Leading Libraries: How to Create a Service Culture. By Wyoma vanDuinkerken and Wendy Arant Kaspar. Chicago: ALA, 2015. 224 p. Paper $65.00 (ISBN: 978-0-8389-1312-3).
Librarianship is a service industry, so aren’t librarians, by definition, already service leaders? The answer, according to authors Wyoma vanDuinkerken and Wendy Arant Kaspar, is “no.” Libraries and librarians may be part of a service industry, but to create a servant leader and a true service culture requires more than just lip service.
Leading Libraries: How to Create a Service Culture begin with two chapters overviewing the major views on leadership theories and service leadership, creating a foundation for the remainder of the book. This section feels like a whirlwind, as the authors cram decades of management and leadership theory into just twenty pages. For those with prior knowledge of leadership theories, this isn’t difficult, but readers unfamiliar with the context may feel overwhelmed.
The remainder of the book focuses on five concepts—conscientiousness; rapport building; encouragement and accountability; innovation; and sustainability. Each concept is discussed in its own chapter, which addresses relevant research from the fields of organizational development, library science, and even psychology and political science. These chapters lead readers to examine their own values, opinions, and actions in light of their desire to be a servant leader and their own personal characteristics. Each concept is treated with equal importance, and—as with most leadership theories—can be applied not just to one’s job but to one’s entire life. At the end of these chapters, the authors provide guided reflection tools for the reader, urging them to evaluate their own professional (and sometimes personal) lives. The questions are thought-provoking and prompt reader to do some higher-order thinking about how these concepts can be observed and emulated.
The authors provide two very practical chapters at the end—chapter 9, “Formalizing Service Leadership in Libraries,” and chapter 10, “Service Leadership in Libraries.” Chapter 9 provides exactly what its title promises: a way to formally introduce service leadership into the library setting. This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road, and the readers learn how and where service leadership can be implemented. Its main topics relate to personnel: recruitment, selection, evaluation, development, and rewards and compensation. Although much of the book is inwardly focused, encouraging readers to change themselves to become service leaders, this chapter discusses how to create service leadership throughout the library through careful curation of library employees. Chapter 10 provides more detailed information about how employees perceive their culture from the inside and how patrons perceive a service culture from the outside. It focuses on the daily tasks of a library that aims to communicate its service culture to its patrons.
One overarching theme of this book is the idea that leaders must practice what they preach. The reader will lose count how many times the authors insist that a service leader cannot simply say they want things to be a certain way—they must exemplify everything they hope their library and its employees to be. A leader must “walk the talk,” so to speak, because if leaders can’t change, neither will their libraries. This advice is repeated so often that it almost prompts eye-rolling, but the reminder is nonetheless important.
For those who already have some background in leadership theory, this book is an excellent choice for learning how some of those theories can be applied in a library setting. It certainly shouldn’t be the first or only book one reads on leadership, and some background and foundational reading would be necessary. However, Leading Libraries encourages the necessary metacognition and self-reflection that is helpful for understanding how to evaluate one’s own brand of leadership, as well as providing practical advice on how to truly embrace the service culture libraries are meant to exemplify.—Jennifer Tatum, Reference & Instruction Librarian, Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology, Okmulgee, Oklahoma