Alignment Step 3: Actions You Can Take NOW to Increase Your Value in the Workplace

3. Align With Other Departments

Set up meetings with other departments to learn more about their current and upcoming priorities and the information they will need to be successful. (Ask if they have a strategic plan or list of current goals you can review in advance.)  Tell them about the internal and external information resources that you can make available to them.

Set up a system to check back with each department on a quarterly basis to see if priorities have changed and information requirements are being met.  Be certain to document your targeted efforts on behalf of individual departments.

Here is Step 1: Seek and Destroy Jargon
Here is Step 2: Compare Strategies

Comments

[John Chu]

Perhaps a step further than "align" should be considered. What about "partner" with other departments?

Partenrship implies equal footing, roles, and being stakeholders. It requires close collaboration. Partners can co-sponsor an event, collaborate on a project, co-endorse an initiative, share the glory, pass around accountability (not blame).

In the biopharmaceutical industry, the target departments include IT, Bioinformatics, Structural Biology, Computational Chemistry, etc.".

[Embeddedlibrarian.wordpress.com]

I think John Chu raises a good point. As librarians, we are known as a service-oriented profession. Yet in the future, many of us will be called to go beyond service, to partnership with our colleagues in the organizations where we work. To me, the key difference, which John mentions, is that partners share responsibility for the outcomes.