The Public Services Leadership Cohort (PSLC) was developed to address a lack of consistent and engaging leadership training for new and existing supervisors in our library system. Branch supervisors were frustrated by the lack of structured training to help them grow and understand their roles as leaders in the library system. In this same period, PGCMLS experienced a significant turnover in branch leadership, with a large number of existing supervisors leaving for new opportunities. This created a vacuum in the system’s library leadership, as the incoming supervisors were qualified candidates, but lacked practical, hands-on training in their new roles.

PLSC is an evolving, hands-on training program that focuses on four fundamental leadership topics: knowing yourself, knowing your team, building your team, and knowing your community. These topics build on each other across the program, providing participants with the tools they need to understand their role as a leader, recognize the dynamics in their team, and embrace their role in the community. One feature of PSLC is its intentional use of cohorts, with each consisting of no more than nine participants. These participants establish their own ground rules, hold each other accountable, and create their own mini-networks of support in their roles as leaders and supervisors. With these cohorts in place, PSLC effectively turns leadership training into a truly immersive experience, with trainers using a combination of interactive tools and engaging discussions to facilitate learning, and the cohort creating their own unique dynamic to foster a safe, collaborative space for growth.

As a result of their participation in the training, PSLC participants have established new connections with their fellow supervisors, learned from each other’s experiences, and learned to value the human resources available to them across our library system. Because of the success of the earliest iteration of the training, the program has also expanded to welcome supervisors from all across PGCMLS, rather than just from individual branches.

More notably, the PSLC approach has gained eyes beyond PGCMLS, with library systems across DC, Maryland, and Delaware all indicating interest in either bringing our trainers to their systems, or learning from us how to develop similar programs of their own. To this end, two PSLC trainers, Karin Luoma and Andrea Thomas, spoke about the program at this year’s Maryland Library Association conference in a presentation called “Building a Culture of Leadership,” to an audience of more than 60 Maryland and Delaware colleagues.