This was the first and only time our group of 50 would come together at Midwinter.
The next time will be at Annual in June.
What's the Emerging Leaders program all about?
It began in 2007 and it's objective is to enable those of us who are new to the profession to gain an inside look into the very complex and confusing structure of ALA, to participate in a problem-solving work group, and to network network network.As an Emerging Leader, we'll have an edge should we decide to serve within the organization of ALA in a leadership capacity. Initially this would likely translate into serving on an ALA committee at some capacity.
The majority of our day was spent getting to know our fellow EL's, with time in the afternoon to work on our group projects (think MLIS days). We ended with a Leadership Self-Assessment to identify our strengths as managerial leaders and of course areas of weakness upon which to improve. It seems my strengths lie in the areas of Empathy and Motivation. Feel free to remind me of this come SRP :)
Our cohort spans everything from Library Assistants to Directors, a GREAT group of people!
My project group includes Erwin with the National Archives in D.C. (He gets to collect and archive Michelle's designer dresses and gifts given to the Obama family!) Melissa(NY), Amanda(NY), Kim (MN) who are each involved with school libraries, and me. For those of you attending ALA Annual in June, set aside a bit of time to attend the poster session where we'll showcase our project.
Thanks for the information about the EL program. I was curious about it, so it's interesting to hear about your experience.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting - on many levels! Would love to hear about what Erwin sees! What kind of leadership assessment did your group do? Curious if it's similar to something we've done in our RCLS trainings.
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