Managing Emotional Culture in Academic Libraries: A CALM Approach to Inclusive Leadership

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.

Emotional culture isn’t separate from the mission of academic librarianship. It’s embedded in every student interaction at the reference desk, every committee meeting, every email, and every moment of burnout or breakthrough. Managing it requires the same intentionality that we bring to collection development, instructional design, or strategic planning.

We can better address emotional culture by integrating the CALM framework—Communication, Adaptability, Learning, and Management—and aligning it with emerging leadership research and social justice frameworks. When we manage emotional culture effectively, we foster not only healthy work environments but also more equitable and inclusive institutions.

Emotional Culture as Institutional Culture

Often, conversations about organizational culture focus on values, mission statements, and professional norms—what the Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture calls cognitive culture. But that framework reminds us that beneath this layer sits an emotional culture that governs how people actually behave, especially under pressure.

In academic libraries, emotional culture is shaped by whether staff feel comfortable expressing frustration, pride, empathy, or vulnerability. If collaboration is valued but conflict is avoided, tension builds quietly. If student-facing staff are expected to always “stay positive” without acknowledging stress, service quality may decline over time—even when no policy changes.

Cultural change, therefore, requires managing both what people think and what they feel. It also means creating conditions where marginalized emotional experiences—those shaped by race, gender, rank, or contract status—aren’t dismissed or sidelined, but recognized as vital signals about the health of the organization.

Leading with CALM

The CALM framework provides a model for library leaders and supervisors to intentionally cultivate and manage emotional culture. It’s especially powerful when combined with a justice-oriented mindset inspired by frameworks like Viral Justice, which emphasizes small-scale, systemic interventions for change.

Communication: Naming and Normalizing Emotions

Communication includes tone, timing, and the cues we send about what emotions are acceptable in meetings, evaluations, and conversations. For academic library leaders, this means being attentive not only to what is said, but how it is said—and what remains unsaid.

Team members notice when discomfort is ignored, or when emotional responses are met with silence. Leaders who narrate decisions with clarity, acknowledge challenges openly, and create forums for feedback help build a culture where emotional expression is not seen as weakness, but as workplace data. This communication is especially important during transitions—whether in systems, staffing, or priorities.

Adaptability: Reading the Room and Responding Strategically

Adaptive leaders adjust their approach based on the emotional climate, not just the institutional calendar. A spike in absenteeism may indicate more than workload issues; it could signal psychological fatigue. An uptick in student frustration might reflect not just user interface issues, but deeper concerns about access or inclusion.

Instead of applying blanket solutions, emotionally intelligent leaders tailor their responses—sometimes by slowing down, sometimes by shifting tone, and sometimes by inviting others to lead. Emotional adaptability isn’t improvisation—it’s responsive design grounded in listening.

Learning: Cultivating Emotional Intelligence as a Skill

Emotional intelligence can and should be taught in academic libraries, not assumed. This includes recognizing emotional cues, navigating conflict, and giving feedback with clarity and care. Just as librarians train for database use or instructional design, they can also develop capacity for emotional leadership.

This is especially crucial when mentoring early-career librarians, onboarding student workers, or managing across lines of difference. A shared emotional vocabulary and framework supports not just smoother operations, but deeper trust across teams. It also reinforces equity by ensuring that emotional expression is not coded as unprofessional or inappropriate based on identity or positionality.

Management: Embedding Emotional Culture in Systems

Emotionally intelligent management goes beyond interpersonal style. It includes how policies are written, how recognition is distributed, how performance is evaluated, and how departures are handled. It also includes decisions about space, time, and attention—who gets to step away, who’s asked to multitask, and whose labor is made visible.

This layer of management is where emotional culture becomes operationalized. A library that encourages collaboration but offers no time for peer feedback is signaling contradiction. A workplace that values well-being but normalizes after-hours emails is reinforcing anxiety. By aligning management practices with emotional goals, library leaders can shift from reactive to proactive care.

Emotion as a Justice Issue

Addressing emotional culture is not just about well-being—it’s about equity. Too often, emotional discomfort is unevenly distributed. Librarians on contingent contracts, staff from underrepresented backgrounds, and those navigating institutional power imbalances often carry an unspoken emotional load. Without a framework for recognition and support, this load becomes invisible and unsustainable.

Justice in academic libraries includes the right to feel safe, to express concerns, to experience joy, and to be treated with dignity—even in times of disagreement or difficulty. A justice-oriented approach to emotional culture challenges the assumption that neutrality is fairness, or that professionalism is always stoicism.

When we manage emotional culture with intention—through communication, adaptability, learning, and management—we don’t just build stronger teams. We create more inclusive libraries where every person, and every emotion, is part of the story.