A Leader's Toolbelt

Leaders need a variety of tools to be effective in their management, communication, and leadership. These tools should be used for specific jobs and are operational in working with some personalities but not all. Leaders can develop these tools and over time, learn when and how to effectively use them. Such tools will enhance the leader's ability to address a variety of situations and issues drawing upon expertise gained through experience.     

Difficult Conversations

Organizations by their very nature will incur conflict and individuals will need to negotiate differences, behaviors, and performance. Effective leaders understand that difficult conversations are necessary in managing an organization or unit. No one wants to initiate a difficult conversation or to address performance issues but it is essential that leaders face the need to have hard conversations and in so doing, the organization will benefit from an ongoing dialogue. This column will discuss the need for difficult conversations and some tips for facilitating a dialogue. Interested authors are invited to submit articles for this column to the editor at farrell@uwyo.edu.     

Leadership Reflections: Leadership Paradoxes

Leadership faces a number of paradoxes that can be challenging and confusing, particularly as individuals take on new leadership roles. Employees want leaders to be decisive but participatory in decision making, focused on big pictures but contribute to detailed discussions, and engage but not micromanage. It is confusing as mixed messages are given to leaders and the opinions of employees vary, creating a situation in which it is difficult for leaders to fully understand employee expectations. Leaders not only need to understand these paradoxes but develop methods to balance employee expectations and communication strategies that help employees appreciate the balancing act that each leader must develop.     

Leadership Reflections: Leadership Skills for Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is a process that infuses knowledge and decision making across an organization. It not only encourages decision making based on data but also fosters communication among personnel for informed practices and processes. The social connections within an organization facilitate the formal structure and encourage personnel to share expertise, insights, and past experiences to inform decision making. Such a highly interactive organization requires leadership that supports and encourages knowledge management practices. A successful knowledge management organization depends on certain leadership characteristics in order to foster interactions that contribute to the processes. A variety of characteristics and patterns will offer leaders understanding on how to lead within a knowledge management library.     

Interim Leadership

ABSTRACT

Leadership training tends to focus on development and performance of leadership skills with the implied understanding that the position is permanent or the appointment is formalized. Yet organizations require temporary leaders during leadership gaps but there is limited information on serving in an acting role or for a short period of time. Serving as an interim leader has unique challenges and opportunities but several considerations should be made to make this a positive experience providing smooth transitions for an organization.     

Starting From Ground Zero: Establishing a Collection for a New Doctoral Program

This article reports a librarian's collection development efforts to support her institution's first independent doctoral degree (Ed.D., Educational Leadership) via a citation analysis comparing information usage by education doctorate dissertation authors from six peer institutions nationally. This analysis is part of a long-term examination of library collection use among California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) doctoral students. Key findings include the relative young age among the information resources in educational leadership, which resource formats were cited, what serial titles were cited the most, and where they are available electronically. The ultimate aim is the creation of an essential collection in the subject discipline.     

Transparency

ABSTRACT

Within organizations, employees often discuss the need for transparency but what exactly is transparency? Transparency is often linked with communication in an effort to create an organization that is more informed about decisions and processes creating a sense of employee engagement. But leaders are not able to operate in a completely open manner due to a variety of factors. What leadership activities can be conducted in a transparent manner and how is transparency balanced with confidentiality? Transparency is not just a leader responsibility but other managers and employees contribute to organizational transparency. This column will provide more insights into the complex issue of transparency within libraries.     

Collegiality in the Workplace

ABSTRACT

Libraries are considered safe spaces to explore different topics facilitating the sharing of knowledge so it would appear that colle giality and civility are cornerstones of our service. But within our organizations, collegiality is not always stressed as an important value within the workplace. Civility and collegiality are important for libraries as they are the foundation of our public services and support diversity of ideas and open communication within the workplace. Collegiality standards are set by the leaders and managers within an organization and this column will explore the need for civility standards to successfully achieve library goals.

Column Editor’s NoteLeadership skills are essential to creating libraries that are effective and relevant to their communities. While some individuals seem to possess inherent leadership capabilities, it is possible to develop and strengthen skills to effectively lead a department, unit, or organization. This column explores ways for librarians and library workers to improve their knowledge and abilities as they lead their units, libraries, communities, and the library profession. Interested authors are invited to submit articles for this column to the editor at maggie4@clemson.edu.     

Leadership Reflections: Extrovert and Introvert Leaders

Leadership calls for the ability to work well with people, communicate with stakeholders, participate in and lead meetings, and often public speaking. As a leader advances within an organization, expectations increase for the individual to engage with others as leaders spend more time working with colleagues and stakeholders to advance the organization. These expectations tend to favor extroverts in leadership roles but organizations may overlook the strengths of introverts as leaders losing out on the potential for effective management. An understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of personality types will help individuals as well as organizations in developing leadership in order to achieve organizational goals.     

Strategic Alignment at the University of Manchester Library: Ambitions,Transitions, and New Values

The University of Manchester Library (UML) is embarking on an ambitious new strategy that aims to align the library more closely to the work of the University—to contribute to the University's strategic success. This article describes elements of the strategy development and content, focusing on methods used; how the service has worked collaboratively both internally and externally, and how senior managers have supported resource, skill, and knowledge challenges. The role of the middle manager is explored in detail in terms of its importance to successful strategy implementation, and parallels are drawn between UML's senior and operational requirements.     

Time Management

Time management is an essential component of leadership. Leaders need to develop strategies to maximize time in order to achieve personal and organizational goals. While there are numerous time saving methods, leaders will need to test and determine which patterns are most effective for their personal style. There are some organizational strategies that will benefit the individual leader as well the organization such as planning, goal setting, delegation, decision authority, and work life balance. By managing time, the leader is accounting for the important commodity of time within an organization.     

Leadership Reflections: Complexity and Our Adaptable Minds – Collaborative Inquiry and Presence-Based Leadership

Abstract

Our guest columnist is Tim Schlak who, like many of us, is on a journey continuing to challenge ourselves to be better leaders and to more effectively serve our organizations. This column presents several of the latest leadership development frameworks that are novel to library literature. Where many leaders assume our minds and identities are fixed, this paper presents theories and anecdotal evidence that our minds and identities are flexible and adaptable to the causes we choose. Complexity is offered as the central feature of organizational life and the responses we make can be intentionally crafted to help us hold our knowledge and our senses of self more loosely. In so doing, we create room to grow and to muster more effective and authentic responses to the complexity we all face in our libraries.     

分众分类：网络时代的新型信息分类法(编译）

针对网络信息分类体系构建的要求日趋突出，主要研究了一种与传统分类体系截然不同的分众分类体系，分别对这一全新分类体系的思想来源、主要机制及其主要功能加以阐述，并分析了其未来在知识管理方面可行的企业级应用前景。     

Leadership in Libraries

A summary of recent articles on leadership in library and information science literature.     

新起点 新思路 新发展

历史的车轮滚滚向前。中国广播影视工作者意气风发地迎来了21世纪第一道曙光。回顾过去，祖国大地上留下了中国广播影视事业发展壮大的印记；展望未来，中国广播影视事业面临着更大的发展机遇和更加激烈的挑战。在新世纪到来之际，中国广播影视任重道远。     

Perceptions of Transformational Leadership in Academic Libraries

ABSTRACT

Transformational leadership is highly correlated with effective organizations and successful change, yet few studies of this leadership style exist in the library literature. This study examined perceptions of transformational traits in academic library leaders. The study asked academic librarians at 4 year institutions to rate their library's leadership using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. While the librarians perceived their library leaders to be more transformational than transactional, the mean score for transformational leadership was middling, as were the scores for each of the transformational components. This could indicate a lack of change readiness in these libraries.     

知识管理视角中的情报学研究范式

基于知识管理研究的基本内涵来比较研究情报学与知识管理异同，指出情报学主要是研究显性信息的收集加工整理及传播，侧重于社会层次与个人层次；知识管理主要研究隐性知识的收集加工整理及传播，侧重于组织层次。同时，探究知识管理研究对情报学研究的启示，并给出情报学研究的基本模型及交流传递模式。     

Learning to Lead: Challenges and Resources for The New Public Library Director

Library directors are part of the infrastructure of information management, but how well do they manage their institutional knowledge for succession planning? Our study looked at strategies to ease managerial transitions between libraries, focusing on knowledge management, communities of practice, and mentorship. Our survey found that succession planning was dictated by local practice and size of library. The results of this paper inform knowledge of succession planning and reveal existing gaps between informal transfer of knowledge and structured knowledge management (KM), as well as librarians' resourcefulness. Library directors use KM strategies, mentoring, and involvement with communities of practice to foster innovation.     

Leadership Reflections: Resiliency in Library Organizations

Similar to individuals, organizations display characteristics that speak to qualities and abilities. Our guest writer, Lisa Bodenheimer, discusses a trait that is critical for library organizations during this period of constant change and transformation. Resiliency is the ability to rebound and flex as circumstances shift enabling an organization to thrive and adjust during difficult times. This skill is typically developed through experiences, but, as Ms. Bodenheimer outlines, organizations are able to strategize in order to build employee and organizational resilience. Such a proactive approach will enable a library organization to better weather challenging situations and times as difficulties will enviably occur. The following article provides practical suggestions for library organizations that will enable them to be more successful while leading and managing in a changing environment.     

Vision and Vulnerability: Thoughts on Leadership and Conservation

ABSTRACT

Testimony from colleagues in the cultural sector suggests that there is a common perception of leaders as authoritarian, infallible and invulnerable. However, developing leaders soon come to understand that good leaders often have an authenticity of their own. Being able to embrace authentic leadership in this way requires confidence. It involves accepting vulnerabilities, learning to be comfortable making decisions without all the information, and daring to risk potential failure as the best way to encourage creativity, innovation and learning. Given this dichotomy, is there a potential for the development of leadership in conservation? This paper explores the unique challenges we face as conservators in a changing sector. In it, I reconnect with professional experiences of my own and those I gained as the first conservation fellow on the Clore Leadership Programme as well as examining testimony from others in the profession and the wider cultural sector. The ideas generated are supported by literature from a variety of sources inside and outside the conservation field. Starting from what draws people to conservation in the very beginning and working through to the leadership of the profession, the paper identifies four main areas of challenge for conservation in a twenty-first-century creative economy. These are around a lack of diversity, a lack of confidence, the strength of voice and perception and issues around support, for our decision-making and for the profession as a whole. The paper concludes that a new vision for the future of conservation could not only help rebalance the diverging preventive and remedial specialisms but also be instrumental in the perception, interpretation and preservation of cultural heritage. If we expand our horizons, the bigger picture of heritage and what it can achieve for the society could be crucial to us not only changing but thriving in the modern world.