Brady Clemens, District Consultant, Central PA District

Submitted on behalf of the Altoona, Johnstown, and Central Pennsylvania Library Districts
by Brady Clemens,

What are your strengths, and how well do you leverage them at work? If you haven’t given a lot of thought to this topic, you aren’t alone. It seems that sometimes as library professionals, we focus on ferreting out and fixing our weak points through additional coursework, trainings, and webinars. But maybe this isn’t the best way to look at how we work? On August 19th at the Blair County Convention Center, over seventy staff members from the Altoona, Central PA, and Johnstown Districts were encouraged to look at this question from a different perspective, courtesy of LSTA funding from the Office of Commonwealth Libraries.

Paul Hilt, of Hilt & Associates, presented our “Find Your Strengths!” workshop, helping attendees discover their strengths, learn more about what those strength areas mean, and figure out how they can apply them effectively in work or personal decision making. Each staff member was given a copy of Tom Rath’s StrengthFinder 2.0, with a unique code to take the StrengthsFinder skills assessment test, which generated a list of their top five areas of strength. Unsurprisingly to our speaker, who has worked with librarians before as a faculty member of Library Leadership Ohio, many of us found that “Input” was one of our top strength areas–librarians usually like to learn new things! Further discussion focused on how each strength takes different forms for different people.

After we learned about each of our five strength areas, we were then asked to consider how those different areas interact with each other, to give us a more holistic perspective of how the strengths operate in our lives. In what was for many of us a very useful exercise, we were asked to think about how we have already used our strengths in dealing with a previous situation, before being asked to think about how we will use them in dealing with a situation we are soon to face. Attendees seemed reassured to know that we’ve already been successfully using our strengths, even if we didn’t know the specific terminology for describing them. And, if we’ve done it before, we can do so again, using our strengths for success in future projects and opportunities. As Paul Hilt assured us, “Are there unknowns? Sure. But you’ve done it before!”