Van Duinkerken Wyoma - Challenge of Library Management: Leading with Emotional Engagement

The Challenge of Library Management

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The Challenge of Library Management

Leading with Emotional Engagement

Wyoma VanDuinkerken & Pixey Anne Mosley

American Library Association | Chicago 2011

Wyoma VanDuinkerken is the coordinator of cataloging record support and an associate professor at Texas A&M University Libraries. She has also held roles at Texas A&M as the interim head of cataloging staff, coordinator of monographs acquisitions, reference librarian for Islamic studies, and project leader for the implementation of virtual reference. Prior to her arrival in Texas, she managed documentation and support and customer service response for a library software company in Canada and worked with the Office of Strategic Business Initiatives of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, managing an extensive project portfolio.

Pixey Anne Mosley is the head of collection support services and a professor at Texas A&M University Libraries and has recently served as the interim director of the universitys academic integrity office. She has published extensively on management in libraries with articles in LibraryLeadership & Management and Reference & User Services Quarterly and has authored two previous books, Staying Successful as a Middle Manager and Transitioning from Librarian to Middle Manager. She is currently the co-associate editor for Library Leadership & Management, the official journal of the Library Leadership and Management Association. She previously served as the coordinator of instructional services and head of access services at Texas A&M and as the information technology librarian at the University of North Texas. Prior to her career in librarianship, she was an aerospace engineer in the corporate sector, working for Boeing and Allied-Signal.

2011 by the American Library Association. Any claim of copyright is subject to applicable limitations and exceptions, such as rights of fair use and library copying pursuant to Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act. No copyright is claimed for content in the public domain, such as works of the U.S. government.

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ISBNs: 978-0-8389-1102-0 (paper); 978-0-8389-9280-7 (PDF); 978-0-8389-9281-4 (ePub); 978-0-8389-9282-1 (Mobipocket); 978-0-8389-9283-8 (Kindle). For more information on digital formats, visit the ALA Store at alastore.ala.org and select eEditions.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

VanDuinkerken, Wyoma.

The challenge of library management : leading with emotional engagement / Wyoma VanDuinkerken and Pixey Anne Mosley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8389-1102-0 (alk. paper)

1. Library administration. 2. Organizational change--Management. 3. Leadership. 4. Library administration--Problems, exercises, etc. I. Mosley, Pixey Anne. II. Title.

Z678.V36 2011

025.1--dc22

2011011349

Contents

Continuous change in libraries: one sees it emphasized time after time in conference programs and in the scholarly and popular literature of librarianship. Changes in service delivery models, organizational structure and staffing, workflows and processes, and facilities are happening across the entire world of libraries. But have you ever thought about why some changes are more successful than others? Or asked why some organizations seem more resilient when faced with continuous change while others seem to struggle with every new change endeavor? This book offers some possible answers to these questions as it looks at the softer skills of change leadership in the context of the literature from the business and social science disciplines. How a change is communicated and the manner in which employees are engaged or isolated from the decision-making process during the planning and implementation stages of a change can play a key role in the future long-term success of the change.

The chapters of this book are arranged around several themes, and each chapter ends with some exercises that a reader can use as a reflective or discussion tool in thinking about leading change effectively. discusses the specific issues one can face for different types of changes, such as organizational structure, construction/renovation changes, and personnel/workflow changes. The chapter also presents information on the impact of major changes to help one understand what the culture can adjust to more easily, ongoing medium-level changes or huge turn everything on its head changes.

The material for this book is gathered from literature across the disciplines of management, human resources, psychology, organizational theory, and librarianship and the authors own experiences from having been leaders, participants, or observers in many change initiatives in different fields and institutions. Any examples are fictional in nature and are developed as composites based on trends seen in libraries across the country. Ironically, during the course of writing this book, the authors themselves were swept up in major organizational changes, with Wyoma moving from her coordinator role in acquisitions to a similar management and change leader role for catalog record support, and Pixey changing managerial responsibilities from access services to cataloging and shelving operations and serving in a university-level administrative role during a budgetary realignment. Along with this, they went through several changes in organizational visioning and renovations of the public spaces and collection stacks.

Finally, the authors would like to thank those individuals who provided us with encouragement and support during the course of writing this book and without whom this book would probably not have been completed. This includes Wyomas husband, Desmond Ng, and children Gabriel and Logan, and Pixeys husband, Joel Kitchens. We would also like to thank our friend and colleague Wendi Kaspar for her support in helping us to keep things in perspective and stay focused on what was professionally important. Finally, a thanks to our ALA editor, Chris Rhodes, for his support and flexibility in getting contract details ironed out, providing feedback on chapter drafts, and extending deadlines while we settled into our new jobs.

Change in Libraries

Common sense is not so common.

Voltaire

Although the quote above is almost 250 years old, Voltaires statement seems particularly true in todays constantly changing library environment. Common sense is based on a collective consciousness of shared ideas, knowledge, and understanding. However, when change occurs, the knowledge underpinning that common sense is altered and it seems that common sense gets thrown out the window. Leaders feel their decisions are based on obvious common sense, so of course everyone should embrace those decisions enthusiastically. Secure in this knowledge, they marginalize apparent resistance and are perpetually surprised when a planned change stalls or even fails. Similarly, when changes are thrust upon individuals and stress over job security blinds them, it is difficult for them to plug into that shared understanding and find the commonsense grounding for having confidence in their work and positive engagement with others.

National estimates indicate that one third of all workers in the United States report that their jobs are often or always stressful.

Defining How Libraries Are Different

Libraries, like all organizations, are facing a period of rapid technological growth that is changing societies around the world. Patrons are developing higher expectations of library services and often end up using these services differently than the way they were used in the past. Though it was ten years ago as the opening speaker at the 2000 American Library Associations Second Congress on Professional Education, Wendy Schultz was particularly visionary as she pointed to a number of societal issues that are affecting our profession. The items she noted are even more valid today and are impacting all types of libraries at significant levels: