MLA 2019 - Two Favorite Programs

Two workshops at this year’s MLA Conference really stood out to me: What If … You Could Make Sense of Management and What If … Equality Is A Reality.

The What If … You Could Make Sense of Management Workshop was extremely helpful to me as a first time supervisor. This workshop was led by Professor Brian Butler from University of Maryland’s iSchool. The focus of the workshop was on how to navigate the creation of your personal leadership toolbox in order to make dealing with the myriad of issues and personalities that you are responsible for less stressful and more effective. We discussed the various stakeholders that are involved in the operations of a public library and the many demands that they make on our resources. It was really helpful to hear from peers from different types of library environments and with different levels of management experience on how they deal with these, often conflicting, demands on their resources. Some of the issues discussed were ones that I have already had to deal with as a new supervisor and some of the issues were ones that I had not considered. The end conclusion of this workshop was that management is hard and if you think that it’s easy or that you have a one-size-fit-all solution, then you are doing it wrong.

The other workshop that I found particularly compelling was What If .. Equality Is A Reality. This workshop was led by Dr. Michael Edge from the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the College of Education at Wilmington University, and his ability to combine his life experience with the topic matter was compelling. He spoke about implicit biases and how they impact our relationships with one another. While I’ve been to several trainings that have discussed implicit biases in some form or another, Dr. Edge spoke on this sensitive topic in a way that was both highly impactful and not at all blaming or shaming of the participants. One of the things that he brought up over and over again was that you can not blame someone for having implicit biases, they are something that are formed in your childhood by circumstances that you have no control over because you were a child.

This was a welcome approach to the topic since many such trainings on implicit biases have a tone that seems intended to instill a sense of guilt in participants. This approach led to a more open and, in my opinion, honest discussion of the participants’ experiences with implicit biases. The workshop discussed how these biases impact our interactions with customers, both internal and external, and our ability to give excellent customer service. The only downside of the workshop was that it was too short to cover the breadth of the topic.

Kalyn Shields

Pennsylvania Avenue Branch