Who’s in the room: The hidden costs of global library leadership conversations

Ellen Hartman, OCLC Leaders Council Manager, continues her blog series on global library leadership conversations, inspired by a recent meeting of the OCLC Leaders Council. The first post in the series explored the unique value of global library leadership conversations, as well as some of the practical realities of making this form of engagement successful.

As I continue to reflect on the most recent OCLC Leaders Council meeting, I’d like to look at another aspect of global library leadership conversations: what they “cost” and who carries that cost. What do I mean by that? A global convening of leaders like Leaders Council requires participants and organizers alike to directly face challenges to achieve a meaningful outcome— the opportunity costs of participation, the responsibilities of representation, and the time zone challenges, just to name a few. All of these challenges were in effect during our recent Leaders Council meeting and here, I’ll reflect on the lessons learned from these experiences and how we might carry that forward into effective, transformative meetings of library leaders from around the world.

A shared responsibility for the outcome

There is a certain pressure that comes with bringing global library leaders together. The goal always is for participants to walk away feeling inspired or positively challenged. To feel that it was worth the time spent—the preparation, the travel, the days away from a library that doesn’t stop needing its leader just because they’re on the other side of the world.

While every effort goes into organizing and facilitating these gatherings to create an environment that’s conducive to conversation, what happens in the room is ultimately everyone’s responsibility. There must be a willingness to engage, learn, and share. Leaders who have invested in the time to attend must also show up ready to contribute.

But willingness alone doesn’t make participation equal. Engaging across borders involves more than sharing perspectives or exchanging ideas. It demands translation, abstraction, and sustained effort. These demands are not evenly distributed, and they shape who is heard, which perspectives travel, and how collective understanding takes form.

No one starts from neutral

There is no such thing as a “globally convenient” meeting time. This sounds like a minor logistical observation, but it points to something more significant about how international participation actually works.

Every international gathering, whether in person or online, asks something unequal of its participants. Someone is always the outlier. For in-person gatherings, that might mean traveling across multiple time zones to participate in a conversation that spans two or three days—by the time the jet lag begins to ease, it’s time to leave again. People show up and engage with genuine enthusiasm, running on the energy of being in the room. But the physical cost is real, whether it’s felt during the conversation itself, on the journey home, or in the days that follow.

For online gatherings, the asymmetry takes a different form. There is no time zone that works for everyone: someone is always joining in the middle of the night or at the end of a long working day, bringing commitment that deserves acknowledgment rather than assumption.

Acknowledging and managing the physical cost of international participation is an important aspect of organizing global leadership conversations. Engagement is most valuable when people can bring their full attention and their clearest thinking, and recognizing the conditions under which people are participating is key to taking global engagement seriously.

The weight of representing more than yourself

Participation in international leadership engagement opportunities is often limited by resource constraints, geography, and institutional priorities. Because of this, there’s often an unintended expectation that those who are able to attend speak not just from their own experience, but on behalf of a much larger community they’re perceived to “represent.”

Library leaders are often part of many different conversations: within their own institutions, at the national or regional level, or within library associations and other advisory or interest groups. While there’s great value in taking part in all these conversations and being present in different rooms with different viewpoints, it can also be a struggle. A leader might want to represent the different opinions and experiences they’ve heard, even if they aren’t their own. This requires multiple levels of translation: from personal experience to the national or regional level, and from the national or regional level to the global conversation. And no single person can do this perfectly.

Moreover, full representation, however much we might wish for it, is not practically achievable in a single conversation. A room that attempts to represent every context, every region, and every type of institution quickly ceases to function as a conversation at all. At the end of the day, the goal isn’t perfect representation: It’s awareness of where representation is limited, and what that means for how the conversation and its conclusions should be understood.

The consequences of acting as the “representative in the room” extend beyond the individual adopting that role. When a single voice comes to stand in for a broader context, the conversation itself is affected. The genuine variation within any national or regional system can disappear from view, leading to misleading impressions about what is typical, possible, or desirable in any given setting. As discussed in the first post in this series, international engagement spaces are rarely designed to communicate the full picture of the contexts involved. What appears to be a shared understanding may, in fact, reflect the voices of those who were present and, implicitly, those who were not.

When ideas travel, something stays behind

To participate effectively in international leadership spaces, leaders are often asked, implicitly and sometimes unknowingly, to step back from local urgency. Their own institutional realities must be translated into language that everyone in the room can engage with, meaning that context is simplified so that ideas can be compared across very different realities.

Without some level of abstraction, international exchange becomes unwieldy. But abstraction always involves loss. The more portable an idea becomes, the more likely it is to lose important context and nuance. Solutions circulate more easily than constraints. Success stories travel further than the enabling conditions behind them. A listener may hear what was done without fully grasping what had to be in place, institutionally, politically, and financially, for it to work.

The “cost” of transporting contextual freight can shape what gets discussed and what doesn’t. Perspectives that generalize quickly and easily tend to move forward in the conversation. Narratives that fit familiar frames gain traction. Conversely, experiences that are rooted in specific local realities may struggle to find space. What’s repeated becomes a reference point. What’s consistently absent becomes, gradually, invisible.

This is another reason why it matters to know that a conversation will rarely surface the full picture. If we treat what’s shared as a collection of inputs rather than a complete account, we’re less likely to mistake what translates well for what’s most representative or most important.

Conclusion

Understanding that there are costs embedded in global leadership conversations, and that they are often borne unevenly by participants, can lead to shifts in how organizers and participants respond. It means acknowledging and appreciating the contributions of those who show up despite extraordinary obstacles or inconvenience, navigating the pressure of representing more than one person can fairly represent, and doing the work of translation that makes global conversation possible.

Some takeaways to consider:

• Leave room for the person who’s navigating a conversation in their second or third language, or who’s battling a 12-hour time zone shift.
• Ask questions that invite rather than assume.
• Try to connect personal experiences to others’ without letting that connection override what makes their situation different.
• Approach the conversation with genuine curiosity about what others are experiencing and facing. Everyone in the room comes from a different context and is coping with different challenges. Asking questions about those differences is one of the most valuable contributions you can bring to the conversation.

The next post concludes this series on global leadership conversations with a look at why international cooperation—even among leaders who are genuinely committed to it—has become harder to sustain than it used to be.