How to reach hospital leaders/administrators:
- Utilize the MLA Vital Pathways tool. (Margaret Bandy)
- Stand out from the crowd: (Karen Heiser)
- "Produce useful improvement."
- "Align people."
- "Convey the culture and values."
- Approach systematically: basically, know your stuff, and be able to communicate what you need (tell a good story! and be able to tell it in 3 minutes).
- "You know are ready when:" (Rebecca Phillips)
- you can align key components (missions, values, goals, people)
- you measure your progress against targets.
- Margaret Bandy also discussed the strategies of alignment. "Alignment" seems to be the key word, and it's a good one. My thought: we should combine it with Clifford Stoll's key word of "understanding" rather than finding the right answer and really get administrators' attention, as the excellent panelists have.
- Using tools to create "best teams" for knowledge management.
- Mentioned Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital's membership in a hospital library consortium (ie, hospital has to have a library to get this purchasing power, and they actually let a hospital go when it let its librarian go).
- Also discussed using the NN/LM calculators when promoting library.
- "Tell a story, tie it to data, ask for something."
- Rebecca Phillips polled the audience to see who has gotten new funding from grants, philanthropic funds, etc. A majority had not, and here lies another opportunity for conversation with administrators.
- Panel also polled audience to see the first thing we'll do when we return from this conference. We answered, honestly, perhaps, check e-mail! :) But we'll also develop our elevator speeches, etc.
I'm also going to note there's a lot of good stuff on the twitter feed right now on this panel; there were a lot of little gems of advice that were captured there!