Editorial: Continuous Organizational Development--Teamwork, Learning Leadership, and Measurement

Success is not a place at which one arrives but rather . . . the spirit with which one undertakes and continues the journey.

Alex Noble

Early in my career, a colleague for whom I have great respect said to me, "The great libraries of the future will be those with great staffs." There was a rhetorical flourish in this statement intended to make a vital point. We could not simply rely on massive collections to provide information for the academy—it was necessary to pay attention to our human resources and, by extension, our organizations. By that time in the mid-1970s, the so-called "golden age of library collecting" was ending, and the "age of access" was beginning.

This age of access has left us with diminished power to define our future—without significant support from allies outside our organizations.¹ Libraries must be resilient organizations that have the strength to sustain themselves as partners in the learning and scholarly enterprises. Among other things, this means paying attention to the critical importance of the human side as an essential feature of coping with our challenges, as I have argued before.

The management literature to which we so often look for guidance fundamentally emphasizes the role of managers and leadership. As important as I think these are, I also believe the external challenges to academic libraries are so great that to achieve great success in meeting them means the intelligence, energy and commitment of all staff must be mobilized to find our way. In effect, every staff member must, in some measure, become a manager and a leader—and the organization must treat them as though they have a brain in their head. I am not suggesting a lock-step mentality or a monolithic organizational vision is desirable—or, for that matter, achievable. I am suggesting that there is afoot in academic libraries what may be called an "organizational development movement" that has as its goal the creation of the "learning organization." In my view, this is an encouraging sign that we have recognized the only way to be successful in the current environment.²

There are many strategies that are part of this movement. I have gradually come to the view that they must be tightly integrated and that organizational development should be continuous in face of change that is creating discontinuity. At the very least, this means that those of us who work in libraries must cope with the very real fact that the kind of work we do today is unlikely to be what we will be doing in the future. We must embrace the notion that part of the job is to change the job.

What will continuous organizational development (COD) look like? While it will not take a monolithic form, it should be structural and continuous not incidental and episodic. I can suggest some key features of COD that must somehow be reflected in library programs and the culture; and these should include, at least, the components of teamwork, learning, leadership, measurement, and the people to execute the effort through activities, such as planning, systems design, process re-engineering, assessment, facilitation, skills training, and performance review. How this is accomplished will vary based on institutional resources and size. The challenge is to imbed these features in a COD program that is appreciated as a part of operations like any other and is accepted as part of everyone's job. This latter condition may be the hardest to achieve, but more on that later.

The University of Maryland Libraries started out on the path toward COD as many as seven years ago; albeit, I will confess, we probably did not know it at the time. Moreover, we started by acquiring the necessary human/organizational resources and emphasizing teamwork. In time we came to realize and give equal emphasis to assuring that learning, leadership, and measurement fit into our COD program. If there is any landmark to point to, it is the appearance in June 2000 of the first in a series of working papers, "Working Paper #1 on Team Management: The Vision of a...