Kamara Shonhai

What inspires me every day is actually my kids. One of the things is that I always want my kids to see that it is possible to not only love your job, but to succeed in it, and to help people while doing so. I have a daughter who's gonna be 18 soon, and when I was advising her for a career, I just told her, listen, one, you need to make sure it's something that you're passionate about, that you love doing. Because if you don't love it, if you're not passionate about it, it doesn't matter how much money you make. I want my kids to see that you can love your job and succeed in it while helping people.

In 2024, I went through a Leadership Institute for libraries and had a mentor who taught me something that really stuck with me. She taught me to kind of slow down. I was actually having some issues with staff, and she taught me to slow down, get everybody's point of view, and then figure out how to solve the problem. First, you need to stop. You need to listen. And then you find the solutions, and then you act. That advice about stopping, listening, and then reacting has been really valuable to me.

The first thing is to make sure that you are in this career for the right reasons. You want to help people. You want to serve other people. Because most of the value in our job is intrinsic. It is knowing that you are helping and serving other people. And even in leadership, whether it's supervisory or managing, your job is to support other people. The only way that we really can serve other people is by being able to help our staff know how to do that, too. I always say that my job as a manager is to support my staff, to make sure they have the tools that they need to do their jobs. So, make sure you want to be in a job of service.

Challenges, for sure. Definitely, you know, a lot of the stuff that's going out on in the world right now. There's always people trying to ban books and keep information from getting out there, so that's definitely a challenge - censorship. As for opportunities, there are so many opportunities in libraries. Technology is always changing, and our ability to help people is always changing because of that. So the opportunity is just that there's always opportunity for change in our positions, in the world of libraries.

One of the most important values for me, especially in personal and in my work, is honesty and transparency. I think that a lot of times when there are things that are going on in life and we don't understand them, it's because we don't have that honesty or transparency going on. Whenever possible, like if there's some type of policy change, I always want to be really open with my staff. I want to give them the reason. I want to be as honest and transparent as possible, and I try to do that in my real life. I feel like there's something to be said about integrity - you need to be able to lead with integrity.