Are we doing enough to create the next generation of leaders?

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Are we doing enough to create the next generation of leaders?

Contents

published February 12, 2008

Editor's note: This article consists of three slightly modified blog posts: "Are we doing enough to create the next generation of leaders", posted November 7, 2007 by Steven J. Bell at ACRLog; "Library Leadership", posted November 8, 2007 by Wayne Bivens-Tatum at Academic Librarian and "Every librarian a leader, but...", posted November 26, 2007 by Steven J. Bell at ACRLog, along with excerpts from comments on those posts. Reused by permission of the bloggers; reformatted slightly and headings added during editing.

Are we doing enough to create the next generation of leaders

by Steven J. Bell

It’s not as if there’s no attention paid to developing academic library leaders. There are a few notable programs. ACRL offers a week-long Leadership Institute at the Harvard Graduate School of Education to provide leadership training for academic libray directors. ARL offers an 18-month long program, the Library Leadership Fellows Program, that is designed to shape the future leaders of research libraries. Along with these programs geared to those already in higher level leadership roles, ALA has created the Emerging Leaders Program for those at an early stage of their career. Other individual institutions create fellowships or internships to provide opportunities to those same early career academic librarians who want to gain administrative experience. These programs reach far fewer potential leaders. With our most notable leadership programs designed primarily for those who are already on the leadership track, a question arises:

Generating interest in leadership among academic librarians

I think there is a subtle difference between refining the leadership skills of those already on the track, and developing programs to entice more academic librarians to get on the track. Ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is “no.” Are there good models this profession could follow for developing its future leaders? The world of business may offer some possibilities. A recent issue of Fortune featured leadership as its cover story. The article profiles several companies that have distinguished themselves as having generated many leaders, both those who have risen within the corporation and those whose past employees are leaders elsewhere. For example, Procter & Gamble has produced notable leaders such as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, eBay CEO Meg Whitman, Intuit founder Scott Cook, AOL founder Steve Case, and even General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt. General Electric alumni run scores of companies, such as Boeing , Home Depot and Honeywell.

Do we have academic libraries well known for the leaders they produce?

Do we have academic libraries that are particularly well known for the leaders they turn out? Do we have a program that helps individual libraries to identify prospective future leaders and develop them within the organization? I would certainly be interested to know if there is an academic library that has a particularly strong tradition of preparing and then migrating front-line workers into administrative positions, and then bidding those same individuals farewell as they acquire leadership positions elsewhere. If such organizations exist within our profession then they certainly get little attention for their accomplishments.

A better approach?

So might there be a better approach for this profession? It may be unfair to point to the corporate world as a model for developing future leaders. Few libraries or library organizations have the necessary resources to create the sort of leadership training programs and development centers (like the famous one created by General Electric at Crotonville, NY) found in business. But the Fortune article offers some ideas that may be of interest. For example, identify promising leaders early on. Some companies begin evaluating their employee’s leadership potential on day one. Re-think the way new staff are assigned to positions. We hire new librarians for specific positions, but why not put new librarians into departmental rotations that include time in the administrative suite. Then other suggestions touch on the need to develop leaders in-house, provide mentoring, develop teams and indivdiduals, and make leadership development a part of the organizational culture.

As the article suggests, a good deal of work goes into preparing future leaders. But then again, a great deal is at stake. What more can we do both as individual libraries and in associations to promote the development of our future academic libraries?

Comments

  • "Mark K.": "As a library administrator who tries to be intentional about nurturing the leadership skills of my staff, I have to admit that the thought of conflating “leadership” with “administration” gives me the willies."
  • Marilyn R. Pukkila (excerpts): "Good point, Mark! One of the things I liked about the Harvard/ACRL Leadership Institute (which I did this past August) was the emphasis on opportunities to lead from any position, not just the traditional leadership ones... Are there others who see themselves as leaders from outside the traditional “administrative suite”?"
  • "Georgie D." (excerpts): "My colleague Miguel Figueroa at NYU’s Medical Library and I are co-editing a book about how libraries can foster an environment where early-career librarians can become leaders... There are a lot of things that libraries can do to encourage early-career librarians to explore leadership roles and — yes — to be leaders from whichever position they work, whether it’s in the admin suite or beyond. One idea that was particularly helpful to me was having a required “management” course in library school where Dr. Brooke Sheldon explained that all of us in that class would be called upon to be leaders and, more than likely, managers at some point in our career. Developing the skills to be a good manager can help you be an effective leader, even when you’re not the boss/manager/administrator."

Library leadership

by Wayne Bivens-Tatum

ACRLog had a thought provoking post [above] on creating library leaders for the future, asking what libraries are doing to create those leaders. A commenter wrote: “As a library administrator who tries to be intentional about nurturing the leadership skills of my staff, I have to admit that the thought of conflating “leadership” with “administration” gives me the willies.” I didn’t get the willies, but the post does tend to conflate administration with leadership. This conflation is evident in the following question: “Ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’ Are there good models this profession could follow for developing its future leaders?”

Leadership isn't the same as administration

I would have to agree with the commenter that leadership isn’t the same as administration. If it were, then all administrators would be leaders and all leaders administrators, which we know not to be the case. Library administrators might lead, but they can be just as effective in recognizing and supporting the talents of others and letting them lead change. According to my extensive research on leadership, one way to look at the difference between management and leadership is that “management involves power by position” while “leadership involves power by influence.” When position and influence coincide, one has a great manager, but there will always still be leaders who influence others regardless of their position, for both good and bad reasons. Scandalmongers and gossips might lead a library into decay. Creative innovators and collaborators might lead it into glory. But neither need to be administrators. I once had a terrible experience with an administrator who could neither administrate nor lead very well, and as I look around the profession these days, the people influencing how I think about libraries and where I think they should be going aren’t necessarily administrators, but frontline librarians trying to find new and creative ways to solve old problems.

Saying No to administrative positions

Still, what struck me most about the post was the assertion that if we “ask newer members of the profession if they plan to seek an administrative position and too often the answer is ‘no.’” I don’t usually ask newer members of the profession this, but I can understand the “no.” I’m not sure if I’m a newer member of the profession anymore (I’ve been a librarian for 8 years, which seems long to me sometimes, but is considerably less than many of my colleagues), but I can speculate on some reasons why librarians wouldn’t want to be administrators.

Job satisfaction

A lot of academic librarians like the academic part of academic librarianship. I like being involved, however tangentially, with the intellectual and scholarly life of the university. I like developing the collection as well as using it myself, and I like helping students use it as well. Last week I had a research consultation with a student I’ve worked with before, and at the end he said he thought I had a great job. I asked why, and he said because I got to learn so many different things especially during the research consultations, and he was right. In many ways I do have a great job, and one of the things I like most is the preparatory research before consultations, where I study whatever the students are working on so that I can give them the best help. I’m intellectually interested in philosophy and religion, and doing my job well means I read philosophy and religion books and articles, which I would be doing anyway.

Like a lot of people, I became a librarian after I’d done some other things. To give you an idea of the other things, I sold out to become a librarian. In library school, I talked to a lot of librarians and decided that initially at least the best library job for me would be a reference/bibliographer position working with philosophy and religion at a research university, preferably not at a state university because I wanted to avoid the tenure-track hoops I saw so many librarians going through (and have since seen so many old friends from library school go through). Two years out of library school, I had that job and liked it. If I moved into an administrative job, a lot of what I like doing would go away, and I’m not sure how I’d feel about that. Administrators should be there to support the work of others, not do that work, but I like doing the work. A professor who’d given up being a dean once told me he went back to being a professor because he wanted to be out doing the sorts of projects he was helping to support as a dean. There’s an administrative position open at a fine university nearby, a head of reference sort of position I’ve been tempted to apply for. I don’t know how competitive I would be, but I think I could be great at the job. But I hesitate because I like so much of what I do now, and I fear the loss of good things.

The expectations of libraries

I see a lot of job ads for department heads that expect the applicants to already have several years of supervisory experience before they consider the person qualified. I’ve talked to librarians frustrated by this old Catch-22. Many libraries seem unwilling to take a chance on someone who has the capacity for good management but not the experience. There seems to be the assumption that because someone has supervised before, that they must be good at it, and that unless they have supervised before they are a completely unknown quantity. I don’t know how accurate those assumptions are, but it seems to me that some libraries are better at rewarding degrees or experience than talent. Based on how many open administrative searches there seem to be right now in academic libraries, I think libraries are either going to have to change their expectations for some of these jobs. Notice I didn’t say “lower” their expectations. But for the reference librarian who wants to be a head of reference, how does that person break through the “supervisory experience required.” And at what point does one just give up seeking such jobs?

Lack of financial incentive

Good managers aren’t compensated as well in libraries as they would be in the private sector. One might say that no academic librarians are compensated as well as they might be in the private sector, but that argument only goes so far. For example, I can’t do what I do with a large academic library. What I do isn’t just finding information, but has an integral relationship with information in specific fields communicated in specific ways that I also have an intellectual interest in. But management is a more universal trade. One can be a good administrator without knowing much about the specifics of much of the work. Good library directors don’t necessarily know how to catalog or answer reference questions or select materials any more. Management has some claim to being an art and science of its own. But out in the world good management is compensated, whereas in libraries one gets the burdens of administration without as many of the financial benefits. Some schools are worse than others, but not too long ago I talked to someone on a search committee for an AUL position at a university library in a major east coast city who said they planned to offer a salary in the mid-50s, which is the same or less than a lot of non-administrative academic librarians make already, especially on the east coast. That was an extreme, but I have noticed in those job ads that post salary ranges that the salaries for administrative positions aren’t significantly higher than the position just below it. For someone reluctant to apply for an administrative job, would the possibility of a few extra thousand a year (before taxes) be much of an incentive? Probably not. They’d have to want to be in charge.

Why would you want to be in charge?

But what makes people want to be in charge? If they’re good leaders already and they have power through influence, they might already be getting things done they want to get done. Why take on the hassle of performance reviews and solving people’s problems when one can instead work collaboratively and yet still somewhat independently to get things done?

Unfortunately, I suspect that the best reason might be because of already existing bad administrators, administrators who aren’t interested in recognizing their talented employees and supporting their efforts. I know some librarians who want to be in charge because they believe the people in charge at their libraries are just doing a terrible job, and they want to take over and set things right. Setting things right is a powerful incentive.

Is there really a problem?

Finally, though, I wonder whether this is even a problem. If the management vacuum that seems to be emerging continues as more librarians retire, libraries will have to either flatten their organizations and promote creativity and initiative in their frontline staff, or they will have to take chances on people who might not have had the traditional preparation, but who still might make great department heads and directors. Or they may just promote incompetents, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen often.

There’s at least one other possibility as well, a faint hope or a daring dream. Libraries will always have leaders, but there may come a time when they have very few administrators. Thoreau wrote that that government is best which governs least, and concludes that if this is true then that government is best which governs not at all, and that when people are prepared for it, that will be the sort of government they will have. As power disperses and communication changes and librarians are more empowered because their jobs demand creativity and flexibility and initiative, less library administration might be not just a necessity brought on by circumstance, but a good thing. A library of motivated, dedicated librarians with creativity and initiative who lead and exert power through influence might need no administration at all.

Comments

  • Patricia Thompson (excerpts): "The separation between administrators and 'librarians who do things' is much less defined in a smaller organization. In a smaller organization, many of the 'professional' level staff have some kind of management responsibility. This allows a person to see whether they like that sort of thing, or want to avoid having any more of it...I think smaller libraries are a great place for people to build management skills, and also to try things out that in a larger place would be bogged down with getting approval or consensus. Maybe this is where the future leaders will come from?

Every librarian a leader, but...

by Steven J. Bell

There were two comments to my post about this profession needing to do more to develop its future leaders. Intentionally, my post was intended to speak to the need for upper echelon administrators, and the importance of developing our next generation of leaders who will take over those posts. Now perhaps that caused some umbrage among those who see themselves as leaders at their chosen level of service, or I connected with the inner skepticism and general eye-rolling reaction that front liners and middle managers have when someone suggests their administrators are leaders.

A different type of leadership

Well, like it or not, your library director has a different type of leadership role. Yes, I believe the “every librarian a leader” credo. It’s essential that all staff, professional and support, do their best to take a leadership mentality and apply it to whatever they do. But that’s not quite the same as being in a leadership position where a critical judgment call with enormous cascading consequences for the future, be it immediate or long term, is a regular part of the job. That responsibility lies with your library’s top administrators. That’s not to say those leaders make their decisions in a vacuum. Smart leaders depend on the knowledge, counsel and insight of those who lead from below. That’s the type of leader/administrator to which I referred in my post.

If you need further convincing that there is a difference take a look at some recent research by management experts Warren Bennis and Noel Tichy. Their new book titled Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls is the subject of an article in the October 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review (p. 94) and there is an excerpt in the November 19, 2007 issue of BusinessWeek (p. 68). They write that we all make judgment calls throughout our lives and careers--and so do all librarians. But the difference is that our top leaders’ judgment calls are “magnified by their increasing impact on the lives of others.” And unlike the many decisions made by librarians at every level, the administrator’s decisions are long remembered, especially if they turn out badly. Leaders make decisions in three areas that impact on the outcomes and survival of the organization: people; strategy; crisis.

Are all librarians leaders?

So are all librarians leaders? Let’s just drop the first two; librarians at all levels deal with them although the top administrator tends to have final decision-making authority on those matters. What about the crisis situation? A student is assaulted in the library. Faculty are up in arms about a decision to cancel journals. The provost is on the phone and needs an on-the-spot critical decision. We need leaders who can step up and make the right judgment call in those crisis situations. To do so requires some combination of experience, authentic practice, mentoring and a knowledge of the facts and data. To get back to my original question--is this profession doing enough to identify and prepare our future leaders with the right skills?

Sometimes you need an administrator

So if you are your library’s leader for information literacy or scholarly communications, you’ve got a significant role in shaping future services. But when that critical decision must be made about an important hire in your department, or whether to allocate constrained resources to a new initiative, or any decision that takes the library down a path from which there may be no return, you want a top administrator with the right experience, preparation and leadership skills to get it right. That’s the person that I want to see our profession developing. Those are the people this profession needs to secure a successful future.

Comments

  • Barbara Fister (excerpts): "Different institutions have different takes on this. At Gustavus, we deliberately gave up the idea that one person would make the hard decisions. We made sure everyone got to see all the nitty-gritty of the budget, was privy to all the critical pieces of information, that decisions were made openly and in conversation with those affected, and we elect a chair so that we have a “first among equals” who talks to the dean, goes to meetings, and keeps an eye on deadlines. This means that everyone who interviews for a librarian position, however new to the profession, is being evaluated as a future chair. It doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it works for us. And nobody feels as if it’s someone else’s job to make the tough choices. We do it together. And nobody is in the position of saying “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the boss.”...
  • "Mark K." (excerpts): "I agree that senior administrators have distinct responsibilities that have a broader and more lasting impact on their libraries. I also agree that it is therefore critically important to do what we can to ensure that the people occupying those positions are competent, creative and committed. However, I still strongly disagree that leadership is inherently dependent on, or can be derived from, the mere existence of authority. Making people do stuff is not, in any sense, the same thing as leading them. In fact, it is often the opposite of leading them... Put another way…I would say “Amen, brother!” if you rephrased your call to action as, “We must do a better job of preparing more librarians to become administrators who use their authority confidently, skillfully, and wisely.” An important part of doing that is being a good leader, to be sure. But what we want is administrators who are leaders, not librarians who believe they have become leaders by assuming an administrative position.
  • Marilyn R. Pukkila (excerpts): "It was my experience that I had no idea what sort of leader I would be until I was given authority in my job. And I certainly learned a few things about how I felt about authority! I was placed into an administrative position without much experience, and I’m afraid I did a lot of learning at the expense of my colleagues. It was all a long time ago, and I certainly have more confidence in my abilities now, but this confidence was born of real-life experience..."
  • "Mark K." (excerpts): "I’m the director of a tiny university library. While we haven’t been able to establish a model like Barbara describes at Gustavus, I do insist on collaboration on library-wide issues and significant autonomy on service-specific issues. My intention is for everybody to gain experience in building staff consensus, being responsible and accountable, developing goals and objectives, managing personal and student employee workflows, addressing budget questions, advocating with stakeholders, and keeping up with developments in their field. There are times when I have to make an executive decision, and there are times when a crisis balloons out of one person’s scope of responsibility and I need to step in. But for the most part, my staff works through their own successes and their own failures. That’s part of how they learn good judgment: by exercising it... I think [Bell] is right that we need to be intentional about identifying the people who, shall we say, grow the fastest and bear the most fruit. I think this is done most productively at the local level, myself, which is why I’m not sure what the profession as a whole can or should be doing, other than reducing barriers to participation in the field as much as possible."
  • Barbara Fister (excerpts): "We pretty much take Mark’s advice in that we don’t have a formal path for learning to be a chair; but we do make most of our decisions together, so the learning curve is not as steep as it was when we embarked on this model... It seems to me the one thing the profession could do to foster leadership is to stop using the metric of the number of people you supervise as the measure of a librarian’s relative worth. Supervision is mostly unnecessary, and it annoys new librarians who are, after all, grown-ups. A colleague and I gave a paper on our model at ACRL in 2005..."
  • Steven Bell (excerpts): "I mentioned in the earlier post that there are some existing programs that are a good start. They can give developing leaders some good ideas and tools. Where they lack is in the authentic practice. I’d certainly like to see more residency programs at libraries of all sizes; the too few current programs are offered mostly at large institutions... Perhaps there is a way our libraries can cooperatively fund more of them or though ACRL identify and obtain grants. Perhaps it is something we can do in our own libraries..."
  • "Mark K." (excerpts): "...I like the idea of residencies, but I worry that such programs select for people in a very specific place in their lives, where they can pick up and go somewhere for a year or two, and then pick up again and go someplace else. At least, I haven’t heard of residencies that turn into permanent full-time positions, though I could be misinformed."
  • Marilyn R. Pukkila (excerpts): "...I find myself wondering how many librarians enter the profession with the intention of becoming directors. Or chairs in a collaborative environment such as Gustavus. I agree with the learning by doing model, both as a teacher and as a librarian!... There’s something else, though, a bit more intangible: how to cultivate a mindset in which individual librarians see themselves as leadership material. It took me a long time to get to that place, with a lot of experiential learning! And I’ve noticed that my most successful leadership ventures have happened when I’m not consciously acting as a leader; I’m just doing my job as I see it."
  • Bill Drew: "As a new interim library director, your posting about hits really close to home. I have considered myself a leader for several years in my role as a librarian and also in the role I played as president of the SUNY Librarians Association. A library director must deal with things outside of the library while the front line librarian does not have to. I have been going to our college academic council in my new role. I am being asked for input on college wide policies and issues. That is both exhilarating and scary at the same time. As director my perspective must be much broader than just the library."
  • Barbara Fister: "'A library director must deal with things outside of the library while the front line librarian does not have to.' It’s pretty much a must at our shop. We’re faculty, and service to the institution is required. Luckily, it’s also something people want to do. And when everyone’s involved, the library is more integrally part of the campus."
  • Steven J. Bell is the Associate University Librarian for Research and Instructional Services at Temple University.
  • Wayne Bivens-Tatum is the Philosophy & Religion Librarian at Princeton University.

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