Forging the Future: Building a System to Cultivate a Cohesive and Collaborative Library Team

Background: Organizational change can make or break a library team. One academic health science center library has intentionally utilized a period of change to strengthen its workforce and services. Numerous upheavals including new leadership, space renovations, workforce reductions, and organization restructuring centered the need to cultivate a cohesive and collaborative team to ensure high quality, seamless library services. Successes, challenges, and tactics to improve productivity and avoid burnout supplement this paper’s findings. The paper demonstrates a holistic approach to allow team members to develop a sense of belonging, find value in their efforts, and become stakeholders in the library’s transformation.

Description: The library has onboarded 9 librarians since 2017. The team is currently composed of 10 professional librarians and 9 paraprofessionals. New hires came on board with diverse experiences, skills, knowledge, and backgrounds. These team building strategies employed an integrated approach including taking self-assessments using MLA Competencies for Lifelong Learning and Professional Success, collaborating on on-boarding materials, reviewing service practice guidelines, participating in professional development activities, shadowing library staff, attending department in-services, and engaging in strategic community of practices. The process of cultivating a cohesive and collaborative team also involves building soft skills such as open communication, providing and receiving constructive feedback, time management, budget management, and stress management. All library staff contribute to the process throughout large-scale library projects, which made it a collective effort not only supporting the new hires but enhancing the team cohesion and collaboration.

Conclusion: Data driven outcomes to be measured include such indicators as library budget increases, faculty salary comparisons with peer institutions, librarians’ achievements, impact on service provisions, and librarian-driven service development and expansion of collaborative professional development opportunities.