In academic libraries—where change is constant, resources can be tight, and collaboration is essential—it’s easy to default to problem-solving through a deficit lens. What’s not working? What’s broken? What’s falling behind?

Sasha Costanza-Chock once warned:

Academic libraries are often framed as neutral spaces—repositories of knowledge, service points for students, and support systems for faculty. But beneath this surface lies an often-overlooked force: emotional culture. How people feel at work—what emotions are expressed, encouraged, or suppressed—has a profound effect on performance, retention, collaboration, and institutional trust.

In today’s academic library landscape, many of us spend just as much time pinging, emailing, Slacking, and Zooming as we do curating collections, teaching research skills, or building partnerships with faculty. Yet so often, our messages are misunderstood—or worse, ignored. You might send a clear, concise message about a collaboration or event and receive silence. Or perhaps a carefully worded update yields only a single emoji response.

After nearly three decades in academic libraries—starting in 1997 and graduating from my MLIS program in Wisconsin 20 years ago—I find myself reflecting more and more on what it means to be successful. Not in the abstract sense, but in the personal, lived-in, late-career, what-was-it-all-for kind of way.

"We're like a family here." It's one of the most common phrases you'll hear in corporate culture, often uttered by well-meaning managers and featured prominently on company websites. While the sentiment behind this language is generally understood—leaders want to convey warmth, support, and unity—it's time to retire this metaphor once and for all. Your workplace isn't a family, and pretending it is creates more problems than it solves.

In a moment that quickly went viral, professional tennis player Amanda Anisimova stood at the mic after a crushing loss, fought back tears, and thanked the crowd with unflinching honesty. For many, it was a moving act of vulnerability. For Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, it was something else: a rare, generous act of courage after a devastating failure.

When you're down two colleagues, buried in reference requests, and still expected to run instruction sessions, social media, and assessment reports, it’s natural to ask: How can I keep doing all this?

We've all seen it happen: the manager who consistently misses targets gets promoted to director. The executive who oversaw a major project failure becomes a vice president. The leader who struggled with team management suddenly finds themselves running an entire division. Welcome to the phenomenon of "failing up"—where mediocre or poor performance seemingly gets rewarded with greater responsibility and higher positions.

The job search process can be nerve-wracking enough without employers making it worse through poor communication practices. Unfortunately, many organizations leave candidates hanging in limbo, creating unnecessary stress and anxiety while potentially damaging their own reputation and ability to attract top talent. When employers fail to communicate effectively during the hiring process, it often signals deeper organizational issues that candidates should take seriously.

Middle managers occupy one of the most challenging positions in organizational hierarchies—serving as the critical bridge between senior leadership and frontline staff while often feeling they cannot satisfy either group. Success requires embracing the role as a strategic conduit, not a people pleaser.

In academic libraries, lean staffing has long been portrayed as efficient, necessary, and even virtuous—something to endure quietly, even as we're taught to continue advocating for more support, more staffing, and more recognition. But what if this austerity model is quietly eroding the very foundation of our impact? What if the cost of lean staffing isn't just current stress—but future lost sales?

We often celebrate the idea of transformation in academic libraries—rebranding leaders as innovators, change agents, or visionaries. But not all transformation leads to healthy outcomes. What happens when a transformative leader enters an academic library, only to find that their vision doesn’t fit the institutional culture? Or worse, when transformation becomes disruption without direction?

In academic libraries, overwork is often described in terms of hours logged, tasks juggled, or meetings survived. But these symptoms distract from the deeper cause: power inequities and systemic unfairness. As Brigid Schulte argues in Overwhelmed, work stress flourishes in cultures that mistake busyness for worth and devalue care, rest, and equity.

Check out our limited series podcast with Chloe Mills by clicking play below.

In Holding Change, adrienne maree brown invites us to approach transformation not as a crisis to survive, but as an opportunity to deepen our values, relationships, and capacity for collective action. This perspective is crucial in academic libraries facing sustained budget reductions. Too often, budget cuts are treated as inevitable, technocratic events. But they are also political. They reflect institutional priorities, power dynamics, and whose labor and learning are deemed valuable.

In an era of increasing consortial collaboration, strategic partnerships, and shared service models, academic libraries are leaning on each other more than ever. From resource-sharing initiatives to cooperative digital preservation, the language of partnership abounds. But behind the rhetoric lies an uncomfortable truth: many so-called “partnerships” are structurally inequitable.

In academic libraries and across higher education institutions, we often say our doors are open to feedback. But is that enough? A compelling study by James R. Detert and Ethan R. Burris, "Leadership Behavior and Employee Voice: Is the Door Really Open?" challenges us to consider whether openness is truly being practiced—or merely proclaimed.