Leadership Orientations

At Immersion, July 30, 2006
Faculty Lead: Karen Williams

We began with a Leadership Orientations questionarre. Most in the room scored either as a Structural or Human Resources leader. According to Karen, these are the two most common frames in librarianship. A few scored as Symbolic, but only 2 scored as Political leaders. These four leadership frames: Structural, Human Resources, Symbolic, and Political come from Bolman and Deal's book that is used in the ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute. Reframing is important because it broadens our perspective, helps manage complexity, and “provides a basis for effective and informed action.”

**It is crucial to create an Information Literacy Vision.**

There was then a discussion of what a leader is with views from several authors. Karen’s view of leaders:

1. Storytellers (Boyett & Boyett 1999)
2. “design learning processes” (Senge 1990)
3. “work with all in a community of leaders” (Barth 1992)
4. “take risks and are open to change” (Bennis 1997)
5. view mistakes and failure as learning opportunities (Bennis 1997).

Karen suggested we create leadership growth plans. She recommends Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.

Our activity was an Opportunity Assessment: “Know your audience, focus on the change makers, and know their turf, use their issues.” It was also suggested that we draft short “sound bites” and a back-up plan.

Leadership Tools

From Senge’s Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (1994), the needed tools are: “personal mastery and self awareness, systems thinking, shared vision, mental models and team learning.”

There was a short discussion on change, including John Kotter’s (1996) process of creating change and human reaction to change. The session ended with a very brief overview of Force Field Analysis and the Ease/Impact Model.