Formal career review and advancement, such as the tenure and promotion process, can be a celebratory and/or soul-sucking time for candidates, their colleagues, and library managers. The presenters, three current or former academic library unit heads, know this first-hand from their experiences facilitating sometimes heavenly, sometimes hellish promotional meetings. While the policies and standards surrounding these reviews are crucial to prevent intentional cruelty or harm, culture plays a large role in how those policies are carried out: a successful promotion does not always mean a successful process, and we have seen how positive intent can cause negative impact in the form of microaggression, poorly worded questions, and lack of engagement. What can those of us participating in or facilitating the review or promotion process do to create a supportive, kind, and clear culture of review in our libraries, especially when two candidates may experience the same review cycle in vastly different ways. We will discuss both cultural and structural elements of promotion, highlighting important frameworks and strategies for the planning period, including mental models, psychological safety, and giving feedback. This goal of this session is to collectively contemplate how not to be the a-hole, facilitated by three a-holes trying to do better.
Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a collaborative, person-centered communication approach originally developed in the behavioral health field to strengthen motivation for change. Today, MI offers powerful, practical tools for leaders who want to foster engagement, support growth, and inspire meaningful action within their teams.
This session will introduce the core principles of MI: expressing empathy, developing discrepancy, rolling with resistance, and supporting self-efficacy, and demonstrate how they can be applied to everyday leadership situations. Whether navigating resistance to change, addressing performance concerns, or building stronger team connections, MI techniques help leaders move conversations from compliance to genuine commitment.
Attendees will learn how to use open-ended questions, affirmations, reflective listening, and summarizing (OARS) to create collaborative, trust-based environments. These strategies not only improve accountability and communication but also promote psychological safety, increase adaptability, and strengthen team cohesion.
As remote and hybrid work structures become increasingly common in academic libraries, managers face new challenges in keeping employees engaged, motivated, and connected. This session presents original research exploring the relationship between transformational leadership behaviors and work engagement in remote and hybrid academic library environments.
Drawing on a quantitative study of over 100 library workers, attendees will learn which transformational leadership behaviors have the strongest impact on engagement in remote contexts. By focusing on the two dimensions of transformational leadership that emerged as significant predictors of work engagement, this session will offer practical, research-backed guidance for library leaders navigating reduced face-to-face interaction, digital fatigue, and a growing demand for flexible work arrangements.
The session will connect leadership theory with actionable management strategies, including values-based communication, modeling purpose-driven behaviors, and reframing innovation support to avoid burnout. Attendees will explore how to implement these findings at the micro and macro levels, in everyday interactions and throughout their organizations.
Whether you're currently managing a completely distributed team or trying to maintain a cohesive feel in a hybrid model, this session will help you identify what truly drives engagement and how to lead with intention across distance.
Director of Library Services, Access, & Scholarship, National University
I’m an academic library director at National University, where I lead a fully digital library supporting more than 20,000 online and military-affiliated learners. My work sits at the intersection of access, innovation, and impact, especially in open educational resources (OER... Read More →
