Reading the room: What global library leadership conversations teach us

This is the first installment of a three-part series on global library leadership engagement, contributed by Ellen Hartman, OCLC Leaders Council Manager. We’re grateful to Ellen for sharing her perspectives on this topic.

At a recent gathering of the OCLC Leaders Council, something happened that I always hope for but never take for granted. Connections were being made, there was laughter, sidebar conversations over lunch and dinner, and a willingness to challenge each other’s ideas, honesty about what people were struggling with, and genuine curiosity about what others are doing. All of this was built on a foundation of trust that made these in-depth conversations possible.

These moments don’t happen automatically. In my experience, they take time—and often, the opportunity to meet in person. Meeting online can be very efficient, but it can feel rushed and impersonal—it’s hard to truly get to know each other through a screen. Being in the room together over the course of a few days, in a small enough group that you actually get to speak to everyone, creates a solid foundation for future opportunities to meet again, online or in person, to build on the connections, themes, and conversations that started there.

What made this gathering particularly significant was its global dimension. Library leaders do come together regularly, but often within their own region, or among peers from the same library type. Academic and public library leaders, for instance, don’t always get the opportunity to meet for in-depth conversation, even though there is much they can learn from each other. Conversations organized by library type or region have real value, of course, but there is something additional that comes with a broader perspective that is still rooted in the library ecosystem while extending beyond your usual network. Every perspective in the room adds something, regardless of what an institution has or hasn’t yet achieved. The value of these conversations comes from the range of experiences present.

OCLC Research has published work on building relationships across unit boundaries within institutions (social interoperability), as well as creating and sustaining successful multi-institutional collaborative partnerships. But what I’d like to talk about here is more fundamental—the foundation for building successful partnerships: global library leaders from a variety of backgrounds and experiences engaging with one another in the same room. Prompted by the recent Leaders Council meeting, here are some reflections on the practical realities of these conversations, intended to deepen understanding and maximize their effectiveness.

Same words, different realities

Across international leadership spaces, a remarkably consistent vocabulary tends to surface. Terms recur across sessions, regions, and formats, and their repetition signals that we are all on the same page: a reassurance that participants are engaged with the same broad challenges and moving in a broadly similar direction.

The problem is that shared language doesn’t necessarily mean a shared understanding or a shared reality. One of the things that becomes apparent, watching these conversations unfold, is how often the same word lands differently depending on who is in the room.

Take efficiency, a term that surfaces regularly in conversations about how libraries operate and plan strategically. In some contexts, efficiency encompasses decisions about workforce size and structure. In others, those decisions are shaped by employment frameworks that lead to a very different kind of conversation, shifting the focus instead toward technology, software, or finding different ways of working within existing structures. The word is the same. The need it describes, and the range of solutions available, are not. This is why you need a deeper understanding of each other’s context to find out where you are using the same words but aren’t speaking the same language.

Glimpses, not full pictures

Even with that understanding in place, international leadership conversations can only ever offer glimpses of each other’s reality rather than the full picture. You see enough of someone else’s context to recognize the challenge, but rarely enough to understand all the constraints behind it.

This matters because those constraints are often what make the difference. Take something many library leaders struggle with: making the case for their library’s value to the broader institution or community they serve (for more on this topic, see OCLC Research’s latest report!). Some leaders have, through long-term effort and considerable perseverance, managed to position the library as visibly central to their institution’s priorities and a key part of its success. For others, making that same case remains difficult. The reasons could be structural or personal: the physical or organizational distance between the library and the part of the institution that makes key decisions, the data available to demonstrate the library’s impact, or the library leader’s own position, voice, and access to the right conversations at the right time.

In international settings, what tends to surface is the success story. What is harder to showcase is the full path to that success. The years of lobbying, the hundreds of stakeholder conversations, the incremental steps that made this outcome possible. A leader who has achieved that recognition may share what they did in good faith and genuinely want to help others reach the same goal. But because the conditions that made their success possible are often invisible in how the story gets told, it can be hard for them to understand why the same challenge feels insurmountable to a peer.

The value outside of the program

International leadership meetings are often evaluated by what happens in the formal program. But some of the most valuable exchanges happen elsewhere. Recognizing that is part of understanding how these spaces work in practice.

In smaller gatherings, it’s the time outside the formal agenda where a lot of the magic happens. When a group of library leaders meet for the first time, they are still in the process of getting to know one another. This is why you can’t expect them to immediately share their biggest challenges or most acute pain points. There is a measure of trust building that happens as a gathering takes place, especially over multiple days. It’s often after the official program ends, and there is room for leaders to relax and reflect together (for example, during dinner or at the bar) that the more personal and complex topics get discussed.

That kind of conversation requires enough prior exchanges that people feel safe being a little vulnerable. Admitting that your library is struggling to secure its position, or that you haven’t found a way to make your value proposition tangible enough to institutional leadership or other stakeholders that control funding, is not something most people are willing to do in a room full of peers they’ve just met. It becomes possible when the group has had time to become something more than a collection of strangers.

This is one of the reasons smaller, sustained gatherings tend to produce a different quality of exchange than large conferences. It is also why the informal spaces within those gatherings deserve to be nurtured rather than left entirely to chance.

No neat resolutions needed

One expectation worth setting aside is that international leadership conversations should resolve into clear conclusions. They rarely do, and that is not a failure.

Conversations like these do not need to end in consensus or a neat step-by-step path forward. It’s often the process of sharing and reflecting on both differences and commonalities that provides the greatest benefit. It might be an idea you hear and want to incorporate in your own library. A perspective that’s truly new to you and makes you see a topic in a different way. Or simply the opportunity to take a subject that was discussed at surface level and deepen the conversation in future gatherings.

That is why continued engagement matters more than resolution. Understanding accumulates across multiple conversations, multiple gatherings, and sometimes multiple years. It cannot be compressed into a single meeting, however well designed. The friction and the moments of genuine surprise are part of the value. Smoothing those moments away or rushing toward consensus risks losing exactly what makes international exchange worthwhile.

Conclusion

International leadership spaces are often judged by the ideas they surface or the alignment they appear to produce. But their deeper value lies in the glimpses they offer into realities that are different from our own. Those glimpses don’t tell the full story of what other library leaders are experiencing, but taken together, they help form a better understanding of what experiences are out there.

When designed well and when opportunities for informal interactions are cultivated, global library leadership spaces create the conditions for the kinds of conversations that go deepest. Those conversations rarely happen on the agenda, but rather emerge when enough trust has been built that people are willing to be open and candid with one another. That is not something that happens automatically: it requires continued investment in bringing people together, and repeated exposure to each other’s contexts, experiences, and points of view over time. Trust is not built overnight.

The next post in this series takes a closer look at what global engagement actually involves beyond the conversation itself and why showing up, in every sense of the phrase, costs more for some than others.