Leader's Digest January 2008
From LLN
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Leader's Digest January 2008
by Leslie Dillon
- Items that appear elsewhere have been replaced by links to those articles.
Innovation
Succeeding at innovation: Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker
Now in Innovation lessons
Leadership
What every leader needs to know about followers
Now in Leaders and followers
Management quick tip: How can I become better at delegating?
Now in Leaders and followers
Leading with authenticity: A review of True North
Now in Qualities of successful leaders
Management
Manage like an entrepreneur
Now in Manage like an entrepreneur along with other items.
Signs of unrest
Now in Problematic organizations
You need both passion and compassion to lead
Now in Qualities of successful managers
People
Making talent a strategic priority
Now in Problematic and star employees
How can I improve collaboration within my team?
Now in Teamwork checklists
Technology
Business technology trends to watch
Now in Technology trends
More 2008 trends
Now in Technology trends
LITA top technology trends Midwinter 2008
Now in Technology trends
Knol: Google’s answer to Wikipedia
Now in Wikipedia notes
Freed from the page, but a book nonetheless
Now in Ebook notes
Not yet copied elsewhere
Make every meeting matter
In today’s workplace, time is in short supply. Unfortunately, meetings aren’t. But at their best, “meetings can mean everything to an organization.” People can use meetings to be creative together and to integrate different perspectives, knowledge, and experiences. Part of the reason there are so many meetings today is that the more collaborative and democratic workplace requires more meetings to “share information, receive people’s input, and make group decisions.”
Here are some good suggestions for making your meetings productive:
- Don’t always have a meeting. It may not be necessary. Ask yourself the purpose of the meeting. If it’s just to share information, find another way to do that.
- Don’t just discuss. “Productive meetings depend on clearly defined objectives toward which people can work and against which they can measure progress.”
- Spend time to save time. Meetings need to be well planned and communicated. Spend 30 to 60 minutes preparing for meetings you are organizing or leading. Distribute a precise, time-conscious agenda ahead of time, with clearly stated objectives. And assemble the right people.
- Park digressions; deflate windbags. Often meetings take longer than necessary because people wander off topic. Put off-topic ideas in a parking lot. “On a whiteboard or a piece of paper, list the thoughts and ideas that can be pursued (or not) at a more appropriate time.” Try politely interrupting to cut wordy monologues short, and prompt reluctant speakers to keep everyone involved.
- Declare a meeting-free day or time. (This has worked well for library managers I’ve known.) Some organizations now have something called “stand-ups”--“brief huddles where participants work through lean-and-mean agendas in rapid-fire fashion, literally standing up all the while.”
Bottom line? “Use meetings sparingly, and use them well.” (Tom Krattenmaker, “Make Every Meeting Matter," Harvard Management Update, Dec. 2007.)
Book club for executives
Sandra J. Sucher, the teacher of Harvard Business School’s literature class, The Moral Leader, believes that “bringing executives together to read and discuss literary works can be a potent leadership development tool.”
Executives (and other staff as well) must often make moral or ethical decisions that they’re unprepared for. For example, what do you do if a colleague is being mistreated, or how do you explain to your staff a decision from senior management that you don’t support?
Organizations don’t train their staff to understand moral challenges. The value of the course taught by Sucher lies in “how the students reason through the moral challenges together and debate the perspectives that the literature evokes. Managers responsible for developing other leaders can use this type of literary debate to spark very revealing conversations.”
The books they read aren’t about business. A complete list of readings is available here, but they include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Conrad’s "The Secret Sharer" and several others that allow readers to discuss moral challenges.
The value of a book group for executives is the opportunity to exchange ideas. People “come to understand how their own moral codes constrain them--and how they might approach decisions with a more nuanced understanding.” Hearing other people’s arguments “is one way to strengthen your own moral reasoning skills.”
Sucher also points out that these discussions can “create a powerful bond within a group” and she suggests that organizations “might consider integrating discussions of texts into their leadership development programs or even creating a book club for senior leaders--or for any group that confronts moral decision making.”
Is there a role for libraries here? Could your library sponsor an executive book club?
(M. Ellen Peebles, “Harvard Business School’s Sandra J. Sucher on the Value of a Book Club for Executives," Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2008.)
Report on librarians’ feelings about automation
In case you haven’t already heard about Marshall Breeding’s report examining librarians’ satisfaction with current ILS products, here’s a summary of it.
Based on a survey, Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation ranks products. But Breeding points out that readers need to take the results “with the proverbial grain of salt.”
- Polaris ILS received the highest user-satisfaction ratings. Others receiving high scores were TLC’s Library.Solution, Innovative Interface’s Millennium, Book Systems’ Concourse and Follett’s Circulation Plus and Winnebago Spectrum.
- Follett’s Athena and Ex Libris’ ALEPH 500 and Voyager fell into the mid-range tier.
- TLC’s Carl products and SirsiDynix’s Unicorn and Horizon received low scores.
An interactive section of the report lets readers view “sets of results sorted by individual products or questions so they can do deeper analysis on their own.” Note: “results for satisfaction with the ILS itself differ from results for satisfaction with the actual vendor and with its support services.”
Asked about the likelihood of considering open source ILSs, respondents indicated that libraries “still aren’t ready for wide adoption.” One reason cited was “not having enough technical staff… Breeding agreed that this might indicate a lack of awareness that, today, there are vendors you can hire to support open source systems.”
Breeding said the survey “turned up few surprises” and results were “pretty consistent with the real world…”
(Kathy Dempsey, “Report on Librarians’ Feelings About Automation Is More ‘Validating’ Than ‘Surprising’," Information Today NewsBreaks, Jan. 28, 2008.)
