Earlier this week, I attended the Pacific Northwest Chapter of MLA Annual Meeting in Spokane, Washington. It took place over two and a half lovely fall days in the downtown district, where I was able to sample some truly excellent coffee and macarons. The conference was just as fun as the last conference we held in Portland in 2016, which, coincidentally, was the first conference I attended as a working librarian. The biggest difference this time around was that for this conference, I was co-chair of the planning committee.

I, along with my co-chair and the rest of our planning committee, had spent the last eleven months pulling together this event. Months of online meetings, email conversations, and checklists culminated in a few days of presentations, panel discussions, CEs, and business meetings. Even though I spent most of my sleeping hours last week having stress dreams about various conference disasters, the event went off without a hitch. It was quite the treat to see everything we had talked about and planned for come together so perfectly.

This was my first big leadership opportunity, and it was an interesting and also terrifying challenge. I’m typically a textbook introvert who prefers to listen rather than speak, but I’ve found that I’m able to assert myself when I’m working in service of something I really care about, like librarianship. That was definitely true as I led meetings, recruited speakers, and emceed the conference.

It definitely helped my confidence as a leader to focus on my strengths, and in this case, my love of organizing details really came in handy. The number of details to keep track of and make decisions on increased exponentially as we drew closer to the conference, so my tendency to create lists of everything rattling around in my head helped to keep us on track. I created a handy OneNote notebook to have on hand during the conference that outlined what needed to happen at every stage, and it was a lifesaver.

My penchant for organizing does have a dark side, and that is my reluctance to delegate tasks to others. In a perfect world, I could take care of everything myself and do it the way I think it should be done. But in reality, I needed to rely on my co-chair and my team to make this conference a success. Every time a task appeared, I tried to ask myself “Is this something that only I can do, or can I pass it off to someone else?”. I wasn’t perfect about this, but I made a sincere effort and was able to reassign certain tasks to other members of the team.

If anyone else is thinking about taking on a conference planning role or is just embarking on one, my number one piece of advice is to communicate, communicate, communicate. You’ll feel really annoying at first, but I’ve found that it’s best to overcommunicate than to have something important slip through the cracks.