This year SLA’s Leadership Summit ended with a continuing education session titled The Leadership Adventure presented by Leadership Outfitters. If you didn’t pay the $125 to attend the entire Summit, SLA charged you $199 for this half-day course. Working out those economics is pretty easy.

Leadership Adventure was typical management training, very interactive, very much concentrated on helping you discover within yourself and with your colleagues management and leadership qualities and techniques to become a better leader. If you dispensed with skepticism about “oh another management training course” (which not everybody was able to do, based on the number of people in the hallway outside the door and something that I know I personally should work on), it was actually fun and helpful. It made a nice ending to the first day’s keynote about letting your inner leader out.

We were invited to envision the future (the SLA collage was interesting, made of torn-out words and images from magazine articles — watching librarians destroy magazine pages is always entertaining), to learn how to run effective meetings (I have some candidates in mind who should pay attention to this, not necessarily SLA types), to work as effective teams, and to become more creative.

We ended the Leadership Adventure by noting the nuggets we’d take away from Leadership Summit. My group liked the keynote and found Susan DiMattia’s comments particularly useful. The importance of stories, finding your own leadership style, and identifying with a cause were also mentioned. Finally, the challenge came down to defining what SLA’s core values are and what do the members agree on.

When asked by our instructors if SLA had a Big Hairy Audacious Goal, Ethel Salonen raised her hand to state unequivocally that, yes, SLA had a BHAG. It’s raising a million dollars for Professional Development. Her characterization is dead on.