Critical Library Leadership: Managing Self and Others in Today's Academic Library

Many of us arrive in supervisory positions with little or no formal training in academic library leadership. We attempt to teach ourselves the skills we need to be good managers and organizational leaders while juggling our own identity shifts and insecurities.

Critical Library Leadership: Managing Self and Others in Today's Academic Library provides practical, library-specific, hands-on tools that help us shape our approach to leadership and ourselves as leaders. It gives practical strategies for dealing with stress and addressing feelings of insecurity alongside managing the organization from an equity perspective that places people at the forefront. Each section offers a mixture of theory and research, lived experience, and practice that captures many different techniques you can apply to your own journey and organizational context in both formal and informal ways.

Part I: Leader as Self
Section I: Care, Empathy, and Authenticity
Section II: Career Development

Part II: Leader as Role
Section III: Relationships with Others
Section IV: Management Practices

Critical Library Leadership offers a sense of recognition and of community, new ideas for personal and organizational practice, and a renewed appreciation for the immense amount of affective, emotional, and practical labor that is required of each of us as leaders.