Library Leadership

At College & Research Libraries we do not get many articles on the topic of academic library leadership. I wonder why, because I think this is one of the most important and enduring topics in our profession. Maybe it is because this is a big and difficult topic to pin down. What exactly is leadership? What aspects of leadership are we talking about: defining leadership, evaluating leadership styles, developing future leaders, planning leadership suc-cession? As is always the case, a clear definition and problem statement are needed to construct a meaningful research project and report. Over the last two years, we have published only two articles on this key topic: in July 2010, " Future Leaders' Views on Organizational Culture " and most recently in our last issue (January 2012), " Cheerleaders, Opportunity Seeker, and Master Strategist: ARL Directors as En-trepreneurial Leaders " by Maria Taesil Hudson Carpenter. Both these articles present creative research approaches to their topic. In the first of these, Maloney and her coauthors argue it is " urgent " that academic libraries " nurture the talents of those who show the most leadership potential. " They present survey findings on future leaders' perceptions of their existing and desired organizational cultures. The results are worrying. Too often the current library organizational culture, according to these future leaders, can be characterized as conservative, inflexible, and hierarchi-cal—not very nurturing for new leadership. They would prefer an " adhocracy culture " of openness, risk taking, and adjustment to continuous change. These adhocracy traits fit right in with Carpenter's recent article on en-Library Leadership trepreneurial leadership in academic research libraries. Rather than using future leaders, Carpenter identifies eight (unnamed) Association of Research Libraries (ARL) directors who through their leadership record can be described as entrepreneurial. She engages this group in discussions of definition, traits, and evaluation of this contemporary , highly regarded, style of leadership. Carpenter finds that the directors she interviews value the entrepreneurial approach to leadership, " especially the elements of risk-taking and allowing failure to happen, as well as finding, seizing, and exploiting opportunities. " While these two articles are completely independent of each other, as a reader, I cannot help but wonder if there might be some overlap and conflicting perceptions in these two leadership studies. Could it be an age old predicament of future leaders (let us call them " the up and coming ") always …