Effective management in academic libraries requires more than oversight and decision-making: it calls for leadership that centers people, relationships, and trust. As higher education continues to evolve, library managers are tasked with guiding teams through uncertainty while sustaining motivation, engagement, and well-being. This session explores how leaders can intentionally cultivate a person-centered culture that supports both individual growth and organizational resilience.
At EKU Libraries, we recognized that in order to ensure the library remains relevant amidst shifting institutional priorities and shrinking budgets, we first needed to strengthen how we worked together. By focusing on psychological safety, transparent communication, and shared purpose, we fostered an environment that encouraged learning, experimentation, and adaptability. Drawing on Edgar Schein’s stages of learning and change, we’ll discuss how our management practices evolved to support staff as they navigated this uncertain territory.
Participants will gain practical strategies for leading through change while maintaining a culture of care. We will share examples of how reframing resistance, promoting collaboration, and aligning daily work with institutional goals helped us strengthen both our team and our impact. Attendees will leave with actionable ideas for supporting staff well-being, enhancing communication, and embedding empathy into management practices—tools that empower leaders at all levels to create sustainable, people-focused change within their organizations.
Our university licensed enterprise access to Claude in April 2025, which placed new pressure on the library to be ready to address AI in Fall 2025. As unit leads, we wanted our staff to feel confident addressing GenAI in library instruction, so we undertook two separate approaches to building engagement with AI based on our groups’ working cultures and needs.
The STEM team took a discussion-based approach. Academic departments had adopted GenAI in different ways, and thus liaisons had uneven skill levels using AI tools. This encouraged us to consider an alternative to a group upskilling approach. Our goal was for liaisons to feel confident addressing AI questions from faculty or students on the spot in the classroom. Meetings centered around creating a graph that documented acceptable/unacceptable and effective/ineffective uses. Meeting topics included Northeastern’s AI policies, available AI tools, deep research modes, student attitudes towards AI, communication, and more.
The generalist group of online learning librarians took a competencies-based approach. The unit head developed an initial list of objectives addressing what the team should be able to do or speak about related to GenAI in the context of open workshops or tutorials, which was edited and collectively approved by the group. Our competencies outline focused on explaining how GenAI worked, why it was error-prone, evaluating its output, and using enterprise AI tools.
Both managers will share how their teams responded to these approaches, strategies for staying current with AI developments, and key lessons learned.
