Goal 2: Leadership and Coordination

Librarians as leaders of the community are in an interesting place. We are at the confluence of a series of transformational changes that are remaking the world in which we all live, in ways that many find it hard to understand or deal with.

It is a world in which the use-by date of knowledge is shorter and shorter, the gulf between disciplines grows broader and deeper by the minute, the technologies for accessing data and information are radically transformed in less than a human generation and the knowledge have-nots line up, desperate for help.

Libraries have a special responsibility, not just to keep track of what people are thinking, saying and creating, but also to help them exchange those ideas, for the benefit of society. We do so from every direction of the political compass, left, right, radical and moderate, from any point of view or culture and from every discipline imaginable.

Librarians are the custodians and access point for much of the knowledge and many of the creative works upon which 21^st Century Civilization rests. The solutions for many of today’s problems are to be found in the knowledge collectivity created in the past, as well as the new models, theories, concepts and works that are being curated by librarians as they are created, because that is what we do.

We are an honest broker in the midst of vast oceans of differences. We are the glue that helps society to remember what we have forgotten. And we help people discover what happens in other’s worlds. This is the stuff from which social revolutions are created and new products, services, careers and lifestyles are fashioned.

In order to perform our role as society now expects, we have some important changes to make to the way we operate our libraries. For a start, the wise library leader needs to play a role in reinventing his/her library so it is always aligned with the needs of customers, anticipating their needs and responding to requests.

Asking questions of stakeholders, both internal and external is critically important. Questions such as “What are the biggest issues you are dealing with?” and “What knowledge, resources, skills, and methods can we help you with?” can generate the kinds of conversations libraries need to have with political and community leaders to help communities become more successful in the future and libraries more sustainable.

There’s a generation gap or two to overcome. Today’s digital natives, both customers and staff, think and operate very differently from the people for whom the library and its processes were originally designed. Although many libraries have adapted to change, for some, the many rules, procedures and policies that persist from earlier more different times constrain how we think and what we do. Some are long past due for a renovation.

In times of constant change, we need to perpetually develop better understandings of what customers want, especially to anticipate their emerging needs in the same way that Amazon and Google are in the “anticipatory awareness” business, fulfilling needs before you know you have them.

In doing so, however, we must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. We need to keep offering what continues to serve us from the past, although not quite as much, perhaps, while introducing new services that are better aligned with changing community and customer needs.

Not only do we need to curate and help people make sense of the long standing literacies of reading, writing and research, but also the new literacies of emotional and spiritual intelligence, which are all about developing relationships and creating possibility.

We need to frequently review our methods and processes and subject them to two kinds of change. One is slow and incremental, where we continuously improve existing methods so they are faster, more efficient, deliver higher quality, are less costly and use fewer resource and people. The other is fast and transformational, the kind of change usually associated with the arrival of a new technology (e-books, the Internet, 3D printers, etc). This second type usually requires the reorganization of entire systems. At these times, the skills librarians need, the roles people play, the way we interact with each other and the customer are all simultaneously transformed.

As the work of librarians becomes more specialized, complex and technically discrete, there is a need for people to work together in teams, to take responsibility for planning and implementing projects, budgeting and coordinating with other teams. Such teams still require oversight and leadership, but not the rigid, tightly constrained rules-based approaches of the past, when work was divided up into clear bite-sized chunks and performed the same way day in and day out.

A new kind of distributed leadership is required, so anyone can step up at any time and take a leadership role around their specialty or unique skill set. The new kind of library leader is more of a coach, mentor, inspirer, marketer, relationships developer and advocate. This person “leads from behind,” inspiring others and creating a container for shared success.

We also need to provide a professional development pathway for librarians who are destined to become directors, to help them acquire the new skills needed for leading or managing organizations operating in a state of social, political and technological flux.

For small libraries, particularly school and local municipal libraries, the roles that librarians play is also overdue for change. We can no longer function primarily as administrators, performing largely clerical and customer service functions. We need to add to this role the skills of the small business owner: marketing, communication, budgeting, improving processes and quality of service, supporting staff, developing and introducing new services and phasing out that which is no longer required.

Boards also have a major strategic role to play, along with the library director, of connecting to political, business and community leaders to find out what is wanted and needed, and to help their organizations meet these needs.

Boards have the task in rapidly changing times of not only asking their librarians, staff and community, “Are we doing things right?” They also must ask “are we doing the right things?”; “What assumptions and values are we basing our decisions on?” and “What other choices might we make that are more in alignment with what our community values or needs right now for success?”

As library leaders, we have the responsibility to understand what it means to facilitate the wise application of knowledge, to acquire and model the skills necessary for the new times in which we live and, most importantly, to mentor others as they find their way. We must have both the courage to step up when no one else will, to lead our communities in new directions and the foresight to give away our power and our capacities to others, so in the end, when the work is done, people say, “we did it ourselves.”

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