Hello librarians.  Welcome to this week’s episode where I’m going to talk about leaders in the library – they’re not always who you think they are.  As usual, for complete show notes, you can go to masterfullibrarian.com/ep-29.

I like to think, learn, and share about leadership.  It’s really kind of my thing. Becoming a better leader is something that I work at all the time. And since I started my new position, it’s been even more important to me because I have a fairly large team that I lead. And  one of my responsibilities is to nurture and develop the people on my team – the leaders on my team – the experienced and the emerging.  So it seemed like a good thing for me to talk about with you. 

There are lots of definitions of leadership. Here are just a few:

1.      the one in the charge, the person who convinces other people to follow (https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/leader)

2.      a person who influences a group of people towards the achievement of a goal (http://www.vtaide.com/gleanings/leader.html)

3.      someone who can see how things can be improved and who rallies people to move toward that better vision (https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2020/01/06/what-is-leadership-and-who-is-a-leader/)

I kind of like that last one, but I’m most drawn to this definition from a White Paper by Bal et al.  In  the paper, The Role of Power in Effective Leadership, they define a leader as someone who has the potential to influence others.  

True leaders are powerful people and it’s because of this ability to influence. 

You could be that leader.

For complete show notes, please visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-29.