Reflections on library leadership

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Reflections on library leadership

Contents

Excerpts (by permission) from various blog posts and other sources on aspects of library leadership. First published February 12, 2008.

Leadership (Michael Golrick)

Excerpts from a November 18, 2007 post at Thoughts from a Library Administrator. Michael Golrick is a public library director in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

There were two posts by Helene Blowers which caught my eye and got me thinking. I am going to talk about them in the reverse order in which she posted them.

The first was about her motto on leadership. It is a great motto! Now, I know that at least one of my readers will not be able to see the photo with the handwritten note, so here it is transcribed:

  • To be a Leader: A Leader brings out the best in themselves by bringing out the best in others. [11-90]

For me, it is a fundamental truth in leadership.

The other post is about Jack Welch. It links to a page on the Stanford Graduate School of Business web site which quotes Jack from a visit there:

“The day you become a leader, it becomes about them,” Welch said. “Your job is to walk around with a can of water in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other hand. Think of your team as seeds and try to build a garden. It’s about building these people,” he insisted. “Only you will know the team.”

The quote is a good one, and does have a lot to say about leadership. It got me to wondering about how much he really believes it.

I lived in Fairfield County Connecticut when Jack was the CEO of General Electric. GE's corporate headquarters are in the town of Fairfield, and if you drive the Merritt Parkway (which I did daily for almost a decade), you drive right past it. My first recollection of hearing about Jack was as "Neutron Jack Welch--he leaves the building standing, but most of the employees are gone." Indeed, to check my memory, I went surfing and found this quote (yes, it is from Wikipedia) which matches my recollection:

During the early 1980s he was dubbed "Neutron Jack" (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating employees while leaving buildings intact. In Jack: Straight From The Gut, Welch states that GE had 411,000 employees at the end of 1980, and 299,000 at the end of 1985. Of the 112,000 who left the payroll, 37,000 were in sold businesses, and 81,000 were reduced in continuing businesses.

It also notes:

Welch has also received criticism over the years for his lack of compassion for the middle class and working class. Welch has publicly stated that he is not concerned with the discrepancy between the salaries of top-paid CEOs and those of average workers.

I guess I worry that a true (good/moral) leader is going to show many of the qualities which Helene points to, but should also care about those s/he leads. That is the sign of an authentic leader.

Library directors: Put yourself in your staff members' shoes (Jeff Scott)

Excerpts from a September 19, 2007 post at Gather No Dust. Jeff Scott is an Arizona public library director.

Quoting from "Going to the Field" in the September 15, 2007 Library Journal:

"We're not trying to turn accountants and administrators into desk librarians. But we do want them to see and comprehend the multitude of issues that branch or department staff and management deal with every day. If support and administrative staff see the processes for what they really are, then, we hope, they'll begin to view their roles in a new light."

Quoting from "Sites and Soundbytes: Library Directors and Customers - What's Our Role?":

"Directors should work the service desks at their libraries. Do you know the feel and service your patrons are receiving? (I am posting this from our library's reference desk while the staff has a department meeting, so this is one I personally do whenever I get the chance.) I find that I get a real sense of our patrons, their needs and how the library inter-relates when I do even a short stint at desk."

... Library directors really need to man the front desk, talk to their staff and be involved in what is going on. Understanding the problems will result in better solutions and increased morale. The more staff know that you are listening and that you are communicating what you are doing to solve the problem, the better they will feel. This is true even if you don't actually solve the problem. When they know that you understand their problems, they will trust what you are doing and trust your decision-making.

So go ahead and try it:

  • Work the circulation desk while your staff has a circulation meeting
  • Get higher ups over at the library during the rush of post-storytime
  • Sit at the front desk and watch what staff have to deal with day in and day out
  • Understand the best ways to communicate with staff so they feel they hear you and you hear them

In the end, you will be an administrator who understands the problems and has built trust with staff to move forward wherever you go.

Why a librarian? (Barbara Kelly)

Excerpts from an October 17, 2007 post at Manage This! Barbara Kelly is a librarian in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Two recent posts, one, “The Future of the Academic Library Versus the Sanctity of the MLS” from the The Thinking Library, and the other, “Don’t be that Boss” from Library Garden, both question how well librarians are filling certain positions in libraries. The Thinking Library post advocates for broadening the team to include non-MLSers better capable of doing particular jobs than librarians, such as circulation management, and points out “that the MLS doesn’t prepare librarians for many of the roles they are asked to play when they enter the profession.” The Library Garden post has some quick advice on how not to be that boss who yells, which is unfortunately more common than we would like to admit as librarians become managers without necessarily having any human management abilities.

So if we don’t arrive at our libraries able to manage circulation work-flow or our human resources what did we think we had to offer? Was it our love of books, our passion for seeking out hidden treasures in bizarrely designed databases, or our strong desire to talk through puppets? Not usually--although I have heard all of these as compelling reasons for taking out a large student loan. More often I have heard librarians talk about wanting to improve learning outcomes, early childhood development, literacy, quality of life, community space, and access to reliable and necessary life information for career plans, health choices, and immigration hearings.

These are all admirable objectives, but what are our shared strategies for their achievement? In other words, if we arrive at the door with an MLS, what can be assumed of us and our abilities to move the library forward?

Perhaps library schools should be taking a closer look at life experiences and proven abilities to find candidates who can bring leadership, innovation, and vision to libraries. Perhaps when filling positions we should be tempering years in the profession with an applicant’s potential to lead, inspire and manage. As well, to harp on what is becoming a constant theme with me, we need to be fearless in asking ourselves how we are doing and what we can do to be better.

I think it comes down to either we manage ourselves, our profession, and our organizations better, or watch others do it for us.

Reflections on leadership (Brett Bonfield)

Excerpts from a December 27, 2007 post at ACRLog. Brett Bonfield is the fourth ACRLog new academic librarian. He is currently dividing his time between the University of Pennsylvania’s Lippincott Library of the Wharton School, where he works in reference, and the Temple University Libraries, where he works on systems-related projects.

In 1979, Wayne A. Wiegand assembled an advisory board and asked them to identify the most prominent academic library leaders for the previous half-century. They eventually agreed on fifteen librarians, whose biographies were published in 1983 as a chapbook entitled Leaders in American Academic Librarianship: 1925-1975.

The book serves as a great reminder that issues we’re tempted to think of as unique to us and our time period are often echoes of longstanding debates: libraries have always been underfunded; there was never a time when undergraduates knew how to use libraries or were information literate; nor was there ever a time in which faculty members truly appreciated our role in educating students. However, the fifteen librarian leaders excelled at working through these and other obstacles...

The post includes the complete list of leaders discussed in the chapbook

In addition to providing a historical context, this book also gives us an opportunity to reconsider history. Thirty-five years have passed since its publication, meaning it may now be appropriate to ask:

  • If Wiegand assembled an advisory board now, and looked at the same time period, who would make the cut? How have our criteria changed?
  • Who were the fifteen most notable leaders for the half-century spanning 1950-2000? How do their accomplishments compare to those of the leaders from a generation earlier?
  • Which leaders are making a good case for the half-century from 1975-2025? And for 2000-2050?

[The leaders profiled in] Leaders in American Academic Librarianship made incremental moves early in their careers, often in ways that seemed orthogonal to directing a major academic library. Their fifteen stories have some similarities, but also strong differences, suggesting that there is no correct or obvious path to becoming a leader. What they had in common was an ability to inspire people to believe in them, and when given an opportunity, their actions justified that belief. As long as we can do that—-as individuals and as a profession—-we’re bound to succeed.

Notes from the comments

Exclusions include candidates for those who might make today's list. See the original post for full comments.

  • An omitted portion of this post discussed a situation involving Meredith Farkas, who commented in part:
"You know, I’m not even sure what it means to be a leader anymore. I think it’s definitely changed over time, but I’d argue that we’d all have a difficult time coming up with a single definition of what a leader is. I guess I see a leader not as someone who controls or makes people follow them, but as someone who brings great ideas to the profession and who inspires and influences by the example of the good work they do. A leader is a trailblazer, but they don’t push people to follow them. People follow their lead because they are inspired by what the leader has done. To me, being a leader is all about good ideas, influence and hard work. Directors aren’t always leaders and leaders aren’t always directors... I see a lot of amazing leaders coming up in this generation. I sometimes worry that bad work environments will drive many of them out of the profession or will make them lose their spark, but I think that anyone passionate enough about the profession will persevere. Few people don’t face challenges in their career."
  • Steven Bell: "Leaving a legacy is certainly one reason, if not the main reason, that individuals will choose to take a position of leadership. At some level we might hope that our accomplishments might be worthy of recognition - such as being made an ALA Honorary Member. I’m not saying that we set out to win award or honors. They are nice byproducts of hard work and the appreciation of one’s peers. But as I pointed out to a colleague, I can think of quite a few librarians who have achieved incredible past recognition--our profession’s highest honors. Yet the newest generation of academic librarians would hardly recognize those names--and I’m talking about individuals not anywhere near as far removed from their golden age as those on your spreadsheet. So whatever we accomplish as librarians, as leaders or otherwise, our fame is likely to be fleeting. And I do hope we’ll continue our conversations about leadership."
  • Scott Walter (excerpts): "Definitely an interesting question--if only because both the diversity of our professional leadership has expanded so greatly in the intervening years [13 of the 15 in the table were men] and because we have become more nuanced in our identification of different types of leadership... Without naming names, we can imagine very different types of leaders - all important: 1) people who have led successful and critically needed change at their institutions (often not without pain); 2) people who are leaders at the state or regional level, but are not as widely known across the country; 3) people who have spearheaded national efforts, e.g., on assessment of library services, scholarly communications, diversity; 4) people who have led by example and inspired through their writing or through their efforts on the presentation circuit. Could an advisory panel be as effective in identifying the impact of a wide variety of leaders, and not just those who have the traditional markers of personal position and/or election to the head of one (or more) of our largest professional associations? Could they identify the people who have been leaders in the library world without serving in a traditional library role (the motive forces behind OhioLINK, for example, or SPARC)?"...
  • Barbara Fister (excerpts): "My main problem with the whole leadership notion is that...it’s kind of the “great man of history” theory applied to the workplace: there are special, visionary people who can shift the sluggish masses through their imaginative, daring example (or whatever)--when, in fact, there are all kinds of people who make things work well in libraries and never get the credit for it because they’re not in a position of power or inclined to promote themselves or, in fact, may be more interested in the work they do than in building their careers. Too often people in libraries have to do that work in subversive ways because they are presumed to be drones who report to more important people who supposedly are paid to make the decisions but are mostly just paid more."
  • Barbara Fister (after an intervening comment from Brett Bonfield, omitted here) (excerpts): "I’ll give you one definition of leader: someone who takes joy in the work they do, feels it’s important (without being self-important), wants to do it with other people they work with, and creates an environment in which trying things out, tackling issues, playing around, and being creative is just the way things are. Oh, and is tolerant and respectful but not at all afraid to say what they think because they’ve built a place where you can speak your mind--and even change your mind if the conversation leads them to new understandings."

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