Leadership in the post-hierarchical library - The Library Director

Library Trends, Summer, 1994 by Richard T. Sweeney

THE POST-HIERARCHICAL LIBRARY IS A flattened organization, unlimited by the traditional hierarchy, antibureaucratic, with empowered cross-functional teams, fewer people, constant learning, and redefined and re-engineered work processes focused on customer service. The purpose of the post-hierarchical library is to increase user satisfaction with reduced resources and more staff empowerment. It is being propelled by rising user service demands, increasing costs, new technologies, and internal and commercial competition. The post-hierarchical library leader is a planner, coordinator, motivator, negotiator, innovator, communicator, listener, recruiter, risk taker, problem solver, and evaluator. The leader's responsibilities include adopting and exemplifying a user satisfaction mind set, defining and articulating the mission and strategic plan, creating a supporting technology and knowledge-sharing infrastructure, and fostering relationships and teams. The significant impediments to the development of the post-hierarchical library are the inertia of the parent institution, the leader, the staff, and the motivation for change.

INTRODUCTION

Times of rapid change call for real leaders who possess, communicate, and implement a vision for radically transformed and improved organizations. This article is about such radically redesigned library organizations and the characteristics of the library leaders who will create them.

This article will answer five questions: (1) What is the posthierarchical library and how will it develop? (2) Why should the traditional library be reengineered? (3) What are the characteristics and roles of the post-hierarchical library leader? (4) What are the critical library leadership strategies? (5) What are the impediments to recruiting a library leader and implementing the post-hierarchical library?

The first part of this article explores the vision and nature of reengineering the traditional library and the reasons why this radical redesign is underway. The post-hierarchical library is a radically redesigned and reengineered concept of a library with an entirely new organizational structure and redesigned work processes. The term post-hierarchical library has been created by this author since there is no other suitable term. Terms such as the electronic library, the virtual library, and the smart library do not convey the same meaning. Primarily, the post-hierarchical library will change the nature of library service, library work, and library leadership, and second, the post-hierarchical library, like the electronic library, the virtual library, and the smart library, will involve the use of new information technologies, the emerging national information infrastructure (NII), and the electronic highway (National Research Education Network).

The latter part of this article explores the leader and the leadership skills necessary to transform this new vision into reality. What are the post-hierarchical library leader's desirable traits, skills, roles, ideas, inventions, motivations, and limitations? Such leaders must make quantum leaps in the quality, type, and amount of library services. These library leaders understand and communicate the vision of the library of the future and implement it within radically reengineered organizations.

Is it possible to reengineer vast improvements in the effectiveness and productivity of libraries? How is this possible? Is it possible to implement a reengineered library with a more humane organizational structure? Who will be able to do this? Why is it difficult but not impossible for library leaders to successfully create the post-hierarchical library? How can boards of trustees, university administrators, school principals, and others identify and recruit a new breed of library leaders to accomplish such new organizations? The library community has not yet answered these questions. This article is a first step to posing the questions and, in some cases, suggesting possible solutions.

THE POST-HIERARCHICAL LIBRARY

Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical

redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements

in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost,

quality, service, and speed. (Hammer & Champy, 1993, p. 32)

The post-hierarchical library may be thought of as the "antibureaucratic library." It is an organization which is much more focused on patron or user service and much less bound by inflexible rules and the paperwork tradition. Unlike bureaucracy, the post-hierarchical library may often change its organizational structure fundamentally and rapidly in order to offer new and better services to meet rapidly changing user needs. The staff of this type of library is characterized by its flexibility, willingness and ability to learn and adapt. The post-hierarchical library is characterized by a unique mission, self-organizaing systems, and major changes in work processes but not by fixed bureaucratic systems. This library, most of all, is more focused on the satisfaction of user information needs.