Journal Club: Leading the Library

 Sharon’s Journal Club (if you’re reading this, you’re in the club) Presents:

 

Leading the Library (When You’reNot in Charge)

By Beth Boatright

As I was adding some fresh journal articles to my “to read” pile, I decided to flick through the pile and read some of the ones I hadn’t gotten around to yet. This article is from 2015, and I don’t know if I got it at the time and forgot about it, or if I came across it more recently while researching something else, or if someone had recommended it and I’d downloaded it but then forgotten it.

Either way, it turned out to be a very interesting read – one I recommend for everyone who works in a library, no matter how “lowly” the position. If you recommended it to me – thanks! I quite enjoyed it.

Some advanced warning: I’ve been reading about Permaculture Design Principles lately and toying with applying them to non-gardening situations (everything you work on is your garden, if you think about it that way), so some of my reflections on this article talks about that. Boatright’s article itself is completely free of all permaculture references.

Boatright’s article is an interesting angle on what I’d think of as “engaging with your job for productivity and work satisfaction.” She comes from the angle of seeing yourself as having a “leadership” role, even if you have absolutely no authority in the library whatsoever.

Effective library operations requires everyone to “lead” in their position – to have a leadership team, if you will, in which each person is “taking the lead” in their role, and thereby being a “leader” within the scope of their actual job position.

I’ve read similar things before that were talking about “mindful” or “active” engagement in your work to create opportunities for advancement and job satisfaction, and I think Boatright has read many similar articles, but wants to call it “leadership” rather than “active engagement” or any of the other buzzwords that have been buzzing about.

I suspect she’s trying to speak to that “If I were in charge, things would be different” grumbling that sits in the heart of many librarians (and, oddly, continues to be there no matter how far up the food chain you find yourself – even people in management positions in libraries are not actually “in charge” – that’s usually some bureaucrat who has very little interest in or understanding of libraries).

Well, you are in charge (of your piece of the puzzle) and you can make a difference (even if it’s just a small one). The main beneficiaries might very well be you and your immediate co-workers, but it will flow on in all directions. Whatever positive differences you make in your work will flow downstream to the clients, and upstream to the other members of the library team.

To start with, you need to embrace the first Permaculture Design Principle (I warned you): Observe and Interact.

Guess what? This is exactly what we should be doing for our PDPs (PMPs?... whatever they end up being called). You “identify and thoughtfully consider the mission, vision and purpose statements of your college, library and/or department’s administrations” (345) – in other words, check out the strategic plan of the library, but also (if you can) take a look at whatever “this is what we want to achieve” visionary-type guff the division and the university have made available. Then you look at your own job description to see what’s expected of someone in your role.

Then what you do is look at how you, being in that role, can contribute to the library/division/university achieving what it needs to achieve. How can you “lead” your team from your position so that goals are set and accomplished in order to make a positive contribution?

Back to “Observe and Interact”. You start by taking a look at the bigger picture – not just the day-to-day stuff of your specific job as you’re doing it right now, but the “garden” as a whole. The environment it sits in, what is happening, where the energy is flowing or getting lost or stuck, where we’re overusing some resources or underusing other opportunities…

When you see what needs to be done for the health and success of the “garden” in interaction with the “environment” (not just what you think should happen sitting in your current job dissatisfaction and saying “If I were in charge…”) then you can interact – see what is within your ability to achieve with your efforts, and make measurable goals where you know what you want to accomplish and you can see how you will go about doing it and how you will know it has been done.

Oh, look, we’re back in the PDP again.

This also involves another Permaculture Design Principle: “Design from Patterns to Details”. And, potentially also, “Obtain a Yield” – at the end of the day, you want to have something to show for your efforts. The “yeild” you want to obtain should be part of the plan you come up with as you design the details out of your patterns.

The article goes on to talk more about goal setting and time management and stuff like that from a “leadership” perspective. I won’t recount all of it because that would be silly (and why would you read the article if my commentary on it was twice as long and covered everything it said?). But I will draw attention to the simple four-square time management technique Boatright recommends: ask yourself if this is important or not important, and if it is urgent or not urgent. Schedule time especially to work on the “important but not urgent” tasks as they’re probably where you’ll get the most bang for your buck.

Don’t let the things that are urgent but not important distract you from doing what is important but not urgent.

The other things Boatright mentioned that I want to especially draw attention to (while still leaving it worth your while reading the article itself) are communication and responsibility/accountability.

A good leader communicates with their team. They tell them what challenges are being faced and what progress is being made. This is something I personally need to work on, because reports are one of those “important but not urgent” things that usually get shunted to one side by the myriad of “urgent” things that seem more important to me at the time. But reports and other forms of communication where you let the rest of the team know what is going on… these are good and useful things. We should be using them to good effect.

The idea of accountability dovetails with learning from the outcomes of what you’ve been doing. We talk about learning from our mistakes, and that is part of this. So is learning from our successes, and learning from everything else (this coincides with the Permaculture Design Principle, “Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback). Good, bad or indifferent, we need to look at what has happened as a direct results of our actions and recognise them as our responsibility. The buck stops with us, and rather than hope nobody notices it so we don’t have to “fess up”, we should immediately start thinking about “how can I/we improve this situation?”

The last thing I want to touch on is the idea of “build[ing] your team” (351), even if you don’t have anyone under you. Whether you are the absolute bottom of the food chain or a team leader with a group of people who answer to you, you still work with others (you might not see them, but you work with them). You still have the power to make their jobs a joy or a misery. A leader focuses on “effectively building relationships, motivating others, communicating, and collaborating” (351).

It’s really quite simply achieved. You know what kind of support you would need from others to do your job well – look at the jobs of your team members (from the colleagues sitting “next” to you right up to the Director) and ask yourself what support they need from you to do their jobs well.

I’m going to be chewing on this article a bit as I figure out what kind of librarian I want to be this year (I just hope to God that Boatright’s “encouragement” that I might be given more responsibility as a result is wrong).

Meanwhile, here are my “quotable quotes” from the article:

“Whether or not you have organizational authority, you can still make things better for other people, and in doing so, you will make things better for yourself as well” (351).

“One challenge and opportunity of leadership without authority is to rally behind the ideas and strategies of our administrators and find ways to make things work for everyone involved” (352).

“The more engaged you are, the better your library’s outcomes will be” (355).

Boatright, Beth. "Leading the Library (When You're Not in Charge)." College & Undergraduate Libraries, vol. 22, 2015, pp. 343-57, Taylor & Francis Online, doi:10.1080/10691316.2015.1070702.