Beyond Competencies:  From Information Professional to Information Pioneer
Remarks to the SLA Boston Chapter on October 26, 2004, at Simmons College
By Janice LaChance, jlachance@sla.org

Introduction and Thanks

Ethel, thank you so much for introducing me here at my first meeting with your home chapter. Good evening everyone! Thank you for coming tonight. The Boston Chapter is one of my favorites because I’m a New Englander myself!

I’m sure you know that the Boston Chapter also has the proud status of being the oldest SLA chapter. That means you have a leadership role in helping to shape your profession and your association, because you have a collective history that can be shared with some of our newer chapters.

I am very pleased to join you this evening and talk with you about going beyond competencies in your professional life. First though, I’d like to recognize a few people that are with us tonight.

Hope Tillman, your chapter president, has served in so many volunteer roles in SLA that she is starting to repeat performances! She served as chapter president way back in 1993-1994. But what many of you may NOT know is that she served as president of the Princeton-Trenton Chapter back in 1984-1985. Oh yeah, and she also served as president of SLA! Her service experience totals 48 volunteer leadership roles that she has assumed over the years. I think that is something worthy of congratulations and praise. Thank you Hope for everything you do for SLA.

I’d also like to thank Dee Magnoni for her service to SLA. I’ve known Dee for most of my time as executive director of the association, and I know she has taken on leadership roles across the SLA spectrum – including her current role on the association’s Finance Committee.  

And I’m very happy to see that EBSCO is supporting this event. They have been one of the most consistent supporters of SLA for years, and they deserve our recognition and thanks.

I’d like to talk to you tonight about where I see the information professional today, and what is required for transforming your career.

In my 16 months in this job, I’ve been asked in forum after forum if the library is dead. I think the truth is that we have to look beyond the physical location and into the hearts of organizations everywhere. If we adopt that perspective, I have learned that information professionals are everywhere! Now that’s a statement that usually spawns looks of surprise. It seems that the stories of information professionals losing jobs and corporate libraries being closed are too numerous to count. But information professionals are out there, doing all kinds of great work in businesses, governments, universities, associations and research institutions. But it is true that, in the narrow context of the physical library, organizations are employing fewer information professionals in traditional settings. This fact alone has probably caused more consternation among traditionalists, but the fact is that companies, governments and academia are not eliminating jobs; they’re shifting priorities. With shifting priorities, these organizations have shifted roles and responsibilities. That means they’re creating new jobs to do much the same work as in the past – but in very different ways.

Technology, generational shifts, user demographics, organizational change, and the onslaught of micro-specialties within our profession have all played a part in this transformation of the market for information professionals. Is this revolution a good thing? Arguments on that question may never end. But the long-term interests of the information profession are best served by this transformation. As organizations adapt to changing market conditions, all professions must find ways to adjust in order to thrive. The same applies to the global community of information professionals, and we should be excited about the future.

In 1995, SLA formed a Committee on Competencies to explore the critical skills required of information professionals in the modern working world. The Committee mapped out a range of capabilities that are critical to survival and success. The result was a stunning inventory of personal and professional competencies that were designed to facilitate the evolution of the information professional into a modern knowledge worker: strong in conceptual thinking, flexible enough to face changes, and advanced in leadership and management qualities.

That document was updated in 2003 so as to keep pace with the ongoing transformation of the market for information professionals. It was enhanced with the inclusion of core competencies that marry personal and professional capabilities together. The updated version (titled, SLA Competencies for Information Professionals of the 21^st Century) may be viewed in its entirety at http://www.sla.org/competencies.

But the combination of the skills and capabilities outlined in SLA Competencies can help information professionals not only survive or thrive; they can transform an information professional into a strategically valuable organizational asset. Achieving such a level of performance, however, requires more than formal education, ongoing professional development, and lifelong peer networking. As in any profession, the route to success requires leadership, vision, a willingness to take risks, and a commitment to meaningful innovation.

Peter Drucker is known for saying that “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

So much about the experience of information professionals in the workplace has to do with either the ability to manage information or manage people who manage information. But with information and knowledge now understood as organizational drivers – alongside technology, people, money, and culture – management must transform into leadership, to set standards and drive change within the organization so that the impact of information and knowledge are fully realized. 

Information professionals sit at the crossroads of information and technology; of knowledge and action; of decision support and success. Technical knowledge is not everything. It may be necessary in the beginning of a managerial career, where information professionals tend to focus on tactical delivery. But with the passing of time, leadership qualities, the ability to communicate and motivate, and the power to make decisions are essential for continued growth.

Warren Buffett once said “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

What does that mean? It means that leaders are vision-directed. A leader creates a compelling image of the future, is committed to this idea, and inspires others to action by aligning their goals with this vision. 

But just what is vision? Let’s start with addressing its opposite: myopia. Maintaining a focus on the trees, rather than the entire forest, automatically limits the ability to develop a clear vision for individual, team, or organizational success. So developing a vision for success must begin with the right perspective.  Building a vision is more complicated.

A vision must describe the desired long-term future for the individual, the team, or the organization. The vision development process is, therefore, a balancing act. It requires imagination, a strong foundation of exceptional skills, and a mental capacity for synthesizing both.

Challenging visions can truly motivate people, if they reach out to the future and serve as a beacon for direction. Strategic plans, however, are necessary, but not inspirational, unless a vision is threaded into them. Moreover, strategic plans have a much higher probability of not being achieved if there is no over-arching vision serving as a guide.

Steve Chaddick, Chief Strategy Officer of Ciena Corporation, says we should “Make bold moves, knowing that some will work and some won’t.  Or make no moves, which guarantees that you’ll be an also-ran.”

Assuming risks are a part of life, but in order to manage the kinds of challenges we all face in our professional lives, we must embrace risk to achieve success. The critical part of embracing risk is in knowing that some bold moves will work and some won’t. In order to assume risk, we must be comfortable with the notion that failure is the greatest teacher. We cannot be perfect in every initiative, every endeavor, but we can aim high and learn from our experiences. This is the starting point for embracing risk.

Being a leader requires getting out of your comfort zone. Set "stretch" goals that enable you to develop new skills. Join committees in your organization or in your professional society, and take a leadership role. This is an opportunity to develop leadership competencies and increase your visibility. Many information professionals do their best to “fly under the radar.” They believe that this demonstrates that they are team players. This is not only short-sighted; it can be detrimental to your career. You stand to lose far more by being invisible than you do by taking risks.

Roger Enrico, Chairman of PepsiCo says we should “Beware the tyranny of making small changes to small things. Rather, make big changes to big things.” 

Is it any wonder that the receptivity to change is inversely proportional to the nature and scope of that change? Human tendencies are such that small and incremental changes are much easier to accept and ultimately embrace. Dramatic, landscape-altering change, however, tends to scare us, force us into defensive postures, and creates animosities with its advocates. In the face of such difficult odds, we should commit ourselves to the aggressive pursuit of new ideas that create new value for our organizations and the people who benefit from our work.

Going beyond imitation and benchmarking, innovation requires an investment in the design and delivery of products and services that go beyond current expectations; that anticipate end-user expectations; and help to foster a new kind of creative cycle, where everything we do is focused on continual growth and transformation of our own value to our organizations.

To be sure, every information professional requires the essential skills and aptitudes found in SLA Competencies to be competitive in today’s workplace. On their own, however, the competencies only allow us to set the table for future growth.

Information professionals who:

• are leaders in their organizations

• possess a vision of their work in the future

• embrace risk

• invest in a systemic discipline for consistently acting on new ideas to create new value (i.e., who innovate)

will not only survive in the modern workplace, but will be hailed as champions of their profession and for their organizations. It will not happen overnight. All of these practices require hard work and dedication to purpose – not to mention an understanding of the long-range impacts.

Author and consultant Tom Peters suggests 7 questions that we should ask ourselves regularly in order to gauge our growth over time. These questions are an excellent measure for any information professional’s commitment to becoming mission-critical:

• I am known for [two to three things]

• Next year at this time I'll be known for [one more thing].

• My current project is challenging me in the following [two ways].

• New things I've learned in the last 90 days include [two items].

• My “public relations program" consists of [one item].

• Important additions to my network in the last 90 days include [one to two names].

• My resume is discernibly different from last year at this time [in one or two ways].

The challenge for information professionals today is to: a) continually seek new ideas and practices that will change your impact on your organization; and b) regularly challenge the way things are done today, to ensure that human nature does not limit your growth.

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