To Lead Libraries Through Uncertainty, First Strengthen Relationships and Build Self-Awareness

Libraries are facing a period of profound uncertainty and rapid change. Challenges include ensuring fiscal security, highlighting impact within the communities we serve, and managing evolving technological advances that are increasing tensions across these domains. For librarians operating within a difficult organizational or community culture, these challenges might be exacerbated by barriers between colleagues; difficulties with upper administration who may not see the value of the library within the institution/community; as well as role-related isolation and stress, which can have long-lasting physical and emotional effects.

Adaptive leadership provides a solid framework to harness collective action around change and offer strategies for individual well-being and support.

Defining Adaptive Leadership

Developed by Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linksy, and Alexander Grashow, adaptive leadership is an approach that centers the relationships, actions, and tools shared between individuals who face common problems that they must work together to resolve as they respond to change (Lance, 2024). Adaptive leadership helps teams achieve collective goals by giving them the structures they need to accomplish the work, situating that work within a broader context, and outlining priorities. The model emphasizes building self-awareness and engaging in reflective practices in order to address what Heifetz et al. call “adaptive challenges,” which are by their very definition unknown or difficult to identify. Such challenges are tied to deeper patterns or dynamics; require a time to resolve, with progress happening in fits and starts; and often require reshaping values, beliefs, and roles.

The approach identifies three important steps leaders can take to create the conditions for success:

1. Apply clear decision-making and communication methods to strengthen interpersonal relationships so that team members can freely share feedback and ideas.
2. Encourage individuals to adopt a problem-solving mindset focused on what is within the control of the team rather than what isn’t.
3. Center underrepresented voices, identities, and experiences that ground change processes in diverse perspectives.

Building Your Adaptive Leadership Practice

Leadership is a practice like any other. While some folks might have a natural inclination toward certain actions and behaviors associated with leadership, this inclination can be developed and improved over time and is not tied to any specific position within an organizational structure—leadership is a process, not an attribute. The challenge, however, is that although there are degree programs in organizational development, organizational psychology, and specific leadership activities, like management or human resources, leadership has to be applied in a real-world setting and is highly individualized. Leaders develop as they try out different approaches and learn from mistakes, adding to their toolkit of techniques over time. Adaptive leadership takes this dynamic further and purposefully centers reflection, learning, and experimentation.

Strengthening relationships by building self-awareness

Understanding and validating emotions plays a key role in how we communicate and handle conflict. Debra Lucas (2020) describes emotional intelligence as the capacity to be “aware of, control, and express one's emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships effectively.”

This definition is useful as we approach the aspects of adaptive leadership that emphasize the interplay between self and others and navigating the interpersonal dynamics and interactions between individuals and groups. In practice, this means you should:

• Recognize your emotions and how they affect your thoughts and behaviors, especially when you are under stress; identify strengths and weaknesses and areas of improvement.
• Clarify and share how your values guide you in making decisions and communicating in a variety of contexts.
• Try to understand the emotions, needs, and concerns of others by asking questions rather than making assumptions; and recognize the power dynamics in a group that may affect how comfortable people are sharing feedback, especially with someone in administration. Model how to receive feedback constructively.
• Support difficult conversations effectively by practicing active listening to better understand someone else’s perspective and by focusing on how to address the issue rather than being right or winning.
• Determine how you manage team dynamics. Create space for frank conversations between library staff about how they want to work together, considering both day-to-day functions as well as higher-level decisions or strategies. This requires establishing concrete roles and responsibilities for teams working on projects, using a range of decision-making models and communication formats, and developing a way to address conflict in the moment as well as after a situation has occurred

Neurodiversity may impact emotional awareness, and we cannot make assumptions about others’ experiences or needs. As Alice Eng (2017) reveals in her article “Neurodiversity in the Library: One Librarian’s Experience,” we don’t always know what someone is dealing with and what their strategies are for navigating the workplace—sometimes employees are open about these issues and other times they are not. Openness requires a high degree of vulnerability and trust, and not all environments are conducive to such disclosures. It’s important to create as much opportunity as possible for individuals to feel safe in sharing the information they want to share and to provide accommodations and support as requested.

Problem-solving through tiny experiments

Another way of integrating adaptive leadership concepts with practice is through what Anne-Laure LeCunff (2025) calls “tiny experiments,” and what I would re-categorize as “adaptive experiments.” This process begins by cultivating curiosity, opening ourselves to the possibilities rather than trying to predict the future, which allows us to look at our actions from a new viewpoint. As we conduct these experiments, we focus on the process of learning as much as the outcomes, which provides an evolving roadmap that includes many ways to grow and develop.

How do adaptive experiments help to address adaptive challenges? They can help to focus attention on specific issues and make challenges seem less daunting by providing a place to start. Lessons can be learned quickly as mistakes are made and corrective action is taken. Finally, they are iterative, which offers a lot of flexibility in how to approach the problem.

Experimentation begins with asking a question or identifying something that I want to learn more about. For example, if we were experiencing a staffing shortage in our instruction department, I could ask: How can I best determine what work needs to be paused or stopped until we decide how to address this shortage?

The next step is to set a specific goal using this format: I will [action] for [duration]. For example, “I will conduct a workload analysis for the next two weeks.” Instead of trying to resolve the entire staffing shortage at once, I am beginning with a smaller, trackable, and concrete step.

As the experiment unfolds, I periodically pause to reflect on what is going well, what isn’t working, and how I might adjust based on what I am learning.

Finally, I can choose whether or not to continue the same experiment, to stop it completely, or to make different changes based on the data gathered. In this instance, I may find that several folks are doing similar tasks that can be temporarily collapsed or that my method for conducting analysis needs to be adjusted. For a leader dealing with an adaptive challenge, this iterative process can provide a good place to start analyzing what is happening and how they might want to address it. This process can also scale to organizational applications and is non-linear, meaning that I can conduct several experiments at once; this makes it easier to pivot if an initial question fails to help align my actions towards my goals.

Creating a critical library culture to address adaptive challenges

A final key aspect of adaptive leadership is centering inclusion, which is deeply connected to the first element of strengthening connections between individuals and is the foundation for all other change to come. Jennifer Ferretti (2020) identifies several core components of creating a supportive workplace culture that values equity and diversity and allows all employees to have an active role in how the organization functions. Developing this type of culture offers employees an increased sense of agency and encourages everyone to proactively contribute to maintaining the mechanisms that enable such a culture to thrive:

1. Ensuring that leaders/managers take a critical approach to organizational culture and continually engage in training, reflection, and feedback to improve the environment. This includes cultivating self-awareness about how they might be contributing to systems of harm or marginalization and then broadening their focus to the entire organization. This also means that employees are safe in raising issues and bringing feedback to supervisors and colleagues alike. Again, note the focus on personal and collective action to support making internal changes within the library, which is a significant first step toward resolving adaptive challenges.
2. Establishing organizational norms related to interpersonal interactions, which provide a means to address situations where someone has been harmed or has witnessed behavior or actions where a norm was violated. This may involve working with other groups, such as equity offices or human resources, to create a shared understanding and provide training.
3. Addressing how employees, including new employees, are able to shape and contribute to a positive organizational culture. Are there clear expectations for how to engage with each other? Is there a common definition and practice of accountability? Are issues addressed through a problem-solving approach rather than a blaming one? These areas require continuous and intentional attention through conversations, explicit commitments, and practices that are updated on a regular basis.
4. Ensuring employees are supported through pay and promotion. In addition to pay and promotion, I would include all structural aspects related to employee recruitment and retention that affect how library workers feel the organization values their work, both in terms of career growth/compensation and recognition, which in turn provides the motivation to actively contribute to the mission and vision of the library as it addresses adaptive challenges. During times of fiscal constraints, this last element may seem particularly daunting. Actions such as strategic budgeting, reallocation of resources, and prioritizing employee retention can help make it more achievable

Conclusion

By focusing on the connections between people and the values, actions, and behaviors that enable teams to effectively address change, adaptive leadership offers a compelling vision for the future of library leadership. While we may not be able to anticipate or control what lies ahead, adaptive leadership offers a path that amplifies the interconnectedness of our actions and experiences. Rather than prescribing a checklist that leaders can complete to succeed on their own, adaptive leadership lets connection, learning, and curiosity inform the behaviors that enable every person within an organization to act as a catalyst for their own journey of change.

References

Eng, A. (2017, July 17). Neurodiversity in the library: one librarian’s experience. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2017/neurodiversity-in-the-library/

Ferretti, J. A. (2020). Building a critical culture: How critical librarianship falls short in the workplace. Communications in Information Literacy, 14 (1), 134-152. https://doi.org/10.15760/comminfolit.2020.14.1.10

Lance, L. L. (2024, January 29). Adaptive leadership principles and how to practice it. People Managing People. https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/personal-development/leadership-management/adaptive-leadership/

Le Cunff, A. (2025). Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Penguin Publishing Group.

Lucas, D. (2020). Emotional intelligence for librarians. Library Leadership & Management, 34(3). https://doi.org/10.5860/llm.v34i3.7452