Competency M

Demonstrate professional leadership and communication skills.

Section 1: Introduction

I used to think about leadership as something formal, involving an elected office, or a name at the top of an org chart. Over the course of getting this degree, I have developed a different view: leadership means taking responsibility for an outcome and getting other people moving toward it, with or without formal authority. Barefoot (2022) describes change leaders as having an entrepreneurial mindset and being driven by “a true interest in finding sustainable answers” (“Skill 7: Demonstrate Change Leadership” section). This understanding of leadership better fits my modus operandi. I am not a naturally dominant personality in a group, and I don’t tend to take charge unless there’s a reason to. Instead, I tend to step up when I have expertise or confidence that other people in the room don’t. Give me a task that draws on technical knowledge or editorial judgment I’ve developed, and I will take initiative and make independent calls, which people tend to trust. Outside my area of expertise, I am more likely to follow someone else’s lead, particularly when I recognize that someone else has better knowledge or judgment in that area.

Thinking about project management in library and archival contexts has helped me to understand how leadership is something that can shift depending on the needs of a project and the expertise of the people involved. In a discussion post on digital asset management systems, I argued that successful projects need clear goals and accountability from the start, but they also need real buy-in: people invest more in the outcome when they’ve been part of the planning, not just handed a plan and told to implement it. Horwath (2012) makes a related point about keeping team members in the loop: simple, repeatable communication habits, like regular status updates or reviewing action items at the top of a meeting, work to keep teams aligned.

My own approach is usually less structured than what Horwath describes, but the underlying idea holds: when I am responsible for a piece of a project, I try to keep people informed as I work, and seek their input before making a decision, while still being willing to make the final call when necessary. Leadership and professional communication are closely connected; when leaders fail to communicate transparently and earn trust, people may be less likely to feel comfortable making contributions. I have little patience for people who steamroll others in a group setting, and I try hard not to become that person myself when I do take the lead. My approach is to argue for what I actually think is right while staying open to being told I’m wrong; disagreement is information, not an obstacle to get past.

I saw what happens when a team isn’t asked for input firsthand in a previous job, which I described in a reflection I wrote about workflow changes. A small analytics team tried to replace an outdated process with a new tool, with most communication between the team and developers going through a single liaison; the majority of the team contributed little until it was time to test the final product. Ultimately, the tool was abandoned. To understand why, I drew on Damavandi’s (2023) case study of a digital asset management (DAM) implementation, which argues that change efforts need multiple stakeholders involved early, not just one point of contact relaying information back and forth. Berlin’s (2024) list of common implementation roadblocks, including resistance to change, misunderstood business needs, and low visibility into the new process, matched what went wrong at my old job almost exactly. What I learned from that experience is that expertise alone cannot carry a project. However good the solution is technically, if the team does not understand or trust it, it won’t stick.

Libraries and archives are collaborative by nature, and many of the problems in this field, like those involving digital preservation, shrinking budgets, and serving communities whose needs are continually changing, don’t have a single obvious answer. They require people willing to step up at the right moment and explain their reasoning well enough that other people can trust and build on it. To me, that is what professional leadership looks like: not a list of credentials, but a working style. The evidence that follows shows this pattern across a technical team project, editorial work, and collaborative research design, with communication shaping how I lead in each setting.

References

Section 2: Evidence

My understanding of this competency comes from a mix of coursework, an ongoing editorial role, and volunteer research work, each of which called on a different piece of the leadership-through-expertise pattern I describe above.

My first piece of evidence is a group chat from a web archiving project for INFO 284, in which my team used Archive-It to capture a set of local movie theater websites. This artifact, in which my messages appear in blue, is the clearest example I have of leadership emerging directly from expertise. My teammate and I worked together to figure out why certain site elements, like hover-menu navigation and embedded YouTube videos, weren’t being captured by the standard crawler, but I was the one who ran the test crawls and iterated on possible fixes, including making an independent call to block a podcast host site to keep the crawl from running out of storage space. I checked in with my teammates before acting on that call, but I did not wait for permission to investigate technical problems or propose solutions. One teammate’s response in the chat, “I trust your judgment 100%, Michelle,” provides particularly clear evidence that this dynamic was recognized by others: my authority in the technical aspects of the project came from being the team member with the strongest relevant expertise and taking responsibility for applying it, rather than from any formal leadership role.

My second piece of evidence is my ongoing work as an editor for Archeota. My decisions on assigned submissions aren’t reviewed by anyone else at the journal before moving downstream to layout and production, but the role itself is fundamentally collaborative: I work with authors to strengthen their submissions, not just to approve or reject them. An email exchange with one author shows this in practice: after sending initial edits, I followed up gently when the deadline approached, later returned with a second, smaller round of revisions to a specific paragraph, and flagged that we still needed full bibliographic citations for a book and documentary mentioned in the piece, information the author had left out but that I couldn’t add on my own. A second exchange, with a different author, shows a quicker version of the same editorial process: I flagged a single ambiguous sentence, in which it was unclear whether the author meant “ten, twenty, or even larger murals” to describe increasing quantity or increasing size, and offered both possible readings so the author could clarify which one they intended. The revision was made and the piece was finalized within the same day. These kinds of exchanges, catching a specific gap or ambiguity and following up without being pushy about it, is where the communication component of this competency is most evident. I am translating my editorial standards into specific, actionable feedback and engaging with authors to determine how those changes can best be incorporated into their work, rather than simply issuing a judgment about the quality of a submission.

My third piece of evidence is feedback I provided on survey instrument design during volunteer research work in the Library Technology Integration Lab at San Jose State, where I worked with a small team conducting user research on a VR conference space. My contributions drew on my academic and professional background in survey research: I hold an MA in Sociology and spent seven years working in market research, where survey design and methodology were a significant part of my work. I applied that expertise directly to the team’s shared survey drafts, identifying a double-barreled question that combined two distinct concepts into a single item and flagging the draft’s reliance on positively phrased statements, which risked inflating scores through acquiescence bias.

I also conducted a moderated user study myself, leading a volunteer through a series of tasks in the VR space over a video call and observing where he ran into confusion or friction. My notes from that session captured concrete usability issues a survey alone might have missed: the volunteer initially didn’t realize he could speak aloud to the space’s AI guide, and needed a prompt from me to move to an appropriate distance before he could read on-screen instructions; a “cancel” button in the interface repeatedly failed to register clicks; and by his second encounter with a specific exhibition booth, he skipped re-examining it entirely, explaining that he already knew what was there. For confidentiality reasons I am not including the recording here, but the session gave me a firsthand sense of where the instrument’s questions matched or missed what I was actually observing, and the feedback from the session I conducted will shape future studies. This artifact demonstrates a different form of expertise-based influence than the web archiving project. Rather than taking the lead on a task for which I had specialized technical knowledge, I contributed methodological expertise that other team members did not necessarily possess. My suggestions were incorporated because they strengthened the research instrument and addressed methodological concerns, rather than because I held formal authority over the project.

Section 3: Conclusion

What connects these three pieces of evidence is that none involves me holding formal authority over anyone else. I led the web archiving work because I had a strong technical understanding of the problem and took responsibility for addressing it; I hold editorial authority over my assigned submissions because it is part of my role, not because anyone reports to me; and my survey feedback influenced the project because it contributed relevant methodological expertise, not because I held a higher position on the team. Across all three examples, leadership emerges from expertise, initiative, and the ability to communicate that expertise in ways that others can use.

In my future career, I expect to continue developing this form of leadership by building substantive expertise in areas such as archival appraisal and digital preservation and by communicating that expertise clearly enough to support collaborative decision-making. To continue developing as a leader, I plan to follow the Society of American Archivists’ Archives Management Section, which focuses on management and leadership within archival practice, and to read Library Leadership & Management, a journal published by ALA’s Library Leadership and Management Association that addresses leadership and management in library and information settings. These resources will help me continue developing the ability to lead through expertise while also recognizing when different forms of leadership are appropriate to different professional contexts.