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Leadership in the Digital Age

Taking the Library forward

Leadership skills for the 21th Century

Gunnar Sahlin, Amsterdam 2013 – 09 - 16

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Gaia Leadership• Founded1998

• Customers in Europe, North America & Asia

• Offices in Stockholm, Malmö & Shanghai

• 32 partners

Both …• Top Management & First

Line Managers• Private & Public sectors• Structure & Culture• Individuals &

Organizations

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Leadership in Libraries

• What do we mean with new models of leadership in library and information?

• What is the difference between the leadership of today compared with the leadership some decades ago?

• What kind of leadership do we need in libraries?

• It is some very interesting research about leadership today. Could we find new ways of leadership, influenced by the leadership research?

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Libraries in the digital age and the importance of a new kind of leadership

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Leadership in the digital age

A general view and some examples

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Shape and describe a vision and realize it

HOW

WHAT

WHY

• “People buy WHY we do it, not WHAT we do or HOW we do it”

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Integration of culture & structure

We need ways to work that support our values &we need values that support our ways to work

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Extraordinary result arises when there is a strong inner drive of the individual –

and when connected to the organization's purpose, vision and goals.

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Acting as second-line manager in libraries

• Showing an avid interest in issues in the world around us and living with the issue of how my own business is integrated into the whole.

• Deepening my understanding of internal and external stakeholders, being able to exercise my own leadership in relation to other parts of the organization and in relation to the surrounding world.

• As a manager of managers having ownership of the various strategic perspectives and areas, the vision, values, my own goals and strategies

• Expanding the time perspective in my leadership, from a more short-term and operative approach to a more long-term and strategic focus.

• Going from expert-oriented leadership to being a leader who leads based on goals and results.

• Shifting focus from details to a more general focus.

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• Stop rolling up my sleeves and doing it myself to instead creating scope for having an overview, adopting a long-term approach and dealing with strategic issues.

• Working to create common objectives and consensus on important issues in partnership with the managers in my own business unit/my own management group.

• Increasing awareness of my own need for control and finding strategies to be able to supervise and monitor in a way that generates commitment among my managers and employees.

• Tackling existential issues, such as my own value, my need for acknowledgement by clarifying, creating and owning the role as second-line manager.

• Leading my own management group based on a high level of awareness, facilitating and developing the management group in both operative and strategic issues.

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An organizations long-term ability to compete in

the public world is in direct proportion to it´s

ability to create and develop leaders

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The communicative leadership

• Build up a structure for communication

inside and outside the organization

outside the organization

• Building networks and looking for partners outside the library world

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Interplay between part & wholeness

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Focus on the individual growth

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Fewer and fewer problems can be solved without a holistic (“Wholeness”) perspective

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Leadership in five dimensions

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Thank you