Hanlie Erasmus, Associate Director of Public Library Services, in the State Library of South Australia, shares how she has led the use of PuMP to create a performance framework for libraries that gets results.
Hanlie Erasmus has been leading her organisation with PuMP since 2020, with the help of PuMP Partner Mark Hocknell. Now, when Hanlie told me her story, I wasn’t only impressed by how she’s led her team to such a strong outcomes focus with PuMP. I wasn’t only impressed by how patient she’s been waiting for the data for their measures to build up over the years. I was also impressed by how evidence-based the culture has become in libraries, despite her feeling that she’s just not there yet. I think there’s a very rich story in what’s happened already, and Hanlie’s passion for evidence-based leadership is itself very evident.
It probably comes as no surprise that a Librarian would prize both impact and information in her leadership of an organisation, as Hanlie expresses:
“It’s very important for us that our measures really provide strong evidence as to the range of services and the outcomes and value and impact delivered by public libraries, but also to tell that story with evidence. And that was what I think was missing in all of our previous approaches.”
Hanlie is naturally drawn by curiosity and passion to answering the two questions that are at the heart of excellent organisational leadership:
- Are we achieving what we want to achieve?
- How do we know?
Rather than hoping and guessing and getting little to no leverage from the time and resources her library services invest, Hanlie takes an evidence-based leadership approach to get better and better at answering both those questions very deliberately.
“Our performance framework is a credible evidence-based tool that the State’s Public Library Association, but also the local government association can, for example, use to engage with corporate and public funders and advocate for increased funding to further board, for example, social capital, but also enhance the position of public libraries in the social infrastructure offered by local and state governments.”
Discover the evidence-based leadership approach in action in this complete interview with Hanlie Erasmus, and see and hear first-hand just how passionate and dedicated a leader can be to evidence-based measurement (inspired by PuMP):
Connect with Hanlie Erasmus here.