Middle managers in academic libraries often occupy the most volatile seat in the building. Caught between shifting directives from senior leadership and raw emotion from front-line employees, middle managers feel the pressure even more acutely during organizational change. Empathy frequently shows up as an unspoken job expectation, yet few management frameworks explain how to operationalize empathy without turning a role in the middle into an emotional sponge.
Framed by empathetic leadership theory and grounded in a qualitative study of organizational change at the academic library of a large, public, research university, this session will introduce an “empathy amplifier” lens for middle management. Drawing on my doctoral research, I will share anonymized vignettes from middle managers who navigated change, using their stories to shape concrete supervisory behaviors, communication patterns, and workload strategies.
I want to take a candid look at some of the empathetic tension in managerial roles and provide suggestions and practical phrasing for situations such as high-anxiety announcements related to change or conducting performance reviews with care, clarity, and accountability, and also discuss structures designed to keep empathy sustainable for the middle manager rather than become a source of exhaustion. An empathetic framework can equip middle managers with a vocabulary and set of practices for amplifying empathy in academic libraries without sliding into burnout, even when authority and information might remain tightly constrained.
