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Harvard College CampusI arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts late this morning to spend a week at Harvard to attend the Leadership Institute for Academic Librarians. The Harvard Institutes for Higher Education collaborates annually with ACRL to present this institute. Their goal (and mine) is to increase attendees’ (my) capacity to lead and manage.
The program starts tomorrow afternoon, so I arrived today to get acclimated and be ready to dive into what promises to be a fairly intense week of discussion and study. Issues that we will examine are:
- How well positioned is our organization to meet current and future challenges?
- How effective is my own leadership?
We’ll be looking at characteristics of effective leadership in academic organizations, transformational learning, planning, and organizational strategy and change.
One of the main texts that will be used to help shape discussion is Bolman and Deal’s Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership. It advances a four-frame model of organizations -as factories (structural frame; formal roles and responsibilities), families (human resources frame; organizations as extended family), jungles (political frame; organizations as contests), and temples (cultural frame; organizations as tribes). Each of these has its own image of reality. We will be learning how it is important to understand all four and use all of them to gain a better overall understanding by viewing different perspectives. They maintain that learning multiple perspectives is a good defense against cluelessness (think Lay/Enron).
I’m looking forward to this opportunity to spend a week where I can focus in-depth on issues that are very important to me in my new role and to our library as we start the process of implementing our ambitious strategic plan. I will try to keep a daily update (if we don’t have too much homework!).