I flew into Chicago yesterday. I got checked in and despite some confusion between the hotel staff and I about Internet access, I am up and blogging. Whoo hoo.

This morning I had the opportunity to take an interesting MLA Continuing Education class, Gaining Leadership Skills Without Formally Supervising People taught by Natalie Kay Reed.

This class focused on learning various leadership skills without formally supervising people. In other works you don't have to be a manager or a supervisor and we learned that leadership is not mutually exclusive to management. Just because you are a manager doesn't necessary mean that you are a leader. Just because you are a leader within a group doesn't mean that you are the supervisor or manager either.

Leadership focuses on achieving goals to make a change. Management focuses on control, organization, and order.

Within the class we learned that various organizations MLA, SLA, Management, etc. all have their core leadership skills. They are all very similar, but have their own slant tailored to the organization.

In the class we learned about the various leadership skills and discussed our experiences with leaders who used these skills. After the discussion we looked at the skills and wrote down which skills were important to us. Then we discussed our spheres of influence, in other words our personal and professional encounters in our daily lives. For example: my personal spheres of influence include my family, my swim team, school PTA, friends, etc. My professional spheres could be my job at the library, my state association, committee work, hospital work groups, etc. Then we looked at the leadership skills that we thought were important to us and began to look at we would use them within our spheres. We then created action plans as to how we could better develop our skills and continue learning and developing our leadership skills.

It was a very interesting class and I think the best part of it was listening to other participants thoughts and discussing the qualities and skills of leaders. It has inspired me to develop a few of these skills and grow a little bit more professionally and personally.

Labels: ContinuingEducation, Leadership, MLA2008