Kaspar Wendi Arant - Leading libraries : how to create a service culture

While writing this book, we struggled with a very fundamental concept: leadership. It has given us pause at every turn. Perhaps it is because nomenclature and detail have always been important to our profession. We know this to be true because when we first started discussing the concept of this book with the American Library Association (ALA), the working title was actually Managing People in Libraries: Creating and Sustaining Servant Leadership in Service Organizations, a title that spoke very much to the model and the values that we wanted to convey. However, while ALA was interested in the concept and thought that it would have appeal, there were questions about the use of the word servantnot concerns that we were using servant leadership as a lens to look at management in our profession, but rather the apprehension that the use of the word servant would be distasteful to the audience, particularly those readers who would be interested in reading a book about leadership.

Perhaps the term leadership has confounded us because it seems always to be contingent upon a position of authority or, in other words, management titles, and what is discussed in this book makes no such assumption. Certainly, those in positions of authority have more opportunities to lead and certainly more responsibility. As Voltaire is reputed to have said, With great power comes great responsibility. Strangely, a leader, particularly a leader who places service above all, is practically the antithesis of the traditional authoritarian model in libraries. More than that, there is a pervasive argument about whether a true leader seeks power (or authority or control) or has a more altruistic purpose. Many leadership theories have taken one side or the other of this argument, explicitly or by assumption. That said, if service is at the core of librarianship (and there may be arguments against that as the profession evolves), then it should also be at the core of leadership in libraries.

We have searched through leadership books and management articles, philosophical treatises and political documents, even dictionaries and thesauri, searching for a word that would convey the essence of leadership without the presumption of some sort of hierarchy. Entrepreneur was an attractive term, particularly in view of its recent popularity in library literature. Advocate, champion, activist, frontier, guide, advisor, visionary, pioneer, revolutionary, and many more words were all considered and rejected because of the political connotations that many of these terms have assumed.

So, we will stick to the term leadership. That said, we want it understood that we are not talking about the standard definition of leadership.

The title of this book was chosen very deliberately. We wanted to explore leading in librariesnot leadership in terms of being a leader (largely assumed by position authority) but the act of leadingwith a focus on what it means to lead, the acts and behaviors that manifest and how they are derived from individual interactions with others and how they impact a larger organization.

This book is not precisely a how-to, although it will provide some examples and cases along with some reflective exercises and tools so that those who are so inclined can see how a commitment to service manifests in action. The service orientation is fundamental. Many management books and indeed many managers prescribe certain behaviors that are leadership behaviors or management best practices, but there is no commitment, no sincerity behind those actions. What we are discussing goes beyond leading with intention; it is leading with meaning.

Included in this volume are tools for exercising service leadership skills and modeling service leadership behavior. A service commitment is mandatory; otherwise, the efforts lack sincerity and are just going through the motions. As Robert Greenleaf said, technique without the attitude is phoney.

NOTE

Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant Leader Within: A Transformative Path (Mahwah, NJ: Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 2003), 46.

We would like to thank our husbands and children for their patience and support as we researched and wrote this book. We also want to thank our colleagues for inspiring us to write about the importance of service leadership in libraries.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.