Preface

After nine years of taking part in major changes in the German National Library of Science and Technology and University Library Hannover (TIB/UB) as leader of the Financial Management and Administration Department and being responsible for Corporate Management and Personnel Development, I’m more than ever interested in change processes and in the new challenges arising for leaders in libraries.

During those nine years the TIB/UB introduced teamwork, integrated parts of another library, developed and implemented a strategy and began working with the Balanced Scorecard as their management tool, just to name a few of the deliberate large-scale changes.

In my doctoral thesis (Düren, 2009), I have analysed the impact of leadership styles on the success of the Balanced Scorecard in public service and non-profit organisations based on a survey in the TIB/UB.

Now working as a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg two of my subjects are ‘Libraries in Times of Change – Change Management’ and ‘Human Resource Management’. These are also the topics of my main research project. The findings of my research can be found in this book.

I carried out very interesting expert interviews with middle management leaders and directors of academic and public libraries as well as change managers in libraries. As this shows only one side of the coin I could also have asked the team members about their superior’s leadership style. But I wanted to find out what leaders thought throughout their change projects, whether they recognised the anxieties and worries of their team members and how they reacted to them, what communication tools they used during the change process and if they thought afterwards that they could or should have done anything better.

Even if this doesn’t reveal whether a change process was done well or whether it could have been done in a better way (for this I should also have asked the staff working in the libraries) it nevertheless shows that leaders nowadays are able to reflect on what they have done, that most of them did change their behaviour throughout a change process as well as their leadership style, and that all of them had to cope with new leadership aspects.

It is always helpful to talk to other librarians who have also had to cope with deliberate large-scale changes to get some new ideas or a different perspective on an issue. This book offers such help through the wide range of major changes that are described.

This book might give the readers some ideas about their own leadership style and help them in difficult situations throughout a change process as well as in day-to-day management.

I would like to thank all leaders and change managers that participated in my research project and were willing to answer openly my questions concerning the deliberate largescale change project in their library, their leadership style, their communication methods, their recommendations for other leaders in similar situations as well as their failures during these major change processes.