Are you being served? Embracing servant leadership, trusting library staff, and engendering change

Abstract

It is self-evident that academic libraries and librarianship are changing in substantive ways, ranging from the types of material we collect, the way we approach information literacy instruction, to our positions within college and university organizational charts. In response to a rapidly changing environment, library administrators may try to quickly bring about changes in library policies, structure, and more. However, in the process, library administrators may inadvertently adopt rigid top-down approaches that can disenfranchise and disengage library workers, resulting in outcomes that serve neither students or workers. A servant leadership approach to authority and influence may be a means to reverse this frustrating trajectory. Servant leadership requires that administrators focus on the existing expertise and the development potential of library workers as the means for ensuring fulfillment of the library’s mission in an environment of constant change. Furthermore, this approach requires administrators to begin by accepting library workers’ perspectives as their reality, instead of dismissing those perspectives. This approach shares the same foundations of two central practices of librarianship: reference and instruction. Librarians must believe users’ information needs, listen to their experiences and with this information, consider ways to aid the user in progressing toward their goal. A challenge to this approach is that it requires more work for library administrators and library workers through consideration of different types of information and looking closely at voices of disagreement and resistance. While servant leadership appears more complex with slower progress, the end result of sincere engagement and effort by everyone in the library has the potential to aid in achieving the changes needed to keep academic libraries thriving.