On academic leadership

No, the purpose of this post isn't to reveal the secrets of successful academic leadership. If I had those, believe you me I'd be writing this from my villa on the French Riviera.

However, I am heading off to the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians in Boston next week where I hope to be a least a little more enlightened and educated along that path.

Not surprisingly I've been watching the blogosphere these last few months for insightful posts and articles about academic leadership, in particular academic library leadership. I've found a few and I thought I'd share them with you.

First of all, though, I'd like to mention what the course textbook is. It's Reframing Academic Leadership by Lee G. Bolman and Joan V. Gallos. It a very good book with both practical and theoretical approaches to leadership that I find quite interesting. What's really useful is that is situates the challenges of leadership within the unique environment of collegial governance, the demands of research/teaching/service and a tenured professoriat/librarian complement. It's well worth reading. I hope to get around to a more detailed review later in the summer.

Anyways, here's some of the things I've found over the last little while. It's all on the open web so I'm sure there's lots of books and articles that would be useful that I haven't linked to. It's worth noting that I didn't only look for stuff on leadership but also ideas that are useful for leaders or potential leaders.

Of course, please feel free to suggest additional resources in the comments, either on the free web or other books and articles that you might know of.

• Organizing is what librarians do
• On the state of professional development in librarianship
• Bad Advice (on getting good & bad advice as a leader)
• 'Seduction of the Leader'
• 6 Ways Leaders Can Build Trust
• How Libraries Trump Big Media
• Bad Female Academic: Administrative Ambition
• The exodus (of tech-savvy librarians)
• Slide deck from ALCTS Forum on the Ithaka report
• oh, you mean organizing skills!: activism as management metaphor
• but they didn't teach me that in library school!
• Asking by Listening
• Are You a Crisis Manager?
• The Tao of Librarianship
• Bravery based librarianship is the (only) future
• The Joys of Administration

I'll only add one post of my own that I think might be useful: A stealth librarianship manifesto.

There are a few blogs that are more-or-less required reading for me on academic library leadership, again not just because they're about leadership but because they have ideas that are useful to leaders or potential leaders:

• Attempting Elegance by Jenica Rogers
• Confessions of a Community College Dean by Dean Dad
• Library Babel Fish by Barbara Fister

I'm sure there are others -- suggestions are always welcome.

It's worth noting that my some of my hesitations and doubts about thought leadership apply to the domain of academic leadership as well, but different, of course. It something that's important and that needs to be embraced to be able to move forward and grow but that we also need to be careful and critical about. Perhaps I'll explore those in detail at a later time.