Ernie Ingles, Vice-Provost (Learning Services) & Chief Librarian, University of Alberta, and founder of the Northern Exposure to Leadership Institute, talked at an Education Institute teleconference this afternoon about “Key Practices in Developing Managers & Leaders“. He referred to himself as one othe individuals who has been toiling in the “bibliographic vineyards” for quite a while. Great term!
Ernie defined leadership as taking the initiative and getting things done through others. His definition of management, structuring your own activities and those of others while co-ordinating resources and operations.
He talked about the 8 R’s Research Study on the future of human resources in Canadian libraries which is being launched at CLA in June. It has 300+ pages of analysis and recommendations about managerial and leadership competencies. It will be available online at the CLA web site later next month.
In our knowledge economy the study examines opportunities for librians and issues of recruitement, retention, remuneration, retirement, rejuvenation, restructuring and a couple of other R’s! Results are based on 1300 surveys to institutions/libraries (filled out usually by Human Resources or senior management) and 8500 to individuals.
Although the study indciated that there was no shortage in the supply and demand of librarians, library capability is in decline and there is a need to revitalize our profiles. The following were the 10 top ranked leadership competenceies that are important and also difficult to fill:
leadership potential
flexibility and responsiveness to change
able to deal with workload
innovation
technololgy skills
people skills
managerial skills
communication skills
deal with and work with different user groups
entrepreneurial skills
Many of these can be addressed through training but others are behavioural. There were some differences in this list from different types of librariess — academics listed workload lower but innovation higher in their rankings and those in special libraries or without physical library spaces were more pragmatic, and had more concerns more around response to change and worklaod issues and ranked them higher.
Indiators for demand from all respondents showed that the needs for leadership and management skills are higher than in the last 10 years and will be higher still in the next 5-10 years. Another strong theme in the study reflected the desire for more
project opportunities where librarians could demonstrate their leadership skills more than in their regular activites/jobs. Ernie suggested that we may need to restructure our work to provide more project and less bureaucartic activites.
He talked about innovation, socialization & the “info gap or death valley”. Innovation is an important part of leadership landscape, and we librarians are good adapters and adopters but not necessarily forward thinkers in looking at new approaches. Studies show that most innovation comes from those under 45 years old. The average age of our library school grads is 38 and most innovative activity takes place 12-18 years after post-secondary training. So that is why we have a professional death valley and really need to be looking at the innovation gap in context of libraries. A challenge for all of us.
