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
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.
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 →
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.
