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Using Cross-Training to Develop Your Employees and Strengthen Service Excellence

Three scenes of the same staff person being trained. In the first, she is talking to someone at a service desk. In the second, she is talking to someone pushing a book cart. In the third, she is talking to someone typing on a laptop.
About the webinar

Help staff adapt to changing needs.

Garrison Libby and Emily Leachman show how a cross-training program helps staff grow so your library can adapt to changing needs.

How nimble is your library? If a staff member is gone for an extended period of time, can their major job duties be covered? Do your staff want to build new skills? Cross-training is a solution to all of these challenges!  

Cross-training is any form of employees learning job duties that are outside their normal focus from their colleagues within the same library system. Cross-training can have a variety of appearances, from people within a single library learning each other’s areas, to creating staff who are comfortable at more than one branch location, to back-ups for tasks crucial to the library’s success. 

Whether you work in a single library or multi-branch system, there are multiple ways to design a cross-training program to help your staff grow and enable your library to rapidly adapt to changing needs. In this session, Garrison Libby and Emily Leachman will discuss the benefits of cross-training and ways to implement it at your library.

Join us on Wednesday, September 2, 2026
at 2:00 pm US Eastern, 11:00 am US Pacific
Fill out the form to register for the webinar
A woman talks to a man at a service desk.
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Bio

About Garrison and Emily

Garrison Libby is the Head of Research Services at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has written and presented on topics such as management, staff development, and open education. Most recently, he co-authored the book A Complete Guide to Training Library Staff: From Onboarding to Offboarding. Outside of the library, he enjoys running and eating all kinds of tacos.

Emily Leachman is the Assistant Director for Public Services at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Her professional interests include staff training, employee development, and customer service.  She recently co-authored the book A Complete Guide to Training Library Staff: from Onboarding to Offboarding with Garrison Libby.  When not at work, Emily is an avid quilter.

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Join us

Learn how cross-training program helps staff grow so your library can adapt to changing needs.