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Registration has opened for the first ever national youth library leadership conference for youth staff and managers: Power Up: A Conference on Leadership for Youth Services Managers and Staff.

Scheduled for March 30-31, 2017 and sponsored by UW-Madison SLIS Continuing Education Dept, the conference brings together speakers from throughout the country to address aspects of leadership and management for youth librarians at all stages of their careers.

The conference kicks off with Gretchen Caserotti's keynote and concludes with an address by Deborah Taylor. Also featured is a reception and tour at the Cooperative Children's Book Center, a short 15 minute walk from the conference center.

Seventeen sessions packed with information from multiple perspectives and voices include: Reflective Leadership
Considering How Managing Your Collections Affects People
Determining if Management is for You
Benefits of Finding Your Programming Style
Developing Leadership Through Book Discussion
Leading a Multigenerational Team to Success
Channeling Passion into Leadership
Unconventional Outreach; Discovering Your Power
Addressing the Need for Confrontation
Leadership for Unofficial Leaders
Reaching Underserved at Small Libraries
Start Anywhere on Your Leadership Path
Managing Media Mentors

If you are a Wisconsin library staffer, ten scholarship s are available for registration.

It looks like a great conference and I hope to see and meet lots of colleagues there!

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In today’s globalised and instantly shareable social-media world, heads of state have to watch what they say, just as much – and perhaps even more so – than what they actually do. The rise of ‘Twiplomacy’ and the recent war of sound bites between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton speak to this ever-increasing trend. With these witty refrains in mind, test your knowledge of world leaders and their retorts – do you know who said what?

The post How well do you know your world leaders? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

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I was in a taxi in Hong Kong several years ago, stuck in traffic in the pouring rain. I said to my Hong Kong-based colleague how notable it seemed that all the apartment buildings looked exactly the same. “Cheaper that way isn’t it?” was his response, “Just design one then put up 50. Obvious really.”

The post From ‘conforming stores’ to digital first – the changing world of retail appeared first on OUPblog.

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The sands of time are quickly running out for putting in program proposals for the exciting national conference on youth leadership and management coming in spring 2017. This is a perfect opportunity to pitch your thoughts and ideas relating to that topic.

The audience will be be both staff and managers, leaders and those who want to become more effective leaders. It promises to be a thought-provoking two days that hone in on the power that youth librarians hold!

Here are the details. But don't wait. The deadline is Sunday July 31.

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When Antwon’s kids get a little older, he plans to tell them what he’s been through. A 25-year-old father of three, he’s working hard to give them all a better life.

Today, he is employed as a plumber, studying to get his GED and has completed a leadership and empowerment program for young fathers… twice. But this is a life he never imagined.

Antwon grew up in the Woodland Terrace housing development in Washington, DC where many families live off an annual income of $7000 per year.

“My mother worked on and off. She was raising five kids. She was struggling.” When his siblings’ father, who his family relied on for financial support, passed away, “everything changed.” As the oldest child, Antwon felt a tremendous sense of responsibility.

“The only thing I cared about was taking care of my family, but my mind wasn’t thinking that I could get a job. I wasn’t old enough to get a job. I was 13 at the time, and I got into street life. I was selling drugs.”

Antwon faced time in prison. While he was incarcerated, his mother passed due to a stress induced seizure.

A few weeks before returning home, something hit Antwon. “I had children, and I couldn’t do nothing for them but stand on the block all day. I needed a job. I needed to stay off the streets.”

That’s when Antwon connected with Smart from the Start, a family support, community engagement and school readiness organization. As a First Book partner, the nonprofit helps parents and caretakers become their child’s first teacher by supplying them books to help break the cycle of chronic school underachievement.

“I read to them. They like the sticker books, but I read,” he shares with a smile. “My oldest son, he is in school now. He’s got good grades. I sneak up on him sometimes, but I never let him know I’m coming. I just peek in the classroom. He’s doing good.”

Antwon knows there is work ahead, but he’s incredibly motivated. He needs to earn his GED to get an apprenticeship. Eventually, he wants to become a firefighter. But above all else he wants his kids to have a better life than he had.

“I want to motivate them to do better than I have done – finish school, get a good jobs; if they have kids, take care of their kids, be responsible.”

“It’s crazy,” he tells us, “I’ve seen a lot of things, but now I don’t even look back… My whole life has just changed.”

The post This is a Life He Never Imagined appeared first on First Book Blog.

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Our new  2106 Youth Services Section (YSS) board for the Wisconsin Library Association met recently in our first in-person retreat (maybe ever!). To start us off during an afternoon of brainstorming and reflection, we took the time to learn about our responsibilities as members of a statewide board.

I volunteered to guide the group through our responsibilities as board members. As the YSS rep on our WLA board, I've developed some knowledge on how our association and unit work.  I've also thought alot about the reasons that group work like board work, committee work and even group projects and staff teamwork can be so hard.

Depending on the circumstances, some people consider their service a step up the ladder of fame; some people let others do all the heavy lifting; there always seems to be one or two who appear AWOL much of the time; people lose the thread of continuity and make up stuff; guidelines or bylaws or org manuals are ignored. I could go on but we've all been involved in group work and can share a horror story or two.

It doesn't have to be hard.  But I think before we say yes to a board or committee, we need to consider our responsibilities to the group. Here's what I suggested make for stronger group work on a board level.

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Change is constant. We are all affected by the changing weather, natural disasters, and the march of time. Changes caused by human activity—inventions, migrations, wars, government policies, new markets, and new values—affect organizations as well as individuals.

The post Leadership for change appeared first on OUPblog.

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As anyone who has experienced the very best of the British policing profession could attest, high quality policing can contribute to the transformation of a community, laying the foundations for flourishing neighbourhoods and the lives of those who live there. It is Police Now’s overarching aim to contribute to the creation and development of safe, confident communities in which people can thrive. Our Theory of Change is that by attracting Britain’s best graduates to a policing career, training them intensively as community leaders, and then deploying them as police officers in those communities who need us most, we can have a disproportionate impact.

The post Policing – the new graduate career path? appeared first on OUPblog.

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Leadership training has become a multi-billion dollar global industry. The reason for this growth is that organizations, faced with new technology, changing markets, fierce competition, and diverse employees, must adapt and innovate or go under. Because of this, organizations need leaders with vision and the ability to engage willing collaborators. However, according to interviews with business executives reported in the McKinsey Quarterly, leadership programs are not developing global leaders.

The post Can leadership be taught? appeared first on OUPblog.

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This is a guest post from Perla Casas, a 2015 high school graduate. She will be part of the panel speaking on Sunday June 28th at 4:30 pm as part of "Empower Your Teens! Civic Engagement Strategies That Work."

The Youth Leadership Council (YLC) is a youth-driven advisory board for the Oakland Public Library. The YLC creates support strategies to improve its service for patrons and promotes the library simultaneously. The YLC is made up of twelve individuals from the ages of thirteen to eighteen. I was sixteen years old when I first stumbled across the YLC application at the TeenZone in the Main Library. I have always enjoyed reading and I am passionate about libraries, so I thought this group would be a perfect fit for me. After a nerve wracking three month application process, I was finally accepted as a member.

The YLC meets for two hours every third Saturday of the month at the Main Library. After my first official meeting, I was given the opportunity to facilitate the next meeting. I received training and multiple handouts on how to properly run a meeting while being respectful towards my fellow members and being an effective communicator. I became more comfortable with the other Youth Leadership Council members after I facilitated my second meeting and I had a better understanding of how we function as a productive team. I was able to identify and recognize the strengths and talents of my fellow members. It was a successful meeting.

The third annual Culture Festival held by the YLC allowed my creativity and organizational skills to shine. I volunteered to be the decorations and activities director alongside my best friend, Julia. After seeing last year’s decorations, we knew we had to completely revamp them. We brainstormed all of our ideas and I created a decorations schedule in order to materialize all of our ideas. Recreating the Great Wall of China for the Oakland Public Library was our greatest accomplishment. Over 100 hours were spent on creating various cultural decorations and we made sure every culture was included. It was an arduous process but at the same time extremely rewarding. Being able to see how our decorations transformed the library was fulfilling and gratifying.

During my time as a member I feel like I have formed a bond with the Youth Leadership Council members (some of which are alumni now), the supervising librarian of teen services, Lana Adlawan, and my amazing moderators, Amy Sonnie and Jeanie Austin. Amy Sonnie gave me the confidence to join the YLC and accomplish things that I thought I never could do before. She taught me how to prosper inside and outside of the YLC. Jeanie Austin, who I have only known for a short time, has become a good friend and has given me support throughout the entire process of my last few months with the Youth Leadership Council. I am thankful and truly blessed for these wonderful, dedicated, and hardworking people in my life. My experience with the Youth Leadership Council has been unforgettable and I am proud to become a YLC alumni in the fall.

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When Antwon’s kids get a little older, he plans to tell them what he’s been through. A 25-year-old father of three, he’s working hard to give them all a better life.

Today, he is employed as a plumber, studying to get his GED and has completed a leadership and empowerment program for young fathers… twice. But this is a life he never imagined.

Antwon grew up in the Woodland Terrace housing development in Washington, DC where many families live off an annual income of $7000 per year.

“My mother worked on and off. She was raising five kids. She was struggling.” When his siblings’ father, who his family relied on for financial support, passed away, “everything changed.” As the oldest child, Antwon felt a tremendous sense of responsibility.

“The only thing I cared about was taking care of my family, but my mind wasn’t thinking that I could get a job. I wasn’t old enough to get a job. I was 13 at the time, and I got into street life. I was selling drugs.”

Antwon faced time in prison. While he was incarcerated, his mother passed due to a stress induced seizure.

A few weeks before returning home, something hit Antwon. “I had children, and I couldn’t do nothing for them but stand on the block all day. I needed a job. I needed to stay off the streets.”

That’s when Antwon connected with Smart from the Start, a family support, community engagement and school readiness organization. As a First Book partner, the nonprofit helps parents and caretakers become their child’s first teacher by supplying them books to help break the cycle of chronic school underachievement.

“I read to them. They like the sticker books, but I read,” he shares with a smile. “My oldest son, he is in school now. He’s got good grades. I sneak up on him sometimes, but I never let him know I’m coming. I just peek in the classroom. He’s doing good.”

Antwon knows there is work ahead, but he’s incredibly motivated. He needs to earn his GED to get an apprenticeship. Eventually, he wants to become a firefighter. But above all else he wants his kids to have a better life than he had.

“I want to motivate them to do better than I have done – finish school, get a good jobs; if they have kids, take care of their kids, be responsible.”

“It’s crazy,” he tells us, “I’ve seen a lot of things, but now I don’t even look back… My whole life has just changed.”

The post This is a Life He Never Imagined appeared first on First Book Blog.

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भाग दौड भरी जिंदगी में अक्सर खुद को प्रोत्साहित करना बहुत जरुरी हो जाता है पर … कैसे करें खुद को प्रोत्साहित… यक्ष प्रश्न है. पर कुछ ही देर मे मुझे इसका उत्तर भी मिल गया . किसी काम से मेरी सहेली  मणि के घर जाना हुआ  तो वो किसी से बात कर रही थी ” कमाल है,तुम तो वाकई में बहुत समझदार हो. मतलब कि हर बात को कितनी सहजता से ले कर उसका समाधान निकाल लेती हो और कोई तनाव नही रखती हमेशा स्माईल ही रहती है चेहरे पर हमेशा ऐसे ही रहना शाबाश,कीप इट अप…

मैं सोच ही रही थी कि किससे बात कर रही होगी अंदर गई तो दूसरा कोई नजर नही आया. मेरे पूछ्ने पर बोली अरे तूने सुन लिया… और स्माईल करती हुई बोली कि शीशे के सामने खडी होकर खुद से बात कर रही थी. खुद को मोटिवेट करना भी बहुत जरुरी होता है इसलिए अक्सर वो यह काम करती रहती है.. मुझे यह बात बहुत पसंद आई. सही है जब तक हम खुद को शाबाशी नही देंगें उत्साहित नही करेंगें तो आगे कैसे बढेग़े…

वैसे नीचे Motivational Quotes भी दिए हैं ताकि आप भली प्रकार समझ सकें

 

14 Motivational Quotes to Keep You Powerful

I once despised motivational quotes, probably because my wrestling coach liked to say, “If you’re not puking or passing out, then you’re not trying hard enough.” Read more…

हमे हमेशा खुद प्रोत्साहित करने के साथ साथ मोटिवेशनल साहित्य भी पढते रहना चाहिए इससे हमे बहुत नई जानकारी मिलती है और साथ साथ हौंसला भी मिलता है.

 

50 Motivational Quotes

Here, in 50 inspiring quotes, businesswomen, role models, activists, entertainers, authors, politicians and more share their thoughts on leadership and success — and what exactly those mean to them. 50 Motivational Quotes From Disruptive, Trailblazing, Inspiring Women Leaders

 

मेरे विचार से अब तो नही सोच रहे होंगें कि कैसे करें खुद को प्रोत्साहित …. वैसे अब मुझे भी घर लौटने की जल्दी थी खुद को प्रोत्साहित  जो करना है शीशे के सामने खडे होकर … और आप ?? आप तो करते ही होंगें अगर नही करते तो आज से ही करना शुरु कर दीजिए….

फिर जरुर बताईएगा कि कैसा लग रहा है !!!

The post कैसे करें खुद को प्रोत्साहित appeared first on Monica Gupta.

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There are problems with defining the term ‘leadership’. Leadership often gets confused with the management function because, generally, managers are expected to exhibit some leadership qualities. In essence, leaders are instruments of change, responsible for laying plans both for the moment and for the medium and long-term futures. Managers are more concerned with executing plans on a daily basis, achieving objectives and producing results.

Top police leaders have a responsibility for deciding, implementing, monitoring, and completing the strategic plans necessary to meet the needs and demands of the public they serve. Their plans are then cascaded down through the police structure to those responsible for implementing them. Local commanders may also create their own plans to meet regional demands. The planner’s job is never finished: there is always a need to adapt and change existing measures to meet fresh circumstances.

Planning is a relatively mechanical process. However, the management of change is notoriously difficult. Some welcome change and the opportunities it brings; others do not because it upsets their equilibrium or places them at some perceived disadvantage. Mechanisms for promoting plans and dealing with concerns need to be put in place. Factual feedback and suggestions for improvement should be welcomed as they can greatly improve end results. When people contribute to plans they are more likely to support them because they have some ownership in them.

Those responsible for implementing top-level and local plans may do so conscientiously but arrangements rarely run smoothly and require the application of initiative and problem solving skills. Sergeants, inspectors, and other team leaders – and even constables acting alone – should be encouraged to help resolve difficulties as they arise. Further, change is ever present and can’t always be driven from the top. It’s important that police leaders and constables at operational and administrative levels should be stimulated to identify and bring about necessary changes – no matter how small – in their own spheres of operation, thus contributing to a vibrant leadership culture.

The application of first-class leadership skills is important: quality is greatly influenced by the styles leaders adopt and the ways in which they nurture individual talent. Leadership may not be the first thing recruits think of when joining the police. Nonetheless, constables are expected to show leadership on a daily basis in a variety of different, often testing situations.

Reflecting on my own career, I was originally exposed to an autocratic, overbearing organisation where rank dominated. However, the force did become much more sophisticated in its outlook as time progressed. As a sergeant, inspector, and chief inspector, my style was a mixture of autocratic and democratic, with a natural leaning towards democratic. Later, in the superintendent rank, I fully embraced the laissez-faire style, making full use of all three approaches. For example, at one time when standards were declining in the workplace I was autocratic in demanding that they should be re-asserted. When desired standards were achieved, I adopted a democratic style to discuss the way forward with my colleagues. When all was going well again, I became laissez-faire, allowing individuals to operate with only a light touch. The option to change style was never lost but the laissez-faire approach produced the best ever results I had enjoyed in the police.

Although I used these three styles, the labels they carry are limiting and do not reveal the whole picture. Real-life approaches are more nuanced and more imaginative than rigidly applying a particular leadership formula. Sometimes more than one style can be used at the same time: it is possible to be autocratic with a person who requires close supervision and laissez-faire with someone who is conscientious and over-performing. Today, leadership style is centred upon diversity, taking into account the unique richness of talent that each individual has to offer.

Individual effort and team work are critical to the fulfillment of police plans. To value and get the best out of officers and support staff, leaders need to do three things. First, they must ensure that there is no place for discrimination of any form in the police service. Discrimination can stunt personal and corporate growth and cause demotivation and even sickness. Second, they should seek to balance the work to be done with each individual’s motivators. Dueling workplace requirements with personal needs is likely to encourage people to willingly give of their best. Motivators vary from person to person although there are many common factors including opportunities for more challenging work and increased responsibility. Finally, leaders must keep individual skills at the highest possible level, including satisfying the needs of people with leadership potential. Formal training is useful but perhaps even more effective is the creation of an on-the-job, incremental coaching programme and mentoring system.

Police leaders need to create plans and persuade those they lead to both adopt them and see them through to a satisfactory conclusion. If plans are to succeed, change must be sensitively managed and leaders at all levels should be encouraged to use their initiative in overcoming implementation problems. Outside of the planning process, those self-same leaders should deal with all manner of problems that beset them on a daily basis so as to create a vibrant leadership culture. Plans are more liable to succeed if officers and support staff feel motivated and maintain the necessary competence to complete tasks.

Headline image: Sir Robert Peel, by Ingy The Wingy. CC-BY-ND-2.0 via Flickr.

The post Essential considerations for leadership in policing (and beyond) appeared first on OUPblog.

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Dwight D. Eisenhower described leadership as “the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” Eisenhower was a successful wartime general and president. What made him successful? It was not a full head of hair and a fit physique, two of the physical traits of a CEO. What made him an unsuccessful university president? Was it luck or skill, or his social interactions with those he led?

There are many theories on what makes a leader effective, where effective leaders go, and whether leaders are born or created, but little empirical work. We cannot run a field experiment to study leadership of an organization in a high-stakes setting. Empirical tests of leadership theories have to come from quantitative studies of leaders and organizations, but large, longitudinal datasets on CEOs and companies are rare. A unique longitudinal data set on Union Army soldiers augmented with information on the regiment level provides a testing ground for leadership theories. This sample (available at uadata.org), created from men’s army records and linked to their census records, is the most comprehensive longitudinal database in economic history. It has been used to study the economics of aging (Costa 1998) and the role that social capital plays in people’s decisions (Costa and Kahn 2008). The data contain information on men’s promotions and demotions, their jobs during the war, their socioeconomic and demographic information at enlistment, and their jobs and locations after the war.

Who became a leader and what made leaders effective? The more able, i.e. the literate and men who were in higher status occupations, were more likely to become officers. So were the tall and the native-born. There were benefits to being an officer – higher pay and lower odds of death, both on and off the battlefield. Game theoretic models of leader effectiveness have emphasized that one way to elicit effort from followers is to lead by example. Although on average commissioned officers did not imperil themselves in battle, when they did, it was an effective strategy in creating a cohesive fighting unit. Company desertion rates were lower for companies in which the regimental battlefield mortality of commissioned officers relative to enlisted men was higher.

After the war leaders moved to where their talent would have the highest pay-off, as predicted by economic models of sorting. The former sergeants and commissioned officers were more likely than privates to move to larger cities which provided higher wages and greater diversity in the dominant economic activity of the time, manufacturing. Even men who started in low status occupations in cities were able to climb the occupational ladder.

Are leaders created or born? The Army, and a large management literature, stresses that leaders have character, presence, and intellectual capacity. In contrast, economic theory emphasizes the management skills that can be learned. Union Army soldiers who missed being promoted because casualty rates were relatively low in their companies were likely to be in a large city after the war compared to men who were promoted, suggesting that in the long-run leaders are created. One of the skills learned in the army may have been to be a generalist. Sergeants and commissioned officers with more than strict military tasks while in the army were more likely to be in large cities.

A Civil War context for testing theories of personnel economics may be unusual. The 150th anniversary of the Civil War has focused more on historical research and re-enactments. But if a stress test of theories is their explanatory ability in very different contexts, academic personnel economics does very well.

Headline image credit: Field Band of 2nd R.I. Infantry. Photo by Mathew Brady. War Department. Office of the Chief Signal Officer. Brady National Photographic Art Gallery. US National Archives and Records Administration. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Making leaders appeared first on OUPblog.

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Now that the National Guard and the national media have left, Ferguson, Missouri is faced with questions about how to heal the sharp power inequities that the tragic death of Michael Brown has made so visible. How can the majority black protestors translate their protests into political power in a town that currently has a virtually all-white power structure?

Recent experiences demonstrate that moving from protest to power is no easy task. For 18 days in 2011, hundreds of thousands of protestors filled Tahrir Square in Egypt to bring down the government of Hosni Mubarak, but three years later, the Egyptian military is back in power. Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protestors encamped in Zucotti Park for 60 days in the fall of 2011, but few policies resulted that help ameliorate the income inequality they protested. Both of these movements, and many others like them — from Gezi Park in Turkey to the Indignados in Spain — were able to draw hundreds or thousands of people to the streets in a moment of outrage, but lacked the infrastructure to harness that outrage into durable political change.

Protestors in Ferguson risk the same fizzle unless they can build — and maintain — a base of engaged activists and leaders who will persist even after the cameras leave. Transformation of entrenched power structures like a military regime in Egypt, or structures of inequality and state-sanctioned police force in the United States happens only when there is a counterbalancing base of power. That counterbalancing base of power, has to come from the people.

How do people, in these instances, become power? Research shows that building collective power among people depends on transforming people so that they develop their own capacity as leaders to act on injustices they face. Transforming protest into power, in other words, starts with transforming people.

So how are people transformed? Research shows that 79% of activists in the United States report becoming engaged through a civic organization. Every day, thousands of civic organizations across the country, from the NAACP to the Tea Party, work to transform people into activists to win the victories they want.

Yet many of these organizations are still unsure of the best way to build the kind of long-term activist base needed in Ferguson. Many organizations know how to craft messages or leverage big data to find people who will show up for a rally or one event. Few organizations know how to take the people who show up, and transform some of them into citizen leaders who will become the infrastructure that harnesses energy from a week of protest into real change.

I spent two years comparing organizations with strong records of ongoing activism to those with weaker records to try to understand what they do differently. I found that it comes down to their investment in building the motivation, knowledge, and skills of their members. Turning protest into power begins with creating opportunities for people like the residents of Ferguson to exercise their own leadership.

Consider Priscilla, a young organizer working in the rural South to engage people around shutting down coal. When she first started organizing, Priscilla spent all of her time finding people who would show up for town halls, public meetings, and press events. She devoted hours to writing catchy messages and scripts that would get people’s attention, and asked her volunteers, mostly older retirees, to read these routinized scripts into the voicemail of a long list of phone numbers.

After several months of this work, Priscilla was exhausted. She wanted something different. An experienced organizer told her to invest time in developing the leadership of a cadre of volunteers, instead of spending all her time trying to get people to show up to events. Others scoffed at this advice: volunteers don’t want to take on leadership, they said. They want to take action that is easy, makes them feel good, and doesn’t take any time.

Priscilla decided to give it a try. She reached out to a group of likely volunteers to ask them to coffee. She began to get to know them as people. When some agreed to volunteer, she sat them down and explained the larger strategy behind the town hall meeting they were planning, instead of handing them a long list of phone numbers to call. Then, she asked the volunteers what piece of the planning they wanted to be responsible for.

Priscilla started spending her time training and supporting these volunteers in the tasks they’d chosen to oversee. With her help, these volunteers developed their own strategies for getting media for the event, identifying a program of speakers, and leveraging their own social networks to generate turnout. When the big day arrived, more people showed up than Priscilla would have been able to get on her own. More importantly, after the event was over, she also had a group of volunteer leaders exhilarated by their experience running a town hall and eager to do more.

Instead of just getting bodies to fill a room, Priscilla had begun the process of developing leaders. Instead of just coming to one rally, those leaders stayed with and built the campaign that eventually shut down the coal plant in their community.

There are talented organizers on the ground in Ferguson trying to do just what Priscilla did: give residents opportunities to develop the skills and motivation they need to make the change they want. Only by developing those kinds of leaders will organizations in Ferguson develop the infrastructure they need to turn the protest into real power for the residents who feel disconnected from it now.

When Alexis de Tocqueville observed America in the 1830s, he famously wrote that civic organizations are the backbone of our nation because they act as “schools of democracy,” teaching people how to work collectively with others to advance their interests. De Tocqueville is as right today as he was 174 years ago. We have always known that people power democracy. What protests from Occupy to the Arab Spring to Ferguson are teaching us is that democracy can also power people.

Headline image credit: “Occupy Wall Street” by Darwin Yamamoto. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr

The post Moving from protest to power appeared first on OUPblog.

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Not long ago I had a back-and-forth with MPOW’s head of HR, who is a great HR head, by the way (and after my spring HR class my admiration for her role deepened–talk about a complex role people take for granted, like, you know, library work). She told me I would be receiving my five-year pin, and I kept insisting it was too early. But in the end I said ok, I will receive my five-year pin, because the day of the ceremony was exactly six months from my five-year anniversary, and also because she wasn’t taking “no” for an answer.

I was startled to get here. Many people have elaborate career plans such as “I’m going to be the dean of an ARL library” or “I’m going to be the interplanetary guru of electronic resources.” My modus operandi has been more along the lines of, “Hey, that looks good,” or “I’m new in town, do you have a job for me?” This baggy approach to personal career management has had spectacularly uneven results, but it did result in my present position, which is an undeniably good fit for me, even, or perhaps especially, on the craziest days.

Everything I said about managerial leadership two years ago still holds, but I continue to have very good lessons-learned, and not all of them learned the hard way. So in the spirit of the ubiquitous listicles on the web, I present my top five:

* Campus relationships are key. Some years back I wrote a “guest response” piece for ACRL that took a position — likely in the minority — questioning the value of faculty status for librarians. I would soften that view today to say, after the manner of Pope Francis, if it works for your institution, who am I to judge? However, I do stick by the point lurking under my piece: faculty status is not a substitute for building and maintaining strong relations with all stakeholders on campus–not just the faculty, but key departments such as advising, tutoring, writing studios, orientation, admissions, campus ministry, and especially, campus services — my library may be hurting for a renovation, but it’s clean and, for its age, well-maintained.

* Sticking around has value. Those relationships don’t happen overnight, so another happy re-discovery is the joy of longevity. If you’ve been in the same library thirty years you and I may have different definitions for that term, but this job rivals only my job managing Librarians’ Internet Index (RIP) for longevity, assuming we allow for my military service being a series of smaller jobs within a larger eight-year job. People have arrived, served the university well, and departed, all on my watch, and I’ve seen a lot of change, as well as some things come full circle. And I’m still here, plugging away at the big things and the small things alike.

* Managerial leadership can be learned (parts of it, anyway). I have learned a lot on the job. Nevertheless, the doctoral program is helping me from many angles. There is the direct classroom experience of highly practical classes on human resources, strategic finance, managing in a political environment, fundraising, and so on. Then there is the scholarly aspect: research, reading, and writing (rinse, repeat). While  there is no substitute for integrity, common sense, optimism, and collegiality, learning how to write a case statement for fundraising is not a bad thing at all.

* The organization comes first. This rule manifests itself in many ways big and small. The boss gotta be the boss.  I prefer to ask “How?” or say “Not now, but let’s find a way to do this,” but sometimes “no” is the correct answer. If a key stakeholder relationship has been damaged, I need to repair it, even if I have to grovel (and trust me, I’ve groveled). If constructive feedback is warranted, I need to provide it (though constant positive feedback is crucial, too). Using Heifetz’ analogy, it’s up to me to clamber up to the balcony every now and then to see what’s happening on the dance floor, and then adjust as needed.

* Do what needs doing. Every institution has its own reality. In our case, I found myself writing an evacuation procedure, purchasing additional emergency response gear in case the lower level was not accessible, and leading the entire library, including student workers, in active-shooter training.  I also ensure we regularly update a small printout of everyone’s non-MPOW phone numbers and email so we can contact one another in emergencies. Was all of that “my” job? Yes, some of it was, but more importantly, it is my job to ensure we are prepared for emergencies, and human safety is non-negotiable.

Make sure you’ve fulfilled the bottom rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy. In addition to improving our emergency response, in the last two years I’ve done what I could to make staff more comfortable and productive. The staff area, carved from a former “processing room,” is aesthetically sad, with worn cubicle panels, ugly tile, and hideous cabinets, but I patiently championed adding overhead fans to the staff area, which has increased staff comfort, and this summer the head of library IT and I built a “seated cost” budget plan to help us ensure staff are adequately equipped for their roles, with scheduled upgrades we can plan and budget for each year. Little things — a full-size fridge, a Keurig, a hydration station for filling water bottles — make a difference.

* Do what you can, and keep trying. As I wrote in 2012, I need to be mercilessly optimistic. Management and leadership have a certain household-laundry quality, with perpetual problems and challenges that mean the last sock is never washed. There are some big things that may not happen on my watch. But I don’t stop developing proposals and plans for improving the library that I share with key stakeholders, and this readiness, plus a variety of creative relationships, have led to improvements to the library, beginning with a refresh of the computers in that aging lab, on to a new reading area, to the first refresh of the furniture on the main level in the library’s 56 years. We’ve also increased our workforce in five years, and for that I can be justly proud, because our services define us.

Have fun with the silly stuff. Several months ago, the library — specifically, I and another librarian — were pulled into an elaborate time-sink of a project to secure permissions for an anthology of prayers and poetry the university will be self-publishing. I am here to tell you that most copyright workshops stop short of the truly practical guidance, which is how to chase down, stalk, wheedle, negotiate, and beg your way to get permissions for material, or even how to go back in a time machine, to when you first got wind of such a project, to insist that submissions be accompanied by little things such as authors, titles, and publishers. But as much as I grumble that this isn’t what I planned to do this summer, the reality is that our efforts are greatly appreciated, our guru-ness in copyright is further solidified, and the end result will be good.

* Get (and maintain) a life. I have a loving spouse, two amusing cats, and a variety of interests, and oh yeah, a doctoral program.  I have heard about directors that work from dawn into the wee hours seven days a week, but I don’t know that their libraries are run any better than mine. I definitely put in my dues; I’m always the director, 24×7, and some periods are busier than others. But I’m no good to the institution if I’m frazzled and depleted. This has  also made me very selective with my speaking and conference activities, in part because I don’t want to be an absent boss, and also because catch-up is hell. Every once in a while I dose myself with “vitamin colleague,” checking in with peer directors for a phone call, Skype, or lunch, because there is some stuff I just can’t share with anyone else.

* Be fully present. Above, I referred to things happening “on my watch.” I have observed some directors take a job with their eyes fixed on their future goal (see above, “wanna be an ARL director”). I have seen others turn into what we called in the Air Force ROADies (for Retired On Active Duty). The sweet spot for me is to get in early every day, be present as much as possible, and be actively engaged with my role as library leader.

It’s possible to renew your present-ness. Last fall was a tough time: the second semester of the doctoral program was grueling, and there were other things going on at work that zombified me. I felt, later on, that I had checked out, even if I still got things done. But that was then and this is now. Nearly every day I drive through the gates of the university with a sense of anticipation;  to quote Thelma in Thelma and Louise, “I don’t ever remember feeling this awake.” (And if you’re tempted to make the inevitable “driving off a cliff” comment, remember that Thelma and Louise were choosing a life framed by that level of being present.) I am captaining a ship sailing toward our library’s vision, with my eye on the horizon as well as the decks, and I can feel the engines pulling us toward our future. It feels good.

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If you’re working with teens in a library – any kind of library — you should be a leader. Being a leader doesn’t have to mean you’re the boss – or that you ever want to be the boss, but it takes intentionality and may mean thinking about your role in serving teens a bit differently. Level Up Your Leadership Skills is a regular feature on leadership topics for staff working with teens.

We all have a lot on our plates. Working the desk, doing outreach and working directly with teens are all important parts of our work. Depending on our role, we may not have direct control over our schedule or exactly how we manage our own time.

But we often have control over how we spend at least some of our time — so how can we decide what to prioritize within the many possible tasks we could be doing or new projects we could be starting?

One way is through a relatively simple matrix, that plots effort against impact – how easy or hard it is to implement something against the impact or outcome we’re trying to achieve.

Let’s say you had four items on your list for “new fall projects.”

1. Meet with new teen parent coordinator at local school to identify how to work with teen parents at that school
2. Start work on training for staff on how to talk with teens
3. Booktalk for one class at middle school across town
4. Staffing a library table at a community event

Meeting with the teen parent coordinator is pretty easy and it’s low-cost, too. It’s probably a pretty high impact, especially if our goal is to reach teens that are at-risk. Whatever project results out of this meeting, though, may be more work.

Developing a training for other staff is not as easy to do — it will take some time. But it may have a pretty high impact.

Doing booktalks at the private school across the town may take some time to prepare. And the impact may be minimal since you’re only presenting to one class.

Staffing a resource table doesn’t take that much time, and you may talk to a lot of families or see students you already know, but how deep or lasting will your impact be?

Using this process, you may find that meeting with teen parent coordinator is easy and could have high impact. It may be a first place to start. Projects that are difficult and the impact is minimal — or not known — may take a lower priority.

You could plot these visually on a grid like this one from the Thinking About Learning blog.

You could also get fancier with 9 boxes like this, which is a common tool from Lean principles, which originated in manufacuring but now used in a variety of industries. You could also create a spreadsheet and rank each project on each scale, using numbers on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 3.

You could also use other categories for prioritization, including comparing work that is “work my boss wants me to do” versus “work I really like doing.” You could use a similar process with young people if your team is working to identify their next project or how to spend their budget.

No matter what position you’re in or what process you use, prioritization is part of everyone’s job. When we start to use it in our own work with teens, it helps us, our manager and library, and helps demonstrate the importance of these skills to young people, too.

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By R. A. W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t Hart

Since Machiavelli, political leadership has been seen as the exercise of practical wisdom. We can gain insights through direct personal experience and sustained reflection. The core intangibles of leadership — empathy, intuition, creativity, courage, morality, judgement — are largely beyond the grasp of ‘scientific’ inquiry. Understanding leadership comes from living it: being led, living with and advising leaders, doing one’s own leading.

In sharp contrast, a ‘science of leadership’ has sprung up in the latter half of the twentieth century. Thousands of academics now make a living treating leadership as they would any other topic in the social sciences, and political leadership is no exception. These scholars treat it as an object of study, which can be picked apart and put together. Their papers fill journals, handbooks, conference programs, and lecture theatres. Some work in the real world of political leadership as consultants and advisers, often well paid. This buzzing, blooming confusion would not persist if such knowledge did not help in grasping at least some of the puzzles that leaders face and leadership poses. And there are puzzles aplenty.

The first puzzle is whether we are looking at the people we call leaders, or at the process we call leadership? Leader-centred analysis has proved hugely popular but many now prefer to understand political leadership as a two-way street; an interaction between leaders and followers, leaders and media, leaders and mass publics.

The second puzzle is whether we are studying democrats or dictators. Democracy needs good leadership yet the idea of leadership potentially conflicts with democracy’s egalitarian ethos. Political leaders holding office in democratic societies live in a complex moral universe. Other heads of government gained power by undemocratic means. They sometimes govern by fear, intimidation, and blackmail. Is that leadership? However, even such ‘leaders’ may aim for widely shared and morally acceptable goals and rule with the tacit consent of most of the population. Understanding leadership requires us to take in all its shades of grey: leading and following, heroes and villains, the capable and the inept, winners and losers.

The third puzzle ponders whether political leadership matters. Leaders use their political platforms to inject words, ideas, ambitions and emotions into the public arena, to shape public policies and transform communities and countries. But when do they make a difference? What stops them from being a force in society? Or are political leaders a product of their societies? Finding out who gets to lead can teach us much, not just about those leaders, but about the societies in which they work. So, we ask who becomes a political leader, how and why? What explains their rise and fall?

The fourth puzzle explores the relative importance of their personal characteristics and behaviour compared to the context in which they work. Sometimes political leaders are frail humans afloat on a sea of storms and sometimes they survive at the helm when few thought that possible. They achieve policy reforms and social changes against the odds, and the inherited wisdom perishes. How do political leaders escape the dead hand of history?

The fifth puzzle wonders if the success of leaders stems from their special qualities or traits – the so-called ‘great man’ theory of leadership. However, we have to entertain the possibility that these allegedly ‘great’ leaders might have been just plain lucky; that is they get what they want without trying. They are ‘systematically lucky’.

The sixth puzzle is about success and failure. How do we know when a political leader has been successful? The temptation is always to credit their success to their special qualities, but no public leader ever worked alone. Behind every ‘great’ leader are indispensable collaborators, advisers, mentors, and coalitions; the building blocks of the leader’s achievements.

Political leadership is both art and profession. Political leaders gain office promising to solve problems but more often than not they are defeated by our puzzles. There is no unified theory of leadership to guide them. There are too many definitions, and too many theories in too many disciplines. We do not agree on what leadership is, or how to study it, or even why we study it. The subject is not just beset by dichotomies; it is also multifaceted, and essentially contested. Leaders are beset by contingency and complexity, which is why so many leaders’ careers end in disappointment.

R. A. W. Rhodes and Paul ‘t Hart are the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership. R. A. W. Rhodes is Professor of Government at both the University of Southampton (UK); and Griffith University (Brisbane, Australia). He is the author or editor of some 35 books including recently Lessons of Governing. A Profile of Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff (with Anne Tiernan, Melbourne University Press 2014); and Everyday Life in British Government (Oxford University Press 2011). Paul ‘t Hart is Professor of Public Administration at the Utrecht School of Governance; associate Dean at The Netherlands School of Government in The Hague; and a core faculty member at the Australia New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). He is the author or editor of some 35 books including recently Understanding Public Leadership (Palgrave Macmillan 2014); and Prime Ministerial Leadership: Power, Parties and Performance (co-edited with James Walter and Paul Strangio (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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Image credit: Woodcut from the title page of a 1499 pamphlet published by Markus Ayrer in Nuremberg. It depicts Vlad III “the Impaler” dining among the impaled corpses of his victims. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable Patrick Lencioni

I have a lot of super-awesome volunteers at my library. One of them has a fancy-schmancy day job as a high-level executive. When I became branch manager, we were talking about my new role and management stuff and she highly recommended Patrick Lencioni, this book in general. So I read it.

I loved it. It’s a “Leadership Fable” which made it a much easier read for me. The first 75% of the book is a story about a dysfunctional software company and how a new CEO came in and fixed the team and the problem and successes they had along the way. As a story, it wasn’t that awesome, but as someone who thinks in story, it was a much easier, faster, and accessible read than a normal “how to” management book. I read it in an evening and the points made are going to stick with me for a lot longer because of it. I was skeptical going in, but I really appreciated the style. The last 25% is a little more “how to” that goes a little more in-depth on the 5 dysfunctions, how to spot them, and how to get over them.

I also think Lencioni makes good points on how to make a team work. He really focuses on the overall goal of the team, and not individual success and ego. Part of this is a good dose of conflict (because good conflict creates better buy-in) and holding each other accountable. I also liked how his team-building exercises and overall method wasn’t touchy-feely. (No trust falls!) and stays largely focused on the actual business at hand, while still being broadly applicable.

I also liked how he has five dysfunctions, but they really play into each other and are all part of a larger problem, and how if you have problem in one area, you almost definitionally are going to have problems in another.

Now, I work with an awesome team, so I won’t be putting what I learned into direct process, but I’ll be keeping it in mind to evaluate if we continue to be awesome in the future.

And, I’ll be checking out Lencioni’s other leadership books.

(ooo.. there’s also a manga version)


Book Provided by... my local library

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By Katie Day

I am one of the last professional women I know to read Lean In by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (Knopf, 2013). If you are also among the laggards, it is an inspiring call to women to lean into leadership. Too often, Sandberg shows through research and life story, women are not considered “leadership material,” and not just by men. We also send that message to ourselves, and attribute any success to external factors such as luck and the support of others. We just don’t think we have the right stuff to be leaders.

Too bad Sheryl Sandberg has not been to Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia. After studying the communities of faith along that one street—around 88 congregations, the number fluctuating year to year—I found one thing that stumped me. There are a whole lot more women in leadership in these houses of worship than in any national sample of clergy. The most generous research findings reflect 10-20% of congregations to be headed by women in the United States today. In my sample, 44% of communities of faith have female leadership. This phenomenon is true across the religious spectrum. “Prestigious pulpits” in the historic Mainline Protestant churches are disproportionately occupied by women. But so were the pulpits in small independent African-American churches. Two of the three mega-churches had women as co-pastors. In the third, the associate pastor is a woman and considered the heir-apparent for the senior position. Two of the three peace churches had women leaders. There are no longer Catholic churches on the Avenue (which don’t have women priests), and the two mosques I researched were led exclusively by men. But the small Black spiritualist Hurleyite congregation (Universal Hagar) has a woman as pastor.

How can we account for this? It might have something to do with Philadelphia’s cultural history of inclusivity, providing a context in which women broke through the stained glass ceiling in the AMEZ and Episcopal traditions. Perhaps it is more closely related with the Great Migration North, in which women sought out church anchors in neighborhoods in which to settle. Frankly, I am hoping a researcher will figure this out…and bottle it!

More impressive to me than the numbers are the amazing women I interviewed. Women like Pastor Jackie Morrow, who started a church and a school in a row house, and ministers to everyone in her corner of Northwest Philly, from the young men who play basketball in her parking lot to the mentally challenged woman who regularly stops by for prayer, food, and a hug. Or Rev. Melanie DeBouse, who pastors in the poorest neighborhood in the city and is teaching young children to “kiss your brain” and older men how to read. Or Rev. Cindy Jarvis, senior pastor at the Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, where she oversees a budget of over a million dollars and has underwritten efforts to prevent gun violence, provide health care for the poor, and a vibrant social and educational program for seniors. These women, and others on the Avenue, are leaning in to take leadership roles not in corporations but in the trenches of gnarly urban problems.

Make no mistake: I like Sandberg’s book. But the clergy women of Germantown Avenue are leaning into stronger headwinds with impressive competence and confidence. They inspired me more.

Katie Day is the Charles A. Schieren Professor of Church and Society at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. She is the author of Faith on the Avenue: Religion on a City Street and three other books and numerous articles that look at how religion impacts a variety of social realities.

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You did it!!  You've got it!  Lotta hard work in back of you. Lotta hard work ahead. But really, it's all good. You are going to be stepping up and out and showing your stuff. Digging into a job - hopefully sooner rather than later. Digging further into learning and networking.  And truly, I hope you'll be showing your stuff to us all.

I'm always inspired by the energy, new passions and thoughtfulness of new librarians. And I want to echo what R. David Lankes wrote to the Syracuse graduates in his recent post: don't wait to break barriers, invent new ways of doing library work good, or pushing the envelope of fantastic.  Leap for it, push for it, do it. Do it now.

We sometimes get lost in the minutiae of our masters work and easily believe that we aren't really learning anything..."I could teach myself this!" kind of attitude. You get out, get that first professional job and think, "Whoa, I really didn't learn what I needed to know to face this crazy person or this screaming dad!".

But you did learn exactly what you needed to be successful - research skills, problem solving, the big picture of librarianship and it's history, how to learn more on any subject and skill and a critical eye to determine which way is best to go to make libraries more..better...indispensible.  And you did it in that atmosphere of higher learning that surrounded you with mentors, peers and discussions that formed your library worldview.

Now take that knowledge and keep building on it and push ahead and lead now. Don't wait until some old guy like me says, "Well, I think you're ready to be listened to." Go out and grab the brass ring now and shine, shine, shine.

Don't wait for permission - start that blog or tumblr. Leap into Facebook's ALA Think Tank group or Friend Feed's Library Society of the World or Flannel Friday. Start collaborating within Google groups or Twitter. Propose programs. Share thoughts. Pursue big ideas.

Fail. Learn. Try again. Succeed. Fail. Retrack. Tinker. Try again. Succeed. Listen, listen, listen. Learn, learn, learn. And lead and imagine and invent. And then share, share, share.

I am learning so much right now from current MLIS students and shiny new librarians of one, two, three, four and five years experience. After thirty seven years in the biz, you all are rocking my world and keeping me fresh and energized.

So give yourself permission to be that innovator, that mover and shaker and emerging leader. Don't be shy. Step right out, step right up and show your stuff. The library world is waiting for you.And so am I!

Image from Pixabay http://pixabay.com/

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By Gerald O’Collins, SJ

“Pope Benedict is 78 years of age. Father O’Collins, do you think he’ll resign at 80?” “Brian,” I said, “give him a chance. He hasn’t even started yet.” It was the afternoon of 19 April 2005, and I was high above St Peter’s Square standing on the BBC World TV platform with Brian Hanrahan. The senior cardinal deacon had just announced from the balcony of St Peter’s to a hundred thousand people gathered in the square: “Habemus Papam.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been elected pope.

Less than an hour earlier, white smoke pouring from a chimney poking up from the Sistine Chapel let the world know that the cardinal electors had chosen a successor to Pope John Paul II. The bells of Rome were supposed to ring out the news at once. But it took a quarter of an hour for them to chime in. When Hanrahan asked me why the bells hadn’t come in on cue, I pointed the finger at local inefficiency: “We’re in Italy, Brian.”

I was wrong. The keys to the telephone that should have let someone contact the bellringers were in the pocket of the dean of the college of cardinals, Joseph Ratzinger. He had gone into a change room to put on his white papal attire, and didn’t hand over the keys until he came out dressed as pope.

One of the oldest cardinals ever to be elected pope, after less than eight years in office Benedict XVI has now bravely decided to retire or, to use the “correct” word, abdicate. His declining health has made him surrender his role as Bishop of Rome, successor of St Peter, and visible head of the Catholic Christendom. He no longer has the stamina to give the Church the leadership it deserves and needs.

Years ago an Irish lady, after watching Benedict’s predecessor in action, said to me: “He popes well.” You didn’t need to be a specialized Vatican watcher to notice how John Paul II and Benedict “poped” very differently.

A charismatic, photogenic, and media-savvy leader, John Paul II proved a global, political figure who did as much as anyone to end European Communism. He more or less died on camera, with thousands of young people holding candles as they prayed and wept for their papal friend dying in his dimly lit apartment above St Peter’s Square.

Now Benedict’s papacy ends very differently. He will not be laid out for several million people to file past his open coffin. His fisherman’s ring will not be ceremoniously broken. There will be no official nine days of mourning or funeral service attended by world leaders and followed on television or radio by several billion people. He will not be lifted high above the crowd like a Viking king, as his coffin is carried for burial into the Basilica of St Peter’s. The first pope to use a pacemaker will quietly walk off the world stage.

In my latest book, an introduction to Catholicism, I naturally included a (smiling) picture of Pope Benedict. But he pales in comparison with the photos of John Paul II anointing and blessing the sick on a 1982 visit to the UK; meeting the Dalai Lama before going to pray for world peace in Assisi; in a prison cell visiting Mehmet Ali Agca, who had tried to assassinate him in May 1981; and hugging Mother Teresa of Calcutta after visiting one of her homes for the destitute and dying.

Yet the bibliography of that introduction contains no book written by John Paul II either before or after he became pope. But it does contain the enduring classic by Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (originally published 1967). Both as pope and earlier, it was through the force of his ideas rather than the force of his personality that Benedict XVI exercised his leadership.

The public relations record of Pope Benedict was far from perfect. He will be remembered for quoting some dismissive remarks about Islam made by a Byzantine emperor. That 2006  speech in Regensburg led to riots and worse in the Muslim world. Many have forgotten his visit later that year to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul when he turned towards Mecca and joined his hosts in silent prayer.

Catholics and other Christians around the world hope now for a forward-looking pope who can offer fresh leadership and deal quickly with some crying needs like the ordination of married men and the return to the local churches of the decision-making that some Vatican offices have arrogated to themselves.

When he speaks at midday from his apartment to the people gathered in St Peter’s Square on 24 February, the last Sunday before his resignation kicks in, Pope Benedict will be making his final public appearance before the people of Rome. A vast crowd will have streamed in from the city and suburbs to thank him with their thunderous applause. They cherished the clear, straightforward language of his sermons and homilies, and admire him for what will prove the defining moment of his papacy—his courageous decision to resign and pass the baton to a much younger person.

Gerald O’Collins received his Ph.D. in 1968 at the University of Cambridge, where he was a research fellow at Pembroke College. From 1973-2006, he taught at the Gregorian University (Rome) where he was also dean of the theology faculty (1985-91). Alone or with others, he has published fifty books, including Catholicism: A Very Short Introduction and The Second Vatican Council on Other Religions. As well as receiving over the years numerous honorary doctorates and other awards, in 2006 he was created a Companion of the General Division of the Order of Australia (AC), the highest civil honour granted through the Australian government. Currently he is a research professor of theology at St Mary’s University College,Twickenham (UK).

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Image Credits: Pope Benedict XVI during general audition By Tadeusz Górny, public domain via Wikimedia Commons; Church of the Carmine, Martina Franca, Apulia, Italy. Statues of Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II By Tango7174, creative commons licence via Wikimedia Commons

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Oxford University Press USA is putting together a series of articles on a political topic each week for four weeks as the United States discusses the upcoming American presidential election, and Republican and Democratic National Conventions. Our scholars previously tackled the issues of money and politics, and the role of political conventions. This week we turn to the role of media in politics.

By Daniel Kreiss

A recent Pew study on the presidential candidates’ use of social media described Barack Obama as having a “substantial lead” over Mitt Romney. The metrics for the study were the amounts of content these candidates post, the number of platforms the campaigns are active on, and the differential responses of the public.

Metrics such as these often tell us very little about how campaigns are actually using social media and the Internet more generally, and their relative strategies for and success in doing so. If there is anything that I found in my last six years of researching new media and electoral campaigns, it is that much of what makes for the successful uptake of new media is often the organizational decisions that receive scant scholarly and journalistic attention. A focus on platforms and content tells us little about the issues of campaign organization, staffing, and coordination of digital and field efforts around electoral strategy that have much more impact on electoral success.

For one, both the Obama and Romney campaigns have created organizational structures that make the heads of their respective new media teams senior leadership. The Romney campaign learned this by studying Obama’s 2008 campaign, which was among the first efforts to organize a campaign in this way.

This organizational role, in turn, helps integrate new media operations within the larger electoral strategy of the campaign. This is important because effective campaigns take up new media in accordance with their electoral goals, and investments in new media have to be evaluated in light of overall campaign strategy. There are very real differences between the presidential candidates, their parties, their supporter and donor bases, and electoral strategies — so much so that we should not expect them to have the same goals for, strategies of using, and investments in their use of new and social media.

During the 2008 cycle, for example, the Obama team took to new media early on, with the specific goal of using an array of tools to overcome the institutional advantages of Senator Hillary Clinton. For the campaign, this meant using new media as a fundraising and especially organizing tool in accordance with the larger electoral goal of expanding the electorate among groups favorable to Obama with historically low rates of turnout: youth and African Americans. Above all, it meant using new media to translate the incredible energy of supporters gathering around the candidate into resources that campaigns need: money, message, volunteers, and ultimately, votes. And yet, while this worked for Obama, other candidates with essentially the same tools could not inspire the same supporter mobilization. The story of the 2008 Obama campaign is neatly summed up in what Michael Slaby, the 2008 campaign’s chief technology officer and the 2012 campaign’s chief integration and innovation officer, said to me: “We didn’t have to generate desire very often. We had to capture and empower interest and desire…. We made intelligent decisions that kept it growing but I don’t think anybody can really claim we started something.”

In this light, the continual hope, exemplified in the Pew Study, for “transforming campaigning into something more dynamic, more of a dialogue,” and the inevitable let down when this does not occur, is a case of our democratic aspirations placing undo expectations on campaigns. Campaigns have very concrete metrics for success given electoral institutions. Campaigns are temporal entities with defined goals: garnering the resources and ultimately the votes necessary to win elections. They are not about democratic renewal, although certainly that can happen. Furthermore, much of the discourse calling for dialogue ignores a fundamental fact: the goals of campaigns and their supporters on social media are often closely aligned around defeating opponents. Supporters embrace tasks and respond to one-way messaging because their goal is to win on election day, not remake democratic processes.

Indeed, a close look at the networked tools campaigns across the aisle are now routinely using in 2012 reveals an emphasis on electoral gain, and integrating tools within larger electoral strategy. The story of the last decade in electoral campaigning has been both about a reinvestment in old fashioned, shoe leather campaigning coupled with new data infrastructures designed to more efficiently and effectively coordinate volunteers and leverage their time, efforts, and social networks. As Rasmus Nielsen has analyzed in his recent book, in the face of widespread practitioner recognition of the diminishing returns of broadcast television ads, fragmented audiences, narrowly decided contests, and social science findings, campaigns have increasingly enlisted humans as media through what he calls “personalized political communication.” Campaigns deploy field volunteers on the basis of voter modeling and targeting supported by a vast, national data infrastructure stitched together from a host of public (voter registration, turnout, and real estate records), commercial (credit card information, magazine subscription lists), party (historical canvass data), and increasingly social network data.

Leveraging people as media in the field complements the ways in which campaigns enlist supporters as the conduits of strategic communications to their strong and weak ties online. Campaigns seek to utilize the social affordances of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to create what I call new “digital two step flows” of political communication, where official campaign content circulates virally through networks of supporters. On one level, geographic-based volunteering in supporters’ communities is now supported by networked devices, such as the Obama Dashboard volunteer platform that creates teams based on location, and mobile apps that display local voter contact targets and scripts for contacting them. On another, through networked media far-flung affinity, professional, and social ties can now serve as channels of political communication designed to mobilize donors and online volunteers. Campaigns believe that political communication coming from supporters contacting voters through their geographic and social networks is more persuasive.

Alongside the fashioning of supporters into media and their social networks into channels, campaigns have developed sophisticated “computational management” practices that leverage media as internal and external coordination devices. New media is a closed loop; every expenditure can be tracked in terms of its return on investment given the ability to generate real time results of supporters’ interactions with networked media. If creating digital two step flows remains more art than science as campaigns struggle to make content go viral, optimizing web content and online advertising is data-driven to probabilistically increase the likelihood that supporters will take the actions campaigns want them to. Optimization is based around continually running experimental trials of web content and design in order to probabilistically increase the likelihood of desired outcomes. This means campaigns vary the format, colors, content, shapes, images, and videos of a whole range of email and website content based on the characteristics of particular users to find what is most optimal for increasing returns. In 2008, for example, the Obama campaign created over 2,000 different versions of its contribution page, and across the campaign optimization accounted for $57 million dollars, which essentially paid for the campaign’s general election budgets in Florida and Ohio.

At the same time, while television advertising has dominated campaign expenditures for much of the last half century, campaigns are increasingly investing in online advertising, which is premised on being able to access new sources of behavioral, demographic, and affinity data that allows for the more sophisticated targeting and tailoring of political messages. Campaigns can match online IP addresses with party voter files, allowing them to target priority voters. Campaigns use this matching, along with behavioral, demographic, interest, and look-alike targeting (matching voters based on the characteristics they share with others with known political preferences), to deliver online ads for the purposes of list-building, mobilizing supporters to get involved, and persuading undecideds.

Despite the best attempts of staffers, campaigns remain messy, complicated affairs. While it would be easy to see things such as computational management and online advertising in Orwellian terms, the reality is that campaigns are continually creating and appropriating new tools and platforms because their control over the electorate is limited. Candidates still contend with intermediaries in the press, opponents engaging in their own strategic communications, and voters who have limited attention spans, social attachments, and partisan affiliations that mitigate the effects of even the most finely tailored advertising. Millions, meanwhile, refuse to engage in the process, a massive silent minority that campaigns only spend significant resources on if they have them. There must always be political desire that exists prior to any of these targeted communications practices, or else supporters and voters will tune them out like much else that is peripheral to their core concerns.

In the end, as another presidential general election takes shape, we see continuities in electoral politics in the face of considerable technological change.

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University. Kreiss’s work has appeared in New Media and Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, The Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and The International Journal of Communication, in addition to other academic journals. You can find out more about Kreiss’s research at http://danielkreiss.com or follow him on Twitter at @kreissdaniel

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This past month, I finished my first full term as Wisconsin’s Chapter Councilor on the ALA Council.  It has been a great adventure and I can hardly wait for the next two years of services as I continue my term. I have spent decades as an ALSC leader – serving on committees and as committee chair on process committees and even a time or two on an award committee. I have also spent decades as a leader in my own state association.  Combining these two streams of process junkie-hood and leadership makes for a perfect preparation for Council.

 

When I first talked to my library colleagues both in state and nationally about my new Council service, the biggest surprise I had was how many sympathized for me and thanked me for serving in such a difficult assignment.  What?!?! Were they nuts? I was looking forward to a new level of service and leadership. Was I missing something?

 

Happily, no. The Council of the past and the monster nightmare of people’s imaginations is not the ALA Council I serve on.  There is certainly debate but the rancor is missing. People have been welcoming, have provided support and insight for me and I can say that after one year I am feeling like I am home. I am getting to know some smart, savvy caring people from all types of libraries and all library positions. I am making contacts across divisions as well and talking about the issues I care about and becoming more knowledgable about issues that matter to others.  I am becoming stronger and smarter (I think!).

 

Just one little teeny tiny thing is missing for me.  Youth colleagues and leaders from ALSC are very few and far between. I have plenty of youth peeps from YALSA and AASL but ALSC is sadly underrepresented.  Where are you, my friends?

 

I know in the past we have had many more folks representing ALSC as at-large members.  Would you like to consider joining our small but merry (and meaningful) band?  It’s easy. You can submit your name to the nominations committee. You can petition for a spot on the ballot with a mere 25 signatures of ALA members which you can garner online.

 

It is amazing feeling to effect change on a divisional level and to work on behalf of youth librarianship and kids on that stage.  It is an extraordinary feeling to do the same thing on the ALA Council level. Won’t you consider joining me there?  I promise you, the water is fine….and fun!

Our guest blogger today is Marge Loch-Wouters, the Youth Services Coordinator at La Crosse (WI) Public Library. Marge is active in ALSC and blogs regularly about youth library services issues at Tiny Tips for Library Fun

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at [email protected].

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