What is a leader, anyway? A person who causes change to happen in an organization, someone who is able to create, together with the people in the organization, a vision of the future for that organization and put into place real changes in strategy and culture and behavior and attitudes that lead an organization inexorably closer to the vision you created.
For a library director, you have to spend at least 30-40% of your time thinking about the change process. How you deal with motivation? What’s the structure? What are the programs? You have to think in a very concentrated way from today going forward, to do that. It takes a great ability not to be discouraged by the inevitable failures, the setbacks, people who don’t respond, things done the way you didn’t want them to be done, and you’ve got to keep plowing on. You’ve got to be an optimist. You’ve got to wake up every day thinking it will be better. You have to work on strategy, organizational structure, budgets, project management, the benefits systems, the reward systems, and the kind of culture you want to create. It’s the creation of a new society.
I think recently that we've had two fundamental changes in society that will require libraries to change. In the last ten or fifteen years there has been a change in the way information is disseminated. Until around 1990, libraries had a monopoly on information in this country. Until the growth of the Internet and the business around it, if people wanted information they had to come to the library, to the buildings, because we had it all - the books, the systems, and the people who could help people find their way. We set the terms of access. That has changed today, and we’re now in a competitive struggle as providers of information - we have to worry about what the people want, not about what works for us.
The other thing that has happened over the last twenty or thirty years is how wealthy this country has become. Forgetting the current recession, this country is wealthy beyond anyone’s imagination. Fifty years ago, well over 50% of the country lived in conditions that are now considered under the poverty line. Today there’s a lot more discretionary income, which affects peoples’ ability to buy books as well as do other things and have other things to do with their entertaining dollar and time. So libraries, which were a destination, and free, and didn’t have much competition for information and time, have lost their place.
The starting point for any effort to change is to have the mindset that every aspect of the status quo, every ingrained attitude, every piece of common wisdom, the way we think about everything, is open to challenge and must be challenged. And it’s the role of the leader to lead the questioning, to be outrageous in the things that are suggested, to demand new and more radical thinking from people in the organization and people outside the organization. Eventually, a leader must demand a pace of change that is greater than anybody else in the organization thinks is possible.
If, "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it" is the worst phrase in leadership, the best one is Nike’s - just do it. If you have 70% of the information, it’s more than you need. Just try it. You’ll learn more from the effort than you ever will from the next two months of committee work. And if it doesn’t quite work, so what? You learn from that and move on. If you have an organization that will take that as information and will move forward, that’s the way change happens.
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