We recently conducted a search for a Chief Executive Officer of a public library and sought to validate and extend information we had received about potential candidates. It was shocking how few were on LinkedIn, the premier business-networking site. Once we reached the finalist stage, three of four were not on LinkedIn. We could not locate these candidates for career history or recommendations. So who cares?

We have so much in common with the police. We each have a chief. We each have hierarchical organizations. We each charge fines.

In a recent editorial, Rick Anderson stated the rather obvious about a “crisis” in research librarianship. Or so I thought…

(See his editorial here)

The staff of Online Colleges have selected their 50 best blogs for future leaders. Some are familiar to me and some not, no doubt the same as for you.

To clients, colleagues, friends…

Yesterday (December 25^th) I stopped at my local Starbucks for coffee and the newspapers. The place was “happening”, as usual.

I receive two newspapers each morning, a local paper and a national paper. Delivery can be tricky as I live in a rainy climate, preferring rain to snow.

This week's blog is courtesy of Ken Roberts, the Chief Librarian of the Hamilton Public Library, in Hamilton, Ontario.

Coaching is a profession whose application in organizations is often ill defined and misunderstood. The International Coach Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. But definitions such as these do little to assist leaders in determining if coaching is an appropriate option for professional development.

We are working with a national organization to develop common competencies for urban public librarians/leaders and to match these to the offerings of LIS programs as a foundation for selection and development of future leaders.

This is an excellent opportunity for a beginning CEO with management experience. Please feel free to forward to interested individuals, and e-mail ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or call me (+1.778.689.5938) with any questions.
Thanks. -- Ken Haycock

According to Jonathan Walters, writing in Governing magazine this week, “health illiteracy” or “medical illiteracy” is costly for patient care. Shockingly high percentages of patients do not understand their condition or how to manage it, and do not understand what their physician has said to them.

Increasingly, innovation is seen as a key to survival as libraries seek to reposition and rebrand themselves.

But who leads innovation? What do successful innovators look like? How do you develop a culture of innovation?

I have highly recommended previously the book Work the Pond by Darcy Rezac, Judy Thomson & Gayle-Hallgren-Rezac (see Networking For People Who Hate Networking).

They have a weekly tip which I also recommend. This week seems particularly relevant.

So a new study of academic libraries shows that librarians have little currency among faculty and students. Faculty see them (alright, “us”) as great searchers but maybe not such great researchers. Students saw them as “more like: ‘Where’s the bathroom?’” Oh, and we appear to be very good at pointing to different areas of the stacks.

There have been a number of spin-offs from my original posting on the advocacy efforts of the Toronto Public Library. You may recall that I despaired at the lack of attention to even the most basic principles of effective advocacy and influence: Why Toronto Public Library Staff Gave Me Indigestion, Part I - Library Leadership

Since my posting on our poor presentation of ourselves and the high level work we do (or are supposed to do as professionals) Why Toronto Public Library Staff Gave Me Indigestion - Part II, several readers have sent me more fuel for the fire.

This week, our blog provides a perspective of Ken Roberts, Chief Executive Officer of the Hamilton (Ontario) Public Library.

With all the brouhaha over the potential privatization of the Toronto Public Library services, I received the same week (the same week!) a professional journal providing the reasons why a TPL librarian (a librarian!) will not lose her job to technology, and yes her position was identified. I have now moved from indigestion to depression. I should provide a full citation but I choose not to make this personal.

A new website started up: Our Public Library: Great people, great library, great city. Not a bad tagline. But the misinformation!

Thanks to Kyle Cox for this blog entry. Kyle is Interim Executive Director of the Mid-Columbia Libraries in Kennewick, Washington. He holds an MPA and is enrolled in the Executive MLIS program at San Jose.Here are a few impressions from his first ALA conference.

Thanks to Kyle Cox for this blog entry. Kyle is Interim Executive Director of the Mid-Columbia Libraries in Kennewick, Washington. He holds an MPA and is enrolled in the Executive MLIS program at San Jose. Here are a few impressions from his first ALA conference.

Every graduate student should have this experience…

One of the pleasures for me of attending professional conferences is to work with graduate students. A few years ago I developed a conference-based one-credit course on Professional Socialization and Trend-spotting.

Networking is important for at least two critical reasons:

[a] the research suggests that the majority of the jobs in our field are not posted but become known through networking;

[b] the research suggests that an emerging competence for leaders is their ability to develop their network, through special projects, temporary assignments and community involvement, among others.

I am honoured that Ken asked me to write a guest post. I decided that I’d leave the post’s focusing on authentic governance, leadership, strategic human resources management and research from a CEO and senior management perspective to Ken, and I’d share my perspectives on an issue I’ve been thinking about for a while now: the role of giving professional advice in librarianship.

What distinguishes the role of a professional librarian from that of a library technician?

Several of my colleagues have urged me not to use this posting. They think that nothing will change as a result of it other than that the same behavior will continue. They are probably right but here goes regardless.

Following my convocation address to the 700+ MLIS graduates at San José, I was asked to make my talk available (it was of course streamed live with the convocation itself to graduates and their families around the world, and will be available on the San José website). This is a condensation, organized according to ten elements for a productive career, without the jokes and sidebars, based on my own forty years of good times.

Our guest Blogger is Dr. Brooke Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon was most recently Director of the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona.  She has been the Dean and Professor of the School of Information at both the University of Texas at Austin and  at Texas Woman's University. Her contributions to the field were recognized in 2005 when the University of Texas created the Brooke E. Sheldon Professorship in Leadership. Her research and teaching center around leadership/management; interpersonal communications.

Extraverts represent a majority of the general population yet Introverts represent a majority of professional librarians. Studies suggest that these majorities range from 60-75% overall.

How do you become a better boss?
How do you develop stronger leadership abilities?

If leadership is primarily an act of social influence designed to move people toward a common goal (any dispute there?), then leadership and management become a series of paradoxes.

How do you determine what makes a great branch manager? The results would be fairly obvious, I suspect… along the lines of have a clear vision and strategy for your team, help staff with career development, be productive and results-oriented… All standard stuff.

Mentorship has changed over the past few years.

Two of the biggest changes that I have observed have been the movement from one mentor to more of a “board of directors” and the change from age- and experience-based mentorship to more of a recognition that there is much to be learned from younger colleagues once one moves beyond career counseling.

Robert Cialdini’s work on Influence: Science and Practice (5th edition, Pearson, 2009) expands on his six principles for the psychology of persuasion:

A team of researchers from three countries is examining how elected politicians and their senior administrators make decisions about funding and policy. We started looking at the effectiveness of advocacy for libraries and soon realized that our examination was backwards—we should look at why and how decisions are made and then match advocacy efforts to that context. The results of our efforts to date were presented at the recent conferences of the British Columbia and Ontario Library Associations. The Advocacy and Influence presentation has had text added to make it more comprehensible to someone not in the audience.

Boris Epstein is the CEO and Founder of BINC, a Professional Search Firm that specializes in the Software Marketplace. Boris shares his thoughts about the recruitment industry, job hunting and career advice at AskBinc.com.

At a recent day devoted to directors, I had the opportunity to work with Jane Dysart and Rebecca Jones (dysartjones.com).

You may be aware of this new report, but if not: The International City/County Management Association has released their study Maximize the Potential of Your Public Library. Their general recommendations are quite good.

If you are not subscribing to Governing, you are simply not keeping up with your political environment and the problems and solutions being discussed by local and provincial/state politicians and senior administrators. The current issues and innovations covered provide much to think about as well as a broadening network.

These presentations are now available on authentic leadership, with more to come. We welcome your comments and suggestions.

We have now completed seven presentations on authentic governance. These will continue to be improved and more resources added as we move forward. In the meantime we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Last month I had the pleasure of participating in an Education Institute program with Jane Dysart. Jane coordinates the audio-conference series Conversations with Leaders. The focus of our session was on Making It Happen: Getting Things Done.

My colleague Sarah Long introduced me to Now, discover your strengths years before it became a bestseller on the Management and Leadership lists. Essentially, the Gallup organization found that most of us are able to document our education, experiences and accomplishments but few of us are able to articulate our strengths. Gallup reports that people who have the opportunity to focus on their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged in their work and three times more likely to report having excellent quality of life in general. You cannot be anything you want to be but you can be a lot more of who you are already.