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Strategies for Effective Relationships

Time and Effort

Building relationships takes time and effort. Good relationships require an understanding of structures, authority, roles of the various officials, and a willingness to recognize the challenges that have to be balanced in order to provide the best library services your community expects and can support.

Connecting with Local Government Officials Before a Problem Begins

This excerpt from the MSL Connecting with Local Government Officials handbook is worth considering.

If your library only interacts with local government officials minimally and only at budget time your relationship is an example of what typically happens in libraries. This is a great time to develop stronger relationships. It is much easier to begin this process when things are neutral or positive. 

If things aren’t so great or if the library is suffering from a lack of financial or administrative support from local government officials, you might want to do something different. Hopefully, you want to have a better relationship than what you have right now.

When interacting with local government officials it is human and normal to want to start with our concerns and worries. All of us are busy. It’s natural to want quick talking points that convince our local government officials to fund the library or to support a big project at the library. This guide isn’t about that.

It’s about changing your mindset and approach in such a way that you see the humanity in your local government officials, and you work with them to provide better service to the community. It’s about long-term relationships that might not seem to have any immediate benefit until suddenly in a crisis or hard time the connections help both the library and the local government weather the storm.

Some Suggestions for Library Boards

  • Track meeting dates and times for local government entities and plan regular attendance.
  • Create standing agenda items to report out or check in on areas of concern.
  • Keep up-to-date contact information available to make it easy to reach out with a quick phone call.
  • Consider assigning individual trustees to monitor issues that may impact library budgets and operations.