Effective delegation is one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools in academic library management. Too often, managers avoid delegating because of time pressures, fear of mistakes, or the tendency toward perfectionism. Yet thoughtful delegation not only strengthens team capacity—it cultivates autonomy, supports leadership development, and fosters a culture of trust and shared responsibility.
This session provides a practical, person-centered approach to delegation rooted in clarity, communication, and coaching. Participants will learn how to identify work that is appropriate to delegate, how to match tasks to employee strengths and developmental goals, and how to create supportive structures that allow staff to succeed. In this session, we will explore the difference between “dumping” and delegating, discuss common emotional and organizational barriers to letting go, and examine how micromanagement can unintentionally hinder team growth.
Through guided activities, attendees will practice writing a delegation plan using a simple, repeatable framework that clarifies expectations, checkpoints, authority levels, and accountability. The session also includes strategies for developing staff confidence, supporting independent decision-making, and navigating delegation challenges such as uneven workloads or inconsistent performance.
Participants will leave with practical tools they can apply immediately, including quick reference cards, a 30-day delegation challenge, and personal reflection prompts, along with renewed confidence in their ability to build stronger, more empowered teams through intention
Rooted in the lived experiences of the presenters – a neurodivergent employee and their manager, this session provides an authentic dialogue about how working through the process of accommodations shaped personal and professional relationships and well-being.
This dialogue-style presentation will provide tips and advice, practical tools, and learnings from failures related to the following themes:
- Advocacy & relationship building
- Communication & transparency
- Fostering well-being
- Navigating Challenges
- Supervision & evaluation
- Managing up & sideways
- Organizational culture/climate
This case study offers practical recommendations for creating neurodiversity-friendly workplaces in academic libraries and beyond. It also invites attendees to reconsider the narrative of accommodation as a solitary journey. Instead, it underscores the transformative power of teamwork and dialogue in fostering a truly accessible and equitable workplace.
By sharing our story, we hope to contribute to a broader understanding of neurodiversity in the workplace and inspire others to embrace accessibility as a collective effort.
Director, Goizueta Business Library, Emory University
I've been both a corporate librarian (at an accounting, tax, and consulting firm) and an academic business librarian. In both instances, my roles were both as director/leader of the library and as one of the "boots on the ground" business librarians.
Mid-career and middle-management librarians occupy a complex and operationally demanding role in academic libraries. Positioned between senior leadership and frontline staff, they are expected to lead from the middle while developing their own managerial practice and supporting the growth and development of others.
This panel brings together librarians from four different institutions to examine the lived practice of middle management, with a specific focus on developing as a manager and leading others through growth and change. Drawing on perspectives from Critical Management Studies (CMS) and practical managerial experience, panelists from public and private institutions with both faculty and non-faculty status will discuss how organizational hierarchies, institutional rhetoric, and cultural norms shape leadership work, decision-making, and professional development opportunities for both managers and the staff they supervise.
Panelists will explore how middle managers balance immediate operational needs with longer-term responsibilities such as mentorship, succession planning, and staff career development, even when advancement pathways may exist outside of their own institutions. Particular attention will be given to mentorship as a core leadership practice, including how managers support growth, navigate developmental conversations, and prepare staff for opportunities both within and beyond their organizations. This session emphasizes actionable leadership strategies for navigating ambiguity, sustaining team engagement, and fostering meaningful professional development in contexts where authority and accountability are not always aligned. Unlike sessions focused on individual skill-building, this discussion centers on managerial growth and the practical work of leading and mentoring others from the middle.
Research Librarian, University of St. Thomas School of Law
Alison Shea joined the University of St. Thomas Law School in 2024 as a Research Librarian. She has a B.A. from Boston University (2004), and a joint J.D./M.S.L.S. from The Catholic University of America (2007).
Alison's formal management experience was brief, having been promot... Read More →
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.
When we make a mistake at work, how we are supported by the people around us can make all the difference in our ability to recover from that mistake and use it as an opportunity to learn, grow, and develop. Conversely, when one of our staff members makes a mistake, how we respond to that mistake as managers can make all the difference in how we build workplace cultures that are people-centered and allow our employees to grow and thrive as human beings and contribute to successful, supportive teams.
In this presentation, two members of a library executive leadership team will share what they’ve learned about the process of making mistakes – both from the perspective of the person making the mistake, and from the perspective of the person helping to manage the mistake after it was made. The presentation will invite reflection on how we ourselves, as people and individuals, move forward from making mistakes, how we can support our staff, and how we can translate that into a more human-centered approach in our libraries that is still centered within workplace and HR policies and procedures.
The presenters will share their vision, using real-world scenarios and concrete steps that attendees can take and adapt at their own institutions, for making libraries places in which employees can safely make mistakes and in which managers can help employees use those mistakes as launch pads from which to learn, grow, and move the organization forward.
Our department has gone through several changes, leaving colleagues split between two campuses. Trying to facilitate collaboration and create a unified sense of community was a critical need. To address this, we created a goal for everyone to share their expertise. This presentation details the design, implementation, and outcomes of our department's in-house professional development (PD) model, where each person developed and led a session for their colleagues. This approach shifts PD from a passive, top-down mandate to an active, collaborative, and person-centered management strategy. Specifically, the model fostered community by creating structured, positive interactions that bridged our two campuses and established a shared vulnerability and commitment to growth among colleagues.
This presentation will explain how this model addresses core tenets of person-centered management, specifically fostering autonomy, recognizing individual expertise, and promoting holistic skill development, by turning every colleague into both a learner and an educator. The session will cover the practical steps for implementation, the challenges encountered, and results demonstrating increased employee engagement, skill transfer, and a stronger sense of departmental community, collective ownership, and a unified professional identity.
Most librarians do not receive formal management education or training and, as a result, may refrain from pursuing management roles because they believe themselves underprepared or underqualified. Yet librarians often have a rich set of skills that map well to the demands of management roles; they just don’t recognize them as relevant and transferable. In addition to the strong grounding in core services and content knowledge that the everyday work of librarianship provides, the soft skills that librarians develop in this work are precisely the skills that managers need most. In particular, the user-centered focus and relational competencies at the core of daily library work guide and strengthen management practice as person-centered. Seeing professional experience through this perspective can empower librarians to realize and articulate their preparedness for management roles and imagine administrative career paths for themselves.
In this session, panelists will share how the skills they have developed in various areas of librarianship have shaped and supported their approaches to key management responsibilities including: deep curiosity, communication, cultivating belonging, generating buy-in, decision-making, nonjudgmental framing, advocacy, and a growth mind-set. Participants will have the chance to reflect on their own value-driven soft skills, honed as librarians, that could translate into their current or future management practice. This session will stimulate discussion and reflection for both aspiring and current managers around recognizing, cultivating, and advocating for a growth-oriented, person-centered management culture.
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.
