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.
Academic library managers often feel pressured to resolve conflicts quickly to move past uncomfortable situations. While efficient, this approach can miss crucial underlying issues, leading to recurring problems and eroded trust. Conflict transformation, a framework used in peace-building, offers a sustainable, alternative approach by shifting focus to ”'constructive change initiatives that include and go beyond the resolution of particular problems” (Lederach, 2003). Unlike the more traditional conflict resolution lens, conflict transformation examines the multi-faceted aspects of conflict to address root causes and positively engage all parties involved.
This session will equip library managers with practical conflict transformation strategies for navigating team dynamics and organizational change in a relational, person-centered way. The presenter will distinguish between conflict resolution and transformation while sharing a framework for person-centered conflict transformation (including addressing provocation, mindfulness techniques, and establishing community agreements), and guide participants in strategies for building sustainable practices that avoid “quick fixes” when it comes to managing organizational conflicts.
Participants will learn to identify patterns in workplace conflicts, apply specific frameworks for transforming rather than simply resolving disputes, and develop approaches that strengthen relationships and prevent future conflicts.
Lederach, J. P. (2003). Conflict transformation. https://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/transformation
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.
Using a trauma-informed framework, we will explore ways to help student workers develop empathy and self-awareness and build a workplace culture of collaboration and inclusion.
What can you do when a student employee is offended by something a co-worker said at the circulation desk? What policies can mitigate the problem of excessive profanity in public services? These questions may seem simple to solve - say “stop it,” and move on - but these issues portend a more complicated problem. Student employees may have had no prior work experience and when problems in workplace culture arise, it offers an opportunity for teaching emotional intelligence skills that will help them in future professional settings. The session will use Rebecca Tolley’s Six Guiding Principles of Trauma-Informed Approaches - safety, transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment and culture - to frame a discussion of intentional learning experiences for student employees that can lead to retention, academic success and self-discovery.
In this workshop, we will brainstorm ways to:
- Use a trauma-informed approach to build a safe, collaborative workplace environment
- Integrate emotional intelligence skills training into a student employment program
- Give feedback to students that results in better performance and concrete action steps
Reference and Instruction Librarian, CT State Three Rivers
I am a librarian at Connecticut State Community College Three Rivers. My responsibilities include teaching, research assistance, marketing and supervising seven Student Library Assistants.
As academic libraries face ongoing retirements and organizational restructuring, early career librarians are increasingly assuming supervisory or managerial responsibilities earlier in their careers. Yet questions remain about how prepared they feel for these roles and what kind of support contributes most to their confidence and effectiveness. This presentation reports the results of a national survey conducted in 2024 exploring early career academic librarians’ perceptions of their readiness for management. The survey gathered quantitative and qualitative data from over 70 respondents with fewer than ten years of professional experience across a range of academic library settings.
Findings suggest that while many early career librarians find themselves in management positions, fewer feel adequately equipped to take them on. This presentation will share key data themes on how library managers did and did not feel prepared, highlight respondent narratives, and discuss possible implications for library administrators, professional associations, and LIS programs. There will also be several breakout sessions for participants to discuss their own management situations and brainstorm how to best support new incoming managers. Attendees will gain insight into how institutions can better support leadership development for early career professionals and foster more intentional management onboarding within academic libraries.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 16th, 2025, an emergency alert text was sent to the University of Denver campus community, informing them of a stabbing that had occurred in the Anderson Academic Commons, the building that houses library employees, service points, and collections. The conflict, which took place in an open seating area, involved two individuals unaffiliated with the University. While the physical injuries sustained by the victim were minor, the psychological impact on the library staff and the community was significant.
Violent incidents in academic libraries—regardless of the scope or medical severity—are traumatic events that fundamentally alter the workplace environment. How administration handles the minutes, days, and weeks following such an event is critical to staff recovery and retention. Moving beyond standard active harmer training, this session focuses on the administrative burden of care after the threat has been neutralized. Topics covered will include: supporting staff immediately following the violence; communicating successfully with campus security and law enforcement; and best practices for communicating with the broader campus community to provide transparency without increasing panic.
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.
The essential activity of recruiting and hiring can be fraught with high levels of stress, anxiety, impersonal formality, and the possibility that anyone involved may dread the unfeeling cold of distant scrutiny and fierce competition. While multiple factors can contribute to discomfort and disconnection, the presenters advocate for an approach that eschews even an accidental running of the gauntlet in favor of interview experiences that intentionally center the whole person. The whole-person approach to hiring both embraces the logistical and legal requirements overseen by Human Resources and incorporates person-centered strategies and when applied across each element in recruitment and hiring, help reduce unnecessary fear or intimidation. By personalizing experiences and applying thoughtful consideration to the holistic experience of each candidate, an organization can invest in their ability to bring their best self to each interaction. This has the potential to make way for a clearer understanding of the expertise, experience, and vision that an individual offers to an organization, and in return, convey what the workplace community offers to prospective colleagues. The presenters—who have served as hiring managers, search committee chairs, and search committee members for a variety of faculty librarian roles— will share why they’ve moved to this approach and what they have learned in three years of refining their whole-person practice. Attendees will receive a foundational understanding of the whole-person approach, including benefits, challenges, and specific, practical strategies for incorporating this philosophy into any hiring opportunity.
Like many libraries, the Davidson College Library is organized around functional teams focused on the various aspects of the library’s work and mission: research collections, archives and special collections, access and outreach, digital engagement, and research and instruction. This structure acknowledges specializations and strengthens those cores, but it also creates silos. To overcome these silos, library leadership at Davidson worked to create person-centered processes that honor individuals' ideas for strategic projects, encourage collaboration across functional units, and empower team members to “lead from where they are” in a relatively flat organization.
This presentation will outline the library’s “Great Ideas” process in which library staff, having connected with key partners across teams, identify and pitch projects that further the library’s strategic priorities. Because overcoming silos is complicated work, a re-imagined organizational structure of “Learning Networks” helps to facilitate shared professional interests and peer-to-peer learning, while a “unit” structure brings together staff with shared focus on collections and teaching, and defined “Systems” and “Professional Well-Being” steering groups further identify and prioritize collaborative work. This human-networked framework provides opportunities for leadership and growth at all levels of the organization, lowers the barriers to connecting with similarly-motivated colleagues from across the library, and builds a sense of belonging amongst staff. After sharing the story of the Great Ideas process and collaborative work structures, the presenters will facilitate an opportunity for attendees to identify pain points to collaboration, explore potential affinity groups, and create actionable steps to establish their own great ideas process.
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 →
Many academic institutions embrace transparent or publicly accessible data practices, leading to high visibility of sensitive information such as salaries and merit raise allocations. This practice brings significant benefits in terms of accountability and equity but also adds layers of complexity for supervisors, administrators, and HR partners who must articulate how merit decisions are made and funded. Library employees may compare increases across units, make assumptions about performance ratings, or express concerns about fairness and consistency. Without thoughtful communication and structured processes, transparency can unintentionally erode organizational morale, increase anxiety, and spread misconceptions.
In this session, we will discuss several challenges related to navigating annual merit cycles in a transparent-budget environment. Topics will include working collaboratively across administrative units, preparing supervisors to communicate difficult decisions, and designing consistent messaging that helps employees understand both the process and the outcome. The session will also examine how to balance transparency with necessary confidentiality, especially regarding individual performance data.
When I overheard my daughter, playing with her dolls, declare proudly, “I’m a department head and a mom,” I didn’t know how to feel. Does my work as a library leader intrude so noticeably on family life that my 4-year-old is playing ‘university’? Am I succeeding as a role model and breadwinner if my daughter sees leadership as something worth including in her play? Is it both? Neither?
The U.S. workforce—and higher ed in particular—aren’t easy environments for mothers to navigate. Structures built to accommodate cis male bodies don’t work for fertility treatments, pregnancy, breastfeeding, sleepless nights, and the intangible magic that—for whatever reason—prompts so many children to reach again and again for mama. On top of this, leadership roles require us to be present, emotionally engaged, and unfailingly committed to our organizations. The exhausting reality for many women and non-binary people is that combining leadership, motherhood, and academia can be draining, lonely work. And yet, for many of us, it is work worth doing.
In this session, participants will share and explore our own lived experiences as academic librarian-mothers in leadership roles, breaking down the intense isolation that often comes with these positions. Discussion may include logistical, physical, and emotional challenges, as well as solutions and opportunities for solidarity and support. This is an interactive session where we will prioritize empathy, care, and safety.
All gender and family identities are welcome in this inclusive, support- and solutions-oriented conversation.
I am a professional librarian, library dean, and author of ALA Editions' "The Complete Collections Assessment Manual." My professional interests include leadership and management; gender in higher education; motherhood in academic libraries; library collection development, management... Read More →
In this prolonged period of disruption for libraries, old ways of working just aren’t cutting it. At our R1 university library, we had long supported researchers and students using a liaison model, with librarians providing instruction, reference, collection development, and outreach to their assigned college unit. Liaisons were organizationally situated in disciplinary departments with some shared work, but largely liaisons managed and went about their work independently. This approach gave liaisons autonomy, deepened their relationships on campus, and amplified their unique expertise. However, it also came with unequal workloads, isolation, and a scramble when there was staff turnover. Leaner budgets and a bumpy environment for higher education exacerbated these downsides to our existing model. To address these challenges, our library embarked this past year on a significant reevaluation of our liaison model. We wanted to build in greater sustainability, workload equity, and more opportunities for collaboration. We also rejected the model of 'doing more with less'.
The three presenters of this session, department directors overseeing liaison work, led a project to study our current liaison model and propose new ways of working. Our session will share our process, including (1) our initial project brief, (2) how we structured our work, (3) key findings, (4) our recommendations, and (5) our implementation plan. Throughout, we’ll address how we adopted change management principles to earn trust and support from the liaisons most affected. Attendees will come away with ideas for how to ask similar questions and address challenges at their own libraries.
Conflict between employees in academic libraries often plays out behind closed doors, shielded by confidentiality policies, HR protocols, and privacy requirements. While these safeguards are essential, they can create an impression among staff that leadership is inactive or indifferent. This session offers candid reflections based on composites of real-world scenarios, exploring the challenges of managing personnel issues when transparency is constrained.
Presenters will share how they approached mediation, collaborated with campus partners, documented concerns, and balanced institutional expectations with compassion and supporting mental well-being. And yet, even with multiple tools and proactive practices in place, there remains some sense of dissatisfaction after the process came to a close. They will reflect on lessons learned–including the value of early expectation setting, proactive communication strategies, and framing messages that respect confidentiality while aiming to foster trust–as well as some lingering disappointment still felt by the parties involved.
Because many library workers only see the silence surrounding personnel matters, this session aims to demystify what happens behind the scenes and equip leaders with practical tools for navigating both visible and invisible aspects of conflict. Attendees will leave with strategies to uphold integrity, empathy, and organizational stability during difficult situations.
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.
This session examines the unique challenges women encounter in management roles and offers strategies for leading with authenticity and impact. Leadership for women often involves more than decision-making—it includes navigating perceptions that influence credibility, authority, and whose voice is heard. We will explore how women can “show up” authentically while maintaining professionalism and influence in library environments. Through case studies, participants will practice techniques for handling difficult conversations that foster constructive dialogue and growth. The session also highlights mentoring practices and team-building approaches that build trust, strengthen collaboration, and boost morale. Attendees will leave with practical insights and actionable strategies to lead with confidence, clarity, and authenticity in today’s library landscape.
Creating a library strategic plan is a complex and time-consuming process that, at its worst, can feel like a performative song and dance for university administration. Library staff struggle to see their work in the strategic plan, the jargon involved can feel corporate and impersonal. Even with inclusively designed plans, it is often too easy to revert back to “the usual” operations after creating a new plan, and to take the plan out of a (virtual) drawer and dust it off only when it’s time for annual reporting.
In 2021, library administration at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University undertook an inclusive, collaborative approach to our next five-year strategic planning cycle, engaging with library staff and campus partners to refine goals, objectives, and actions. This presentation will introduce our planning process, but the main focus of the presentation will be the engagement that we designed to keep the plan alive and active at all levels of library operations throughout the year, and lessons we learned along the way. Regular check-ins with interdepartmental stakeholders increase shared understanding and accountability for the plan. These also allow us to adjust the plan as needed as priorities and opportunities evolve, in addition to meeting (even exceeding) expectations for university reporting. The conversational check-ins, scheduled three times per year, give everyone space to discuss questions (what are KPIs, even?), compare notes, and ask questions in a less high-stakes environment than plan creation or annual report periods.
Following the completion of the IMLS grant to the CALM community, the grant team will share key findings from our various research streams and recommendations for the academic library community for creating new and meaningful professional development opportunities for person-centered management practices.
As academic libraries sustain the brunt of ongoing reductions in campus operations, budget, and staffing, face rapid industrial disruptions, and participate in expanding organizational abandonment or industrial distancing from long-standing higher education and LIS values, library employee exposure to low-morale experiences, toxic resilience expectations, and burnout have amplified. These amplifications have sparked increased conversations about intersections of LIS worker health, industrial values, organizational performance, and the role of leadership in supporting employee well-being. While these valuable conversations help workers recognize how harmful experiences are encouraged and/or hidden by organizational and professional norms and acknowledge efforts to reduce the negative impacts of these experiences, established spaces for consistent communal reflection and recovery practice remain nascent in the field.
Building on Community of Practice (CoP) tenets, this session highlights an LIS-Mental Health practitioner collaboration focused on designing and offering harmed library workers opportunities to participate in a Community of Resonance and Experience (CoRE). An original concept that will be introduced in this session, a CoRE moves beyond a CoP by offering important sense-making information to traumatized library workers, curating conversation and learning opportunities with domain knowledge experts, and including purposeful activities for members to identify, consider, and practice self-preservation, collective care, and somatic awareness tools. CoRE goals may help employees at all levels (re-)kindle recovery from workplace harm, support incremental organizational culture improvement, and/or refine career clarity.
Clenise Platt is the CEO of Plattinum, a leadership and life development brand that helps people show up more fully engaged in their work and their lives. She is also the President and founder of the nonprofit organization, The Keep Your Chin Up Organization, Incorporated, which develops... Read More →
Recognizing that most organizations cannot absorb the cost of externally training a large pool of managers, this presentation explores how to leverage existing internal resources to build a leadership development program for managers of all library staff. In the field of library science, graduate programs provide limited managerial training, yet professionals are regularly promoted into leadership roles, often without access to professional development before assuming them. Program design and goals, time commitments, and collaboration are key components in developing a professional development program internally to your library. This session will explore how to identify resources and establish a process for developing a people leader program tailored to your organization’s needs, strategic goals, and while remaining mindful of budget constraints. The presenter will share observations from building an internal staff development program that supplements existing university resources.
Director of Community Engagement, University of Pittsburgh
Nikhat Jehan Ghouse is Director of Community Engagement at the University of Pittsburgh Library System, where she manages partnerships across the university and beyond, and collaborates on professional development for all library staff. She also serves as an Organization Development... Read More →
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks discusses the importance of theorizing as a necessary act for hope and taking up more inclusive practices. Theorizing with communities means prompting dialogue with different people and groups to collectively make changes at the micro (personal) to macro (policy) levels at our libraries. When we take up leadership praxis (theory informed practice) with our communities using participatory methods, we ensure librarians are working with people. This closing keynote theorizes (with you) what hope and action means for library managers in practice.
Silvia Vong (PhD, M.Ed., MLIS) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. She is a former academic librarian of 15 years with experience as an administrator and middle management. Silvia’s research areas are related to management as well as the library as a workplace and now teaches a leadership course for future librarians.
