–        At least five issues you intend addressing / doing differently in your own library, based on the programme

–        Provide equitable service

–        Be strategic, innovative and assertive

–        Ethical organizational culture

–        Positive branding of library to be efficient and professional

–        To be a leader that will create more leaders within my library

On the second day of the Academy which was a Saturday when nobody expected to be learning as much as,  we learnt about Web 2.0 Technologies.  We learnt how to create blogs and wikis.  It was very informative and interesting.  This is a must for all information practitioners!  These are the tools that would take us through the journey for the Academy.