Collins

Can you tell us a little bit about your current role and how the CPD scheme has intersected with your work in this role or previous roles?

Currently I lead the team at the Beaumaris Library in Bayside, Victoria. I love the team, the library and the community; both the team and the community are really creative and sustainability focused. The CPD scheme has helped me to grow into my role. When I started tracking my professional development, I was a team leader and children’s librarian at St Kilda Library, so I was able to record training such as Geek Girl Academy – a social enterprise dedicated to achieving gender equality in the technology industry – as well as develop my story-time technique. More recently, my professional training, reading and networking has been more focused on supporting the team.

A real gift of the program was that it gave me the confidence to reach out to other industry professionals and to seek out mentors, peers and friends to gain genuine insight into the shared joys and challenges we were facing. Peer-to-peer support continues to be an absolute game changer in giving me a sense of belonging in the library network.

I understand that you’ve recently attained Distinguished Certified Professional status. Congratulations! Can you tell us about some of your favourite elements, including highlights from your professional reading?

A definite highlight was being part of the ALIA Mentorship program where I’d have regular catch-ups with Ali Kemp, who looks after Warrnambool Library. The mentorship spanned the early lockdowns here in Melbourne and it was an absolute godsend to be able to put my everyday challenges and what I was thinking about in my career in the context of her experience. Ali’s emphasis on kindness being core to good leadership has made a lasting impact on how I stay true to my own values as I lead my team.

Professional reading really contributed to my CPD journey. My manager, Kristy, put me onto Robert K Greenleaf’s writing and his theory around the value of ‘Servant Leadership’. This continues to resonate with me. More recently, I read and loved an article in the Harvard Business Review about how important it is that team members genuinely find joy and have some autonomy in aspects of their role. Professional reading really challenges me to stretch in how I can build up the team. Supporting a happy, inspired team translates into positive, meaningful interactions with the community.

In your view, why is professional development important for the library workforce?

I’m really motivated to learn about what is going on across the sector locally, nationally and globally, in order to bring the best possible service to the people we interact with here in Beaumaris. I’m also inspired by excellent training, it keeps me excited about my role.

David Lankes’ emphasis on having a hyperlocal response to our community’s needs rather than trying to adopt every interesting project that other libraries are doing, for example, really resonated with me and has kept me grounded in what our local community values and needs — sustainability and creativity.

In a similar vein, being exposed to the phenomenal work being done in LocHal in Tilburg, the Netherlands, really helped me to focus on what the community needs now as opposed to what we’ve traditionally provided for them. At Beaumaris Library, that translated into valuing a large communal table where different members of the community could work independently, but together. It helped me to advocate for lots of extra power points to facilitate the increasing number of people coming in with laptops. And, by listening to how the local Dutch communities had requested access to small community libraries even when they weren’t staffed, helped me to get onboard with a similar concept here in Bayside at Hampton Library.

You’ve just completed training with the Extreme Leadership Academy. Can you tell us about this experience ?

The Bayside Library leadership team were privileged to complete Rachael Robertson’s Extreme Leadership Academy course. Rachael led an Antarctic expedition a few years back and brings the lessons she learned into an everyday team-leading context. Our leadership team met regularly to unpack what we were learning and how we could apply it to our work.

One concept that really stretched me was getting the balance right between data and stories when advocating for change. It’s not enough to anecdotally say ‘we’re getting a lot of people through the door now who are really just up for a chat’ – we need to be saying, ‘in the last month the library team recorded 134 social inclusion conversations whilst assisting the community in the library’ (we’ve started collecting stats specifically on personal conversations). Then, when we’re advocating for hosting a Chatty Café in the library or thinking about how we can respond to the growing need for social connection, we’ve got numbers to back it.

Another highlight of the training was examining how different generations of staff have different expectations about how to show up at work (metaphorically and literally). Some need a sound work–life balance, some grew up with digital literacy, and some signed up for a role 30 years ago whereas others feel free to stay for a few years and then move on. Our team consists of individuals from multiple generations and it makes sense to be aware that each may expect something different from their workplace.