Leadership involves a commitment to learning. Each year the AASL president-elect and the executive director attend the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) CEO Symposium. The two day event for the association CEO and CSO offers relevant engagement to share successes and challenges and learning how association boards operate, and overall develop partnerships for the year ahead. This is such an incredible opportunity to learn about how to think of impact from a top-down approach and best practices in serving as president of a member focused association. I have attended several different types of leadership institutes and symposiums over the years through my state library association and my school district, but I was still blown away by the new ways of thinking and approaching problems presented during the symposium.

In January I had the opportunity to attend a leadership symposium sponsored by the American Society of Association Executives as the president-elect of AASL alongside Allison Cline, the AASL deputy executive director, to begin planning and mapping out my upcoming presidential year. We both left the conference brimming with excitement and a notebook full of ideas and plans to make them happen.

I found the symposium incredibly valuable and examined best practices for associations, how to develop and hone that top-down, strategic thinking approach that allows associations to grow and evolve with their members and how to lead through change and strife. We looked at how to take a strategic plan and put it into practice, which is exactly what AASL is working to achieve right now with our newly adopted plan.

As I was thinking over all the things I learned in January, I started listening to a new audio book that unexpectedly fit perfectly as a follow-up to the symposium. Dan Heath’s new book Reset:How to Change What’s Not Working compliments what I learned at the symposium perfectly. Heath goes through multiple ways to identify pain points within your organizational process. Two things discussed throughout the book that really resonated for me within my school library practice:

The first: consider the goal of the goal. What are you trying to accomplish or achieve with the goal? Why did you originally choose this for a goal? If you aren’t reaching the goal you intended by your actions, does the goal actually fit? Are there other ways to reach your goal besides the way you are currently trying? While this seems like a really simple concept, it is so easy to get bogged down in the day to day running of a school library you can easily forget why you started doing something to begin with––or you inherited the process and goal from a predecessor and were never clear on the why of the processes from the start.

The second aha for me was what Heath calls the restacking of resources. All school librarians know you have a finite amount of funds and time while juggling a huge number of tasks. While the simple answer is school libraries need more staff, more resources, etc to accomplish our charges, that is not always a realistic solution. Understanding these are the only resources you have and they are in limited supply (time and money) how can you restack or rearrange resources to reach your goals? Are there ways to approach the issues you are facing in your library where you can ask yourself these questions? Within my own practice, I have already put this into action. At the beginning of the school year I set a goal to gather specific data points from librarians about their collaboration and coteaching in addition to all the learner activities and events that happen in the library each day. On paper, the goal and process looked great, but feedback from our district  librarians told me they found it very time consuming and frustrating, which is the exact opposite of what I hoped to accomplish. When I considered the goal of the goal, I realized I was missing the mark. I went back to the drawing board and found other ways that were not sucking librarians time up to gather the same data. If you have roadblocks in your path keeping you from achieving your goal, ask yourself Heath’s questions and see if it helps you get unstuck in your problem solving.

I am still working through the other suggestions in the book but am already energized by the ease at which this problem was solved by approaching it through a different lens. The CEO Symposium provided the time and partnership for AASL leader and staff leader to reflect on suggestions such as in Heath’s book and how we can use this to move forward the work of AASL and our school library profession in the year ahead. I cannot wait to get started and look forward to hearing members share their thoughts on the new ideas we have.