Pat Wagner <lead@pattern.com> is the primary contact.

Description: Change is a given in 21st century medical libraries: intrusive, exhilarating, and growing in strength and frequency. Being an effective change agent and coping with change partly depends on your sense of perspective. If you can understand how change impacts other people and the medical library as a whole, you can learn to increase the benefits and lower the costs (and stress) for yourself and others. This program addresses the needs of both the medical library change agent and those asked to implement the changes. Topics include: understanding the five roles, typical mistakes and how to prevent and fix them, what is changing in medical libraries, eight characteristics of people who cope well with change, nine causes of stress, tools, case studies and knowing when change is not the answer. This class can be presented as a live, face-to-face class, or as a self-paced, online class, which lasts six weeks.

Educational Objective: 1. You will know how to learn the specifics when someone uses the word "change", and everyone else looks puzzled. 2. You will be able to assess both the benefits and the costs of change in your job, department, branch, medical library, institution, and community. 3. You will understand how change impacts people in your medical library differently and have more empathy for their points of view. 4. You will know what mistakes are likely and how to lower their impact on you and the rest of the staff. 5. You will feel more calm and confident, even when the world is unraveling. 6. You will better maintain a benevolent sense of humor, and be less likely to wound others with negative gossip and mean-spirited sarcasm. 7. You will be able to be more influential during times of change, whether from the leadership role or as one of the people asked to do their work differently. 8. You will be able to use simple methods to communicate information that could seem ambiguous and even contradictory. 9. You will be able to better make change work for you, rather than feel overwhelmed. 10. You might even look forward to change in your medical library. (Extra credit!)

Agenda:

This class is available both as a live face-to-face class or an online class. Complete online instructions and a preview of the class syllabus and agenda can be obtained from the instructor, Pat Wagner, by contacting her at pat@pattern or 303-778-0880 in Denver, Colorado. This six-week online class has a starting date and ending date. The class will begin and end with a live webinar, which will be recorded. If you are not able to attend the live session, we will ask you to view the recorded session. The online class is divided into chapters, and each chapter has pages with links to the LINKEDIN discussion group, where you will be directed to post responses to questions and assignments. Each week, you will be asked to read and respond to one-to-two chapters, in addition to reading and responding to the comments of your classmates in the discussion groups. The live class will cover the equivalent information in written exercises and discussion.


Week One: Chapter One and Chapter Two

Chapter One: Welcome: Participants will be introduced to the class tools and learn how to navigate LinkedIn, Librarything, and LE@D. The instructor will interview them by phone and introduce the requirements. They will be asked to submit an online biography and take the pre-test. Each week’s assignments will written and shared with colleagues on the LinkedIn site.

Chapter Two: The Big Picture: This is an overview of the entire class. It contains a number of self-paced exercises and introduces the main concepts. This chapter demonstrates the importance of communicating the big picture to all of the roles in change.

Week Two: Chapter Three and Four

Chapter Three: What is Your Role

Participants will review the five roles in change: user,  leader, manager,  staff and the world. The written assignment is to name three changes the participant could make in their library right now, regardless of their role.

Chapter Four: Mistakes We All Make

Participants will review ten mistakes most commonly made in change management, and discuss three of them online: jargon, responding to the Concerned Library Leader who can’t get anything done, and responding to the Concerned Library Staff who is upset with their leader. Participants also will be given a list of seven possible assignments to chose from and write about online.


Week Three: Chapter Five and Six

Chapter Five: What is Changing in Medical Libraries

Participants will review several categories of trends in libraries in general and medical, academic and special libraries in particular, and identify these changes in their own medical libraries.

Chapter Six: People Who Handle Change Well

Participants will review the eight characteristics of managing change, and create their own action plans to identify and improve these characteristics in their own professional lives.

Week Four: Chapter Seven and Eight

Chapter Seven: Nine causes of stress

Participants will review the nine causes of stress during periods of change and will write about five things they could change in their medical library regarding unhealthy stress, particularly during change.

Chapter Eight: Tools You can Use

Participants will review several conceptual tools and discuss applying them in their libraries. The tools include precision in communication, the three types of library service, making decisions, using cost-benefit ratios and how to teach and learn quickly. The assignment is to apply them in their workplace.

Week Five: Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine: Profiles of change: Four bad ideas

Participants review and discuss four case studies about change projects in medical libraries that went wrong. The assignment is to review guidelines on how to prevent problems and to evaluate how well their libraries are following them.

Week Six: Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten: Conclusion

Participants review the roles of change. They complete the final class assignment, which is being able to write how the roles benefit the library during times of change. They also complete their post-test, and two short written assignments on how they are going to use the material in the class and a plus/delta evaluation.

Need for This Course: Increasingly, over the last five years, I have been asked by medical library directors to help their staff members cope with institutional change and to help the directors themselves understand how to better plan for change, deal with their executives and managers, coach their own managers, and motivate staff. I discovered that even the library leadership at prestigious medical schools and hospitals needed help, particularly with the issues of understanding how the different stakeholders connected to the medical library would view the challenges of change very differently and need different handling. This class was meant to be written from the points of view of the five main kinds of stakeholders: library user, leaders, managers, staff, and the greater institution and community which the medical library serves, as well as the world at large. It is designed to serve medical librarians whether they are the directors leading the change or the managers and employees implementing the change. The topics and exercises are based on real situations and challenges that I have seen for myself and that have been related to me by medical librarians in a variety of situations, including military and civilian hospitals, medical schools, health-related corporations, clinics, and within academic institutions. This class can be taken live or online. The live class can be designed for four, six or eight credits.

The instructional methods used include Slides, Discussion, Dialog, Brainstorming, Sharing/Self-disclosure, Hands-on Exercises, Case Method, Case Study, Problem-based, and Other.

Participant Materials: Participants online materials include: 1. An online interactive class site, which participants will read and use during the six weeks that the class is active. 2. Downloadable quizzes and resources. 3. Use of the online LinkedIn group, where participants will post responses to class materials and exchange ideas. 4. Access to the Librarything online bibliography. 5. Links to pertinent news articles and websites. 6. Live webinar using GoToWebinar.

Facility Requirements: Complete instructions and a preview of the class syllabus and schedule can be obtained from the instructor, Pat Wagner, by contacting her at pat@pattern or 303-778-0880 in Denver, Colorado. Participants for this online class will need to be able to: 1. Use one, and only one e-mail to register for and access the class, whether at home, at work, or at a public terminal. 2. Access the University of North Texas LE@D (Lifelong Education @ Desktop) software, which requires the ability to turn off "pop-up" blockers, and accept cookies, applets, and plug-ins. We will supply you with a free password to test a class and determine if you will be able to access the software as well as supply you and your technicians specifications. Our experience with thousands of participants is that most people are able to log-in with no trouble, even if their computers do not perfectly match the requirements. We have experienced, friendly, live humans beings to help you. 3. Set up on an account at http://www.linkedin.com/. There is no cost, and thousands of your library, university and institutional colleagues are already there. You will be asked to "link" to your instructor, and you will be set up with a discussion group online, where you will be posting your comments and responses to the assignments during the month you are taking the class. 4. Print out various pdfs from the class site. If an organization would like to hold this class as a "live" event in a shared computer lab, arrangements can be made. However, the technical requirements listed would still apply to the individual. So, facility requirements are described in "virtual" terms. Note on privacy: All of the class sites we use are password-protected.

Additional Evaluation: A pre-test and post-test will be part of the class and is built into the online class. It is designed to test the knowledge of the participant before and after the class and focuses on major educational objectives. Also, at the end of the class, participants will be asked four questions regarding the class: what will they apply in their workplace, what would they include in their own class on change management, what they liked about the class, and what they would want to change about the class.