Conclusion
Abstract:
Leadership is a personal journey, a process that requires time and effort not only from the person interested and involved but also from those around him/her in order to create a successful leader. And by those around, I mean the organization and its existing leaders. Existing successful leaders need to identify new leaders from various immigrant populations and train them to be future leaders. Remember the 4As – Acquire, Apply, Assert and Attain/Ascertain.No community willingly wants to promote bad leaders, but these do exist as well. Good leaders care about their employees or cohorts, sometimes at the expense of themselves. Good leaders focus on a task and lead everyone towards it. They don’t create change for the sake of creating change, but only because it will improve the organization in the long run.
The journey towards leadership is a process. It is personal and has many layers. Unfortunately, there is no checklist to follow to be the right kind of leader. There are only suggestions and examples. Good leaders find their success by trying out a combination of skills and styles and either adapting to or changing the organizational culture.
Leadership is not about proving one’s potential or power, but being there for others and envisioning a future for them and leading them towards it. Even with so many books and articles being published on library leadership, librarians are still unsure of how to perfect “leadership.” Whether leadership can be perfected at all is a good question to ask. But in the process of learning, practicing, and trying to perfect library leadership, there is room for all to participate. Canada, the US, Australia and the UK cannot call themselves truly multicultural societies if their library leadership fields do not represent their demographics. Leadership is about being inclusive.
The first step to leadership training for ethnic minorities who are first generation immigrants is cross-cultural training that should be attended by their majority cohorts as well. This training should not only be organized by social programs of the state or province, but also by the institutions that hire them. This cross-cultural training can provide much needed insight into their differences and provide intercultural effectiveness (Brislin et al., 2008: 398). These cross-cultural training sessions should not only focus on how things are done “here” but should also talk about how things are different in every culture, and why. Librarians attending this session should be able to come away with an understanding of each other’s work behavior patterns, with an understanding that “different” is not bad. The focus of this training should be assimilation, not just socializing.
For ethnic minorities, leadership can be developed in four stages:
1. First stage: Acquire – learn new skills, expand knowledge in the subject field, gain experience, understand the nuances of your new culture and the organization’s culture and see where you can fit in: the follower stage.
2. Second stage: Apply what you learn to your everyday activities. Start small with small projects, committees, and work-related activities. Offer to take minutes at meetings, chair meetings, head a small group on a project, etc. This is the stage when learning happens as one applies learnt skills. Mistakes can and will be made at this stage.
3. Third stage: Assert – venture out to do new things, suggest and take on new projects at work, challenge yourself, ask for more challenges, and let others know you are ready for more.
4. Fourth stage: Attain and Ascertain – once established, others will trust you and come to ask for help or guidance. Provide direction, make decisions, and identify other potential leaders from the organization.
Bad leadership
If there is good leadership there has to be bad leadership as well. Who are the bad leaders? Kanungo and Mendoca wrote, “Our thesis is that organizational leaders are truly effective only when they are motivated by a concern for others, when their actions are invariably guided by the criteria of the benefit to others even if it results in some cost to oneself” (in Ciulla, 2004: 314). Sadistic and autocratic leaders who are motivated for the wrong reasons and lack social or cultural intelligence, or the ability to empathize, might still have followers but will not be the right kind of leaders (think of Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali (Tunisia) and Saddam Hussein (Iraq)). On the other hand, as Ciulla states, Robin Hood-ism is not the right kind of leadership either. Leadership is about balance – a balance of skills, knowledge, styles, adaptability without losing identity, diplomacy and purpose, the ability to balance internal and external forces of the organization, and the ability to balance cultural and personal issues along with all available resources.
Leadership has to be ethical and moral as well. Ethics and morality have to do with not only knowing right from wrong, but with having a social responsibility and having the courage to take on accountability. Some researchers have identified altruism as a quality for leaders. This can be problematic if altruism is interpreted as self-sacrifice. Altruism can be about benevolence and social conscience, about sacrificing time for the benefit of the organization. While some leaders have behaved truly altruistically (think of Martin Luther King and Gandhi), their leadership remains ethical because of the means they followed to achieve their end. So, a leader dying for his cause alone does not make him or her an altruistic leader (think of Hitler) (ibid.: 314–315).
Not all leaders are successful, especially so when they cannot handle crisis situations. Their downfall is caused, among other things, by their lack of sensitivity to the situation and a refusal to take accountability. Tony Hayward, former CEO of the BP oil and energy company, was insensitive when he commented that the oil leak was tiny compared to the vastness of the ocean (Webb, 2010). He did not manage a crisis situation well and his comments did not show that he felt responsible as a company or as an individual for what happened in the gulf.
On the other hand, in 2008, when a listeria outbreak occurred and some lives were lost, Michael McCain, the CEO and President of Maple Leaf products, was talking to the public, taking responsibility and updating people of what Maple Leaf was doing to control the listeria contamination. There was a lot of transparency from Maple Leaf about their upgrades in sanitization procedures, buildings, and protocols, and this established trust with the public in spite of the number of deaths in Canada.
Leadership is not only about success. It is about knowing how to handle crisis situations that are caused by organizational or personal failures.
Ethic-minority librarians! Remember that being a librarian is not just a job that pays. Remember that you are creating a learning society, that you are part of a continuum of learning that spans a lifetime, that leadership in libraries requires continuous planning and challenging of the accepted norms, especially in the rise of electronic collections and technological innovations that libraries aspire to adapt to and use. Good luck!
References
Brislin, Richard W., MacNab, Brent R., Nayani, Farzana. Cross-Cultural Training: Applications and Research. In: Smith Peter B., Peterson Mark F., Thomas David C., eds. The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Management Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; 2008:397–410. [Print].
Ciulla, Joanne B. Ethics and Leadership Effectiveness. In: Antonakis John, Cianciolo Anna T., Robert J., eds. Nature of Leadership. Sternberg. London: Sage Publications; 2004:302–328. [Print].
Immen, Wallace, Lessons in Leadership Spill from BP. The Globe and Mail. 2010. [June 11, 2010. Web. October 12, 2010].
Stevenson, Colin P., Maple Leaf Case Study: An Example of Crisis Management. 2008. [Web. April 22, 2011].
Webb, Tim, Tony Hayward on BP Oil Crisis: I’d Have Done Better with an Acting Degree. The Guardian. 2010. [November 9, 2010. Web. November 25, 2010].