Demonstrate professional leadership and communication skills
It’s axiomatic that for information based organizations like libraries, communication is fundamental. This is true whether the message is a “one-to-many” distribution of information, or some form of dialogue between multiple parties. In the first case – which formats like press releases, newsletters, and marketing campaign collateral can all be categorized as – the message delivery channel, style and tone should all be fine-tuned to best reach and impact the target audience. Skillful use of communication techniques are deeply relevant to libraries as they strive to create and promote programming, services, and collections access to myriad communities, age groups, and abilities. The resulting messages may include calls-to-action that can be tracked and correlated to campaigns and individual message recipients. It’s also possible that the message may instead be intended to cultivate awareness of the value the library brings to their communicate, or to facilitate outreach to underserved demographics, goals which present different opportunities and challenges for measurement and learning. For interpersonal, staff communications, on the other hand, there are mechanisms and modalities for facilitating interactions, whether real-time, face-to-face analog or virtual meetings or asynchronous exchanges that utilize digital tools like email, social media platforms and project management software, to name a few examples. These mechanisms are likely to be used more often for circulating information within an organization, promoting best practices and standards for communications, and facilitating conversations among colleagues and internal stakeholders. Alongside the benefits that result from encouraging more active dialogue between staff, there is also much potential value that can be created by capturing and analyzing conversations, identifying themes and sentiments, and warehousing the original content and metadata for future use. Best practices for external communications – those largely uni-directional messages from one source to multiple recipients – differ in many respects from those that apply to internal discourse, though certain situations can reveal areas of overlap, like when materials related to strategic planning are shared both within the organization and with external stakeholders. For each intended audience, tone and presentation may matter as much as message content.
Albright observes that, because leaders in non-profit organizations like libraries must necessarily interact with and at times persuade their board of directors, as well as influence and lead their staff, “the ability to communicate effectively in order to influence the target audience is an important leadership competency” (2018). Of course, the intended audience for communications might also be patrons, communities, or even poorly understood or communities and other stakeholders. Travis Bradberry offers a more general definition of leadership, asserting that it is a “process of social influence which maximizes the efforts of others towards the achievement of a greater good” (2015). I interpret “social influence” – a term which crops up frequently in literature on leadership – to strongly correlate with communication. Leadership and communication are inextricably entwined and foundational yet highly context dependent: the ways they’re practiced in a library are often wildly different from the forms they might take in a corporation. Though a class I took in my first semester called Information Professions (INFO 204-02) discussed “management philosophies” more broadly – including the concepts of leadership and communication in business, academic and a variety of other organizations – the primary focus throughout my studies has almost always been on exploring these ideas within an information profession setting. Of course, leadership and management have many differences, but for the purposes of this essay I’ll assume that leadership and management are concerned with and require roughly the same things from their practitioners. Moreover, there is also a bit of a chicken and egg question as to whether leadership or communication must come first, or which is more dependent on or enabling of the other. Suffice to say that the two support and extend one another. Leadership is impossible without strong communication skills, whether more technical and targeted or face-to-face “soft skills,” while communication risks irrelevance in the absence of leadership which can engender group purpose, motivation, and action. I find it encouraging that employers within information professional workplaces like libraries often make programs available to staff members for the development of their communication and leadership skills.
Leaders and the teams they lead must understand what their organization’s mission statement and values are before they can set a course towards achieving the crucial goals and objectives which flow from them. From the outset, drafting mission and values statements to establish strategic directions and benchmarks for organizational goals and objectives requires sophisticated communication and leadership skills. For example, strategic planners must utilize versatile communication abilities to – among other things – interview internal and external stakeholders in hopes of increasing their participation in the formation of the mission, vision and values statements. Beyond this, communication with stakeholders is ongoing throughout process. Inexperienced planners may not fully appreciate the importance of obtaining stakeholder input and buy-in for defining accountability, expectations, and long-term goals at first, but once they do, they will understand the importance of carefully designing and capturing communications between strategic planners and key role players from various constituencies.
In INFO 204-02 (Information Professions) our final project entailed a dialogue with both strategic planning and related topics like management and leadership philosophies, communications logistics, organizational analysis, consortia, and networks (IIL, WorldCat, Hathi Trust, the National Archives, etc.) and more. This assignment required a broad reading and investigation of subjects which I believe are relevant to a discussion of leadership and communication, though the two projects also diverge at points as well. Diverse theories and debates abound in the literature on strategic planning. Mintzberg and others voice contrarian viewpoints – at times, radically so – on the hazards of strategic planning, and offer both caution and their own approaches. While his work is rooted in business literature, Henry Mintzberg’s influential writing on strategic planning and management theory can apply to non-profit organizations as well. Mintzberg argues that “the conventional assumptions of planning, namely that strategies should emanate from the top of the organization full-blown, that goals can be clearly stated, that the central formulation of strategies must be followed by their pervasive implementation, [and] that the workers will (or must) respond to these centrally imposed strategies … are wrong.” (Mintzberg, 1994, p. 405). While stopping short of calling for the overthrow of all hierarchies or for absolving leaders and managers from their responsibility to skillfully articulate the organization’s strategic plan to various audiences by way of the right tools, methods, and messaging – as well as to offer a more detailed sketch that plan’s procedures, policies, operations, goals and objectives – Mintzberg emphasizes a different paradigm he calls “emergent strategy.” Emergent strategy doesn’t depend so critically on “full blown … central formulation of strategies” by higher ups. Instead, this paradigm allows for communication and decision-making to arise to a greater extent from more decentered, “flat” organizational relationships. Mintzberg acknowledges that this approach is not a universal solution for every organization and problem, but he passionately argues the concept should be given a seat at the strategic planning table. He writes that “organizations cannot always plan when their strategies will emerge, let alone plan the strategies themselves” (1994, p. 288). Emergent strategy can develop, unintentionally, anywhere in an organization, shaped by learning and an interplay of thought and action at a variety of levels (1994). Despite the potential of “emergent strategies” or similar approaches that empower non-management / non-leadership employees beyond their conventional roles, there’s no danger of managers and leaders becoming obsolete either, whether in a Mintzberg reconfigured organization or a more orthodox one.
Leadership must be focused on managing change, another important area of intersection between leadership and communication. This entails anticipating, reacting to and managing change, and to the extent possible, setting examples for partners and peers. The types of change include broad external trends like environmental, social, and technological changes, as well as changes that emanate from the organization itself – and / or its customers and other stakeholders – in a variety of scenarios. Speaking to institutional aspirations, Stephen Abram astutely points out, “information organizations today continue to adapt and evolve, not just as reflections of the changes in society but also as thought leaders in their communities and as places of research that drive those changes” (2018).
While it may seem tautological to say so, leaders with competencies related to change management would be wise to demonstrate their know how to their colleagues and managers to improve what Ruth Barefoot describes as the “change muscle” of individuals and organizations (2018). Broadly speaking, this term describes an organization’s readiness and capability to deal with disruptive or transformative change. As one might expect, there are challenges to designing and putting effective “change muscle” methods into practice. One method might include, for example, the selection and training of “change agents” who can, among other roles and contributions, implement proactive strategic stances designed to comprehensively anticipate future trends. Simultaneously, designated teams and change leaders can together develop coordinated responses to long-term changes already underway in technological or social realms. In the event that the processes, teams and change leaders that make up the organizational “change muscle” fail to adequately address watershed changes, other methods for responding to change retroactively must be put into action. Barefoot observes that these processes are often implemented by providing change agents with cross-department support teams. These teams can provide stability while leaders execute plans to respond retroactively to previously unaddressed changes. Change management within information organizations is a “high touch” process that demands leadership skilled in various modes of communication with both coworkers – to synchronize processes involved in dealing with change – and external stakeholders, who will want to know how the organization is responding to its newly articulated needs and will likely be interested in learning about new services and the changes they herald
References
Abram, S. (2018). Librarianship: A Continuously Evolving Profession. In Hirsh, S. (Ed.), An Introduction to Today’s Information Services. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Albright, K. S. (2018). Leadership Skills for Today’s Global Information Landscape. In Hirsh, S. (Ed.), An Introduction to Today’s Information Services. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Barefoot, R. (2018). Change Management. In Hirsh, S. (Ed.), An Introduction to Today’s Information Services. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bradberry, T. (2015). What Makes a Leader? Leadership and Management. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-makes-leader-dr-travis-bradberry.
Gosling, J. & Mintzberg, H. (2003). The Five Minds of a Manager. Harvard Business Review (November, 2003), 54-63.
Luo, L. (2007). Chat reference competencies: Identification from a literature review and librarian interviews. Reference Services Review, 35 (2). 195-209.
Mintzberg, H. (2013). Simply Managing. Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Mintzberg, H. (1994). The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. New York, NY: The Free Press.
Evidence for Competency M
Evidence 1
For a course on “Information Professionals” (INFO 204-02) we investigated – among other topics – management and leadership philosophies, strategic planning, and concomitant needs for communication within and outside the organization. My final project for this class was a presentation on strategic planning and related approaches to management and communication. Throughout the semester we turned repeatedly to work by Canadian business thinker / writer Henry Mintzberg. Although his areas of interest are business management rather than non-profit organization management, many of the concepts he explores are applicable to libraries as well. While researching the final project I delved more deeply into Mintzberg’s work on strategic planning, and I became fascinated with his articulation of an approach to planning which challenged “the conventional assumptions of planning, namely that strategies should emanate from the top of the organization full-blown [and] that goals can be clearly stated,” among other widely held beliefs in the business world. It’s not difficult to imagine Mintzberg agreeing with Albright that “leadership stems from social influence, not authority or power” (2018). In terms of the communication aspect of strategic planning, Mintzberg reminds us that “every intended strategy must be interpreted by a great many people facing a wide range of realities” (1994, p. 285). Whether this entails drafting a single document that can be “interpreted by a great many people” or creating a set of messages for a set of more discreet audiences is a challenge that strategic planners must face, and one that experience can no doubt inform over time.
Simpson-INFO-204-Professional-SynthesisEvidence 2
Another paper I wrote for INFO 204-02 explores management philosophy. This reflective essay was informed by a series of readings in management theory which were used as prompts for short papers we wrote throughout the semester. We were given a list of management values and asked to identify the three that were the most important to you, and then reflect upon which of these three are most essential to organizational effectiveness. Based on my own experience as both manager and employee in a variety of job contexts, I selected “rewarding and supportive relationships,” “honesty and integrity” and “personal growth and learning” as the most crucial characteristics of a flourishing workplace, and “rewarding and supportive relationships” as the key to a successful organization. Interestingly, some of these values can be seen to undermine the orthodox business literature foundations of leadership. I found Mintzberg’s discussion of the importance of confidence for managers – which went so far as to question its very definition and propose a kind of inversion of it – especially compelling and helpful. To me this offered some hope after all for those of us who feel lacking from what seems at a distance like an impossible level of confidence – which we associate with mastery of a difficult job, and a necessary reservoir to draw upon to lead, decide, and ultimately “win” – but leadership can instead start from a position of authentic humility and build from there.
My initial assumption when I started reading Mintzberg’s “Simply Managing” was that confidence – solid, unwavering, high EQ confidence – is a necessary prerequisite for any manager to do their job effectively. To be honest, I was intimidated by that idea when contemplating my future career prospects. Upon further reading of Mintzberg and and Gosling’s “The Five Minds of a Manager,” I began to think that confidence should be seen more as a spectrum, perhaps definable as crippling self-doubt on one end and narcissistic power tripping on the other. As it turns out, Mintzberg and Gosling don’t praise the over-confident – what they often calls the “heroic” – management style. For example, he argues that instead of a manger taking the attitude that she knows best how to develop her subordinates, “the responsibility for development is perhaps best seen as managers helping people to develop themselves” (2013). He then addresses managerial confidence directly, conceding that managing “takes a good deal of confidence … is no work for the faint-hearted of insecure …[and that] managers often have to feign confidence” (2013). Yet he then goes on to deconstruct “the supremely confident,” arguing that even “reasonable confidence … can carry the manager over the edge, and down a slippery slope to arrogance … [in which they’ve] stopped listening, become isolated, and think of him- or herself as heroic.” To avoid “crossing over into arrogance,” Mintzberg makes a case for the “modestly confident,” which he interestingly ties to “inner confidence,” one that enables the manager to listen to friends and advisers who attempt to warn her of “crossing over.” To me this offered some hope after all for those of us who feel lacking from what seems at a distance like an impossible level of confidence – which we associate with mastery of a difficult job, and a necessary reservoir to draw upon to lead, decide, and ultimately “win” – but leadership can instead start from a position of authentic humility and build from there.
Simpson-INFO204-Management_Philosophy