The New Reality of Library Leadership:
What is Changing for the Nebraska Library Community in the 21st Century
Pat Wagner has worked with libraries as a consultant and trainer since 1978. She is a frequent visitor to Nebraska libraries.
The state librarian approached me with a smile on her face.
“I attended both of the leadership programs you conducted this year and last year,” she said. “Liked them both, but this year's had a significant difference.”
Before I share with you what she said, I would like to tell you briefly about what led up to this conversation. Then, I will talk about four current measures of library leadership success, what changes are causing most people to look at libraries differently, and where the library community in Nebraska could turn its attention in the future.
Learning about Leadership
A great way to educate yourself about a topic is to teach a class about it. You plunge into the research: books, journals, popular articles, interviews and attendance at other people's programs. If you do it right (which I believe means multidisciplinary investigation tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism), the preparation immerses you in a new world. If you are lucky, you will see new patterns and make new connections between old and new data and between the book learning and what actually happens after class in the real world.
Since 1993, I have been conducting leadership programs for the library community. I started by spending a year soaking up both professional literature and personal anecdotes and have continued researching the topic as my leadership programs have evolved.
I have learned that many of the best ideas, which have the most positive impact on attendees and their libraries, institutions and communities, have been around for millennia. So, until recently, I liked to tell audiences there was nothing much new.
However, some things are changing that will affect libraries and the role of library leadership in Nebraska . The key lies in what the state librarian told me this year.
The New Key
“The difference between the two sessions is about how often you used the word ‘urgency' in your presentation,” she said. “This session, you repeated it several times. I don't remember you saying this word last year at all.”
This state librarian noticed something that I had not specifically mentioned in my classes. Consciously or unconsciously, I have learned that urgency may be the new key to successful leadership. Whatever is changing for Nebraska libraries and the people they employ and serve is changing more rapidly. And the response of leadership needs to change rapidly as well. Reaction is not good enough. Library leadership needs to anticipate what the library user is going to expect tomorrow. At stake is the relevance of libraries to the changing needs of the library user.
It's Not Just About Circulation
In effect, you have three kinds of library users to court. You need to bring back the people who have stopped using the library, bring in the people who never use the library and keep the people who currently use the library satisfied. Of course, since you can't please them all, you will have to make a conscious choice about which people you are going to tick off.
Many library directors fall back on pleasing only their current clientele, also known as the core constituency. To be honest, the description “maintaining the status quo” is rarely found in leadership literature. The good manager is worried about making things better today, while the good leader is more likely to be concerned about five or ten years from now. That core constituency also often matches the demographics of the library staff, which in Nebraska , as in most parts of the country, lean towards middle-aged, middle-class, female and, outside of large urban areas, mostly from an English-speaking culture, most often college educated, and not so often checking any box except white, Anglo or Caucasian on a government form.
As the people in community and institution change, it is not uncommon for the library staff to look, sound and act less and less like the people in the entire library user pool. Meanwhile, the core constituency shrinks. It can be a slow process, one that does not concern the person whose attention is turned to the details of today. But library leaders throughout Nebraska need to look to the future, even if it means not providing perfect service today. Otherwise, usage figures can begin to stagnate and even slip.
So even if today's numbers are good, that will not guarantee a successful future.
Leadership Questions: Will you reach out to people who are different from you and not just ask them to serve on an advisory board or sit through a focus group meeting? Do you see yourself as the equal of other people or their superior, because of your age, experience, education, credentials or tenure with the library? Can you accept advice from library users and volunteers? Who are you willing to tick off today in order to build a better future for your community and institution
Financial Support
In addition to the upward curve for circulation and other usage figures, there are three additional measures of leadership success.
The second measure is ensuring the financial support of libraries, from local economic decision-makers, from voters, from foundations and government agencies, and from those who make personal and corporate gifts.
Practical leadership means a high comfort level with money. The ultimate measure is your competence and success at asking for money from your library: lobbying state offcials, running political campaigns, making grant-writing a priority and coordinating fundraising efforts, as well as ensuring your library has both an active Friends group and library foundation.
Leadership Questions: Can you grow the library beyond your fingertips? Will you delegate responsibility so you can spend more time in the larger community? Can you build successful teams with people outside the library's walls and partner with people who know how to find and invest money? Are you able to leave a meeting with a check that clears the bank? Are you willing to educate yourself about economic development issues?
Political Support
The third measure of leadership success is your ability to enlist political support for the library. Politics means votes from elected and appointed offcials when the library needs people to back a difficult decision, such as dealing with a sticky material challenge. It also means the support of citizens inside and outside of the voting booth.
Leadership Questions: Can you secure dollars through the ballot box? In addition, do people show up at public meetings to demonstrate solidarity with your library's decision regarding filtering, the Patriots' Act or the First Amendment? Do they write letters to, call and visit elected offcials to lobby for library causes? Will voters, on their own, take the initiative to protect the library from financial setbacks and political attacks? Do teachers, professors and corporate executives speak out for your school, academic and special library's issues in meetings, when you, the official library representative, are not present?
Do you understand and practice ethical politics, which is the ability to earn the trust and respect of people (even ones you don't like). Do you know how to rally the troops when the library is being attacked? Can you build alliances that overcome superficial differences such as political beliefs, religious affiliation or socioeconomic status? When you walk into a room, do you greet the people you don't know first, so as to build working relationships for the future?
The fourth measure of successful library leadership is improving the library's (and the library director's) influence in the greater community and/or institution it serves.
I visit libraries where the directors and other staff members are presidents of the boards of nonprofit organizations. They spearhead countywide and statewide initiatives for projects outside of the library world, relating to health, education, economic development and environmental issues. They are seen as leaders in other venues. In addition, people outside those libraries see the library leadership as understanding and wanting to impact the bigger picture.
Leadership Questions: When executive decisions about the future of the town or the university are to be made, is the library director or dean the first person invited to the meeting? Does the librarian take a lead in proposing solutions to challenges such as student achievement, community health, senior welfare and economic development? Does the larger community or institution get to see library leadership successfully tackling problems outside the walls of the library? And does library leadership seek office, not just support positions, in charitable groups and economic development groups?
The Challenges of Urgency
What should be obvious is that the scenarios listed here are not about the admirable skills of the cataloger, digitizer, reference librarian, web designer, story teller, tech services specialist, archivist, genealogist, literacy expert, shelver, or front line customer service-oriented circulation clerk. I also did not mention serving on library committees to plan a library conference, write a library association by-law or market a new library association service. Doing a good job for your library or library association is satisfying and will please your library users and colleagues, but being a good reference librarian or committee member won't guarantee that you, in your role as a Nebraska library leader, will have a say in statewide legislation affecting public access to computers.
This sense of urgency applies no matter how small, rural, poor or isolated your library community is, or how insular and smug the existing leadership of the larger place where you live and work. (It is said that we deserve the local government we have, which includes library boards, school boards and faculty senates in academia.)
There was a time when I would have been satisfied with a defifinition of library leadership that focused on the library institutions and its related professions. How can we recruit more people to serve on library conference committees and run for office in library associations? What issues need to be addressed in terms of the principles of running a library? How can we improve the administrative skills of library directors?
But these tasks, however admirable, are not sufficient. So, what has changed that is creating a new sense of urgency about what library leadership is and where its attention should focus?
Foremost, technology is changing, which is expanding the expectations the library user has about what they can expect from information, service and product providers. I hear people talking about these issues at library conferences, but do they really understand how even libraries in small communities are being judged against what is being offered by other government, nonprofits and business? I believe that library leadership means more than installing wi-fi in the lobby or picking a vendor with a snazzy online catalog interface.
Information? I expect I will be able to find what I want to know in a timely fashion, which means according to my schedule, with no excuses from the provider. Consequently, every entity in the private, public and nonprofit sectors is under pressure to provide me with up-to-date information. Yes, I have access to the Internet and the World Wide Web, but I also have free how-to videos at the hardware stores, free classes at the hospital, free interactive kiosks at hotels and cheap 24-hour phone support from my computer company. My doctor's office often calls me the same day with lab results and sends me a report via fax or mail to my home.
My city government in Denver pledges that I will be able to do business with them by phone or online and never have to step foot in a government building. The national Center for Disease Control has an online interactive map for tracking West Nile disease outbreaks in people, birds, horses and mosquitoes, drawn state-by-state and county-by-county, designed for laypeople. My water board shows me what is happening, day-to-day, in Colorado reservoirs and rivers. And I can easily check the local weather forecast for the 100 cities I visit every year, with a couple of clicks, as well as track traffic accidents and construction delays in any major city and all states online, literally block-by-block in most cases.
I mention government examples because the lack of funds is the leading reason I hear from the library community why they can't “compete” with the private sector. However, government agencies are automating because their leadership understood years, if not decades ago, that technology was an investment, not an expense. Making it easier to find information means better compliance on the part of the taxpayer, from obeying the law to paying license fees and taxes, which means more money in the coffers. Also, more government entities are collaborating, to share the costs of providing information faster and in multiple formats.
Service? Catalogs, online sites, phone services, the old brick-and-mortar? The choice is mine. If I am in a motel room in Anchorage, Alaska; San Juan, Puerto Rico; Toronto, Ontario; or San Diego, California, I rely on computers and phone to do things that I could not have done five years ago. I expect that I can conduct business with my bank anywhere, as I travel around the continent. I check balances, transfer funds, pay bills and send reports to my husband and accountant online, as well as talk to bankers 24/7.
Again, collaboration and technology are the keys. Small stores partner with bigger banks to provide slick-looking online catalogs.
Products? Again, the choice is mine. I expect that I can compare prices among dozens of stores. And, regarding my addiction to books, I can search thousands of used bookstores all over the world to find inexpensively priced treasures, particularly books that my local library (one of the largest in the country) does not have and might not be able to get me in a timely fashion.
I have flowers delivered to my mother in Kenosha, Wisconsin and books to my sister-in-law in Los Angeles , again with a few clicks. After fruitlessly searching a dozen department stores and as many dress shops for an outfit for a wedding – one that would camouflage this middle-age body – I found the perfect dress (peach-colored silk tweed sheath with a matching jacket) online, in a store on the East Coast – it was delivered, satisfaction guaranteed, in three days to my house.
But it is more than computers, cell phones and social networking sites that are causing change to accelerate. Every new tool, every new concept will cause a faster cascade of new options for the end user. If I think it, I can get it. And the competitors for the attention of your library users, for money, for political support and for influence are feeling the same pressure. They are becoming more sophisticated at wooing customers, at asking for money, at winning elections and earning influence.
So what is Nebraska library leadership already doing that responds best to a changing world and what can they do differently?
First, reconsider how much money and attention needs to be spent on tradition library professional activities. This might sound a little radical to some, but the structure of professional associations was designed in centuries when decision-making could be a leisurely process. What if librarians spent less time in rooms together and more time outside establishing their credentials with the people who run their academic institutions, governments and businesses?
This might mean scaling back the number of meetings, for example, and asking people to use their volunteer hours in the larger community.
Second, Nebraska already has a great reputation as a library state where libraries collaborate. How far are you willing to take it? The more political barriers to cooperation you can remove, the more power and money you will have to serve users and to earn trust and respect from economic decision-makers People who think they will lose more than they gain in they join forces are what my mother in Wisconsin calls the “Brigadoon” mentality, where everyone falls asleep for one hundred years. Wake up: small and poor is not necessarily better. Even if your university, school, town or institutional leaders won't play together well, that does not mean you can't innovate with other libraries and institutions. And if you are already doing it, do it more. Assume you can solve problems together, instead of pretending that barriers are anything except human designed.
Third, support library leadership education and opportunities for all employees. Assume that paraprofessionals have as much to offer as people with masters' degrees. Recruit people with leadership experience in other fields into the profession and the library, and then get out of their way. To be a leader means the ability to make significant decisions, and we don't have time to wait for leaders to serve decades of apprenticeships as our mentors did with our generation.
If what some authors say is true, the American workplace will be short ten million skilled workers in four years. I meet library school students who found themselves as directors within months of leaving library school, because everyone above them in the food chain retired. I think that learning the skills of leadership should be a priority for the library community.
Fourth, push for measures of success that are not limited to circulation figures or the number of people who visit the library website or attended Library Week functions. If you set new goals, you can make them happen.
Fifth, collaborate with other professional and trade groups, How about more joint conferences with teachers? More meetings with people in the room who are not librarians?
Finally, Nebraska 's library leaders need to use their state's history as a cattle producer, and with all due respect to the vegans in the profession, be willing to kill a few more sacred cows. A sacred cow is a principle that has not been tested today against current facts, which is not helping you to achieve your mission and vision and which is too expensive in terms of its relative value to our strategic plan.
Let's pretend you can make a library, and library leadership, anything you want, and then find out how.
