|
Forecasts from the library profession show a rapid and broad turnover of senior leadership in the next 7-10 years. This turnover follows a long period of stability in senior leadership and careful stewardship of the profession by a large cohort of librarians who entered the profession in the 1960s and 70s. It is also clear that this transition in leadership is occurring during a period of dramatic reconsideration of roles for public libraries. While many forces seem to be at play, several that have come up in numerous conversations are: advances in technology, rise of the knowledge worker, and resource pressures in local governments. Meanwhile, the special case of urban libraries also requires us to consider the unfolding nature of urban and suburban communities.
The context described above, underscored by pervasive and ever-shrinking public resources, compelled us to approach leadership development with unusual precision -- to the right person, at the right time for the individual and for the library, with the proper endorsement and without diluting attention to pressing issues. These requirements led us to the concept of action learning. Fortunately, our search coincided with an endorsement of action learning as the next "wave" for leadership development (see Chapter 8 in Conger & Benjamin, 1999).
Finally, many have shared with me that the participative and democratic nature of librarianship has traditionally undervalued the idea of "leadership" in favor of encouraging responsible "management." Given this, it would have made sense to develop a set of leadership competencies for urban library leaders to use as targets during this project. However, when considering that ULC project must be cross-cutting by design for all of its members, the likely product would have contained very diluted and vague definitions. I can say that my conversations with people inside and outside libraries come back to a desire to have more leadership practices of the type proposed by Kouzes & Posner (1987): challenging the process, inspiring shared vision, enabling others to act, modeling the way, and encouraging the heart.
With these assumptions in mind, the design for ELI draws heavily on three main streams of thought and practice: action learning (Revans, 1971, Pedler, 1991), reflective practice (Argyris & Schon, 1978) and social learning theory (Bandura, 1977). The specific activities during the ELI are drawn from a mix of research and tested practice, as well as informed intuition about how to integrate the many aspects of the program. A substantial commitment has been made to conduct ongoing formal and informal assessment to permit monitoring toward our goals, adjustment as needed, and replication as appropriate in future years and other settings.
1. Individuals identified as having high potential for leadership already know most of what they need to know and have most of the skills they already need to have in order to be successful.
Some of the knowledge and skills that may be needed for leadership will have to come from sources of outside of work experience. Yet often overlooked are the leadership lessons that have been learned from family responsibilities, clubs, community organizations, spiritual practices, hobbies, etc. Rather than view the developing leader as an empty or imperfect vessel that must be "corrected" or "filled up," Fellows will be considered as asset-rich. Content material presented during ELI will be viewed as an opportunity to rediscover what you might already know from other settings and/or to repackage your knowledge and skills from different experiences into a coherent whole.
2. Action, experimentation, and reflection-on-action are core processes for leadership development.
During this experience, Fellows will be viewed as apprentices and leaders-in-residence. This is a period of time during which they are expected to be active in their professional practice as leaders and stretching their skills to solve real problems. Fellows are expected to be attentive to ways in which they might expand or change their practice to be of better service to themselves, their followers, and their communities. As apprentices, perfection is not expected and the close examination of partial successes and even failures when will be undertaken with curiosity and excitement.
3. The dynamics of meaning-making and self-understanding must be made explicit in order to allow for new learning as a leader.
Leaders resist behaving in new ways for good reason. Our psyches and our self-confidence lead us to seek balance and comfort. New actions require being off-balance, following hunches, taking risks, feeling outside ourselves, and experiencing disquieting emotions such as fear, frustration, guilt, and a loss of self-control. At the same time, leaders are asked to address complex problems in information-poor environments. Without proper support, challenge and reframing, any change from our past ways of leading are highly unlikely so that we can preserve the view we have of ourselves and our ways of explaining our actions.
4. Organizational and professional systems around a leader must evolve in parallel to maximize long-lasting leadership development.
Just as individuals are not openly receptive to change, organizations are instruments for reduction of uncertainty and reproduction of work cultures and routines for collective behavior. As an individual leader seeks to develop, a common source of "push back" is often the very organizational and professional system that has asked them to learn new ways of leading! Reward and recognition systems must be adjusted, competing priorities for change must be reconciled, professional identities redefined, structural impediments removed, authorities renegotiated and process rigidities examined for their effect on innovation and change.
5. The creation of community allows for "holding environments" in which challenge and support can be balanced for healthy leadership development.
Intentional communities, designed to support the risks of individual change and expose the resistance of systemic change, are "rich soil" required for growing new forms of leadership. Communities also pool individual energies, lessons of experience and the encouragement needed to overcome obstacles. The Urban Libraries Council itself represents an essential "holding environment" for the ELI because it liberates permission for change and brokers intervention resources. The practice of self-examination, testing assumptions, and systems thinking in peer networks can also make manageable complex subjects such as "culture," "identity," "interests," "decision bias," "values," and "politics."
6. Beyond the current challenge they face, leaders must continue to be forces for adaptive change in their organizations and therefore have expansive capacity to learn from experience.
We believe that no program can provide all that is needed for preparing senior leaders, yet we can aim to develop skills that promote self-education over time. Ideally, Fellows and Sponsors will emerge from this program with an awareness of how they best learn from their own work and personal experiences in a way that expands their capacity for leadership. Learning from experience should be enhanced by reflection on action, critical awareness of multiple motives, comprehensive consideration of alternatives, sophisticated testing of assumptions with others, and efficient engagement of others to shift frame of reference.
Using these principles, ELI has incorporated several elements that will be the focus of this program:
- Selection of individuals as Fellows who are readying to make the transition to senior leadership.
- Assignment of Fellows to work with pressing Leadership Challenges in their Libraries that will require substantive action during the 9-10 months of the fellowship experience.
- Pairing of Fellows with organizationally-based Sponsors who can endorse their work and encourage linkages across the Library and outside the Library to other organizations.
- Provision of Executive Coaches external to the Fellow’s home library system who can work as a learning and thinking partner in leadership development.
- Organization of three Leadership Intensives during the fellowship experience that will provide exposure to topics and skills that can be immediately applied to their leadership challenges.
- Inclusion of exercises at, during, and in-between Leadership Intensives that build an understanding of leadership assets as well as preferences in ways of leading others.
- Integration of activities and exercises throughout and between Leadership Intensives that promote new ways of reflecting on experience, develop rigor in reframing one’s expectations and assumptions, and refine the abilities for listening and engaging other perspectives.
- Explicit seeding of long-lasting community around different ELI roles (e.g, the group of Fellows, the group of Sponsors, etc.), professional interests, needs of leadership challenges via participative Whole-Group Exercises, On-Line Communities, Peer Networks, and Meetings at National Conferences, and the activities of the Urban Libraries Council itself.
- Engagement of others without formal ELI roles in the work and change efforts of the leader and the Institute as a whole such as Library Directors, colleagues helping with leadership challenges, local community leaders, other library associations, etc. through feedback, homework assignments, presentations, interviews and publicity.
- Role modeling of leadership, learning, reflection and community in the way in which the ELI is organized, managed, changed, and evaluated.
Argyris, Chris & Schon, Donald. (1978). Organizational Learning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, Inc.
Bandura, Albert (1977). Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Conger, Jay A. & Beth B.Benjamin (1999). Building Leaders. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Kouzes, James M. & Barry Z. Posner (1987). The Leadership Challenge. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Pedler, Mike (1991). Action Learning in Practice. Aldershot, England: Gower Publishing.
Revans, Reginald W. (1971). Developing Effective Managers. London, England: Longmans Press.
|
