RUSA offers course on Mastering Emotional Intelligence

Register now for the upcoming Mastering Emotional Intelligence course being offered by the Reference and User Services Association.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is an indispensable skill that can help you and your staff communicate more effectively and help foster a more inclusive library environment. EI is a trait that can be cultivated, and in this four-week course, we will discuss theories about developing emotionally intelligent staff through training, mentoring, and succession planning.The theories and recommended philosophies and practices of EI will encompass and blend new concepts into existing and widely valued literature and theorists from both the business sector and within the library science field. 

The instructor, Debra Lucas-Alfieri has been the Head of Reference and Interlibrary Loan at D’Youville College in Buffalo, NY, since 2002. She is the author of Marketing the 21st Century Library: the Time is Now, published by Chandos, an imprint of Elsevier. She has been an online instructor in Library Studies since 2012. Her book chapters appear in Middle Management in Academic and Public Libraries (2011) and the 21st Century Handbook of Anthropology (2010). Dozens of encyclopedia articles appear in the Encyclopedia of Power (2011), the Encyclopedia of Time (2009), the Encyclopedia of Anthropology (2005), and the 20th Century Encyclopedia of Pop Culture (2000). She has also published academic journal articles in Collaborative Librarianship (2011), the Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve (2009), and the Journal of Library and Information Science (2007). Additionally, she served as an editor for the Journal of Library Innovation. 

Topics that will be covered during this course include staff selection, developing skils and competencies, benefits and rewards, and managing change. In the first week, we’ll cover the hiring process from writing a job description to posting, interviewing, and hiring.  As manager and emerging EI expert, you will learn to develop soft and technical skills in your employees while introducing theory and practicalities of defining and developing core competences in your staff. Because the process of creating an emotionally intelligent organization seems daunting, we will outline what benefits EI brings so that we have end goals in mind. Finally, the challenges of change management will be discussed.

Click here to register!!