Case study 6 scenario depicts a weary and worried library manager, the Director of Information and Services. She is suffering from poor health as a result of working long hours and worrying about the complicated staff issues of her team and her upcoming performance review. One of her first priorities now is to deal with her health issues.
Great leaders exhibit many important traits in common such as interpersonal skills and empathy, integrity, flexibility, creativity and communication skills, etc. (Chow & Rich, 2013). Empathy is regarded as one of the top qualities amongst the others. It is defined as a quality that emphasizes compassion with a focus on people because employees live their own private lives and have interests outside of work. Whereas great emphasis has been placed on leaders’ empathy for their team workers in a lot of literature, there isn’t much discussion on the subject of empathy for themselves. Leaders can be generous to their co-workers but have put a lot of pressure on themselves and have unrealistic expectations of themselves which may lead to burnout.
I started my new job as a teacher librarian a year ago. I can relate my own experience to case study 6. I experienced burnout and exhaustion intermittently during busy periods and suffered from insomnia because of the stress of the new job and my commitment to study this course. I worried about the comments from staff especially from those who were outspoken and highly critical of the many things I did including the changes I wanted to implement. I agree with John’s response (Group 10) written for case study 6 in relation to the point that work and life balance is a big thing. A good balance between the two will ensure a high quality of living long term both in our work place and our family life. Long term work place achievements and effective planning for the future will also be possible if such high quality of living could be sustained. Adam’s comments (Group 5) suggested that we seek support from our families, friends and health professionals to keep ourselves in good mental and physical health so that we could work to the best of our abilities as good leaders .
Chow, A. S., & Rich, M. (2013). The ideal qualities and tasks of library leaders: Perspectives of academic, public, school, and special library administrators. Library Leadership and Management, 27(1/2), 1-24. Retrieved from https://journals.tdl.org/llm/index.php/llm