Have you heard about Slow Librarianship yet?

I’ve come across it a few times over the past couple of months, and I’m thrilled to see this becoming a wider discussion in libraries.

If you’re not already familiar with it, Slow Librarianship is an approach to library work that draws inspiration from the Slow Food movement, emphasizing thoughtful, deliberate, and human-centered practices in contrast to the fast-paced, “do more with less” norms that are all too common in libraries these days.

Slow Librarianship advocates for a more deliberate and reflective approach to library work, focusing on quality over quantity.

Doing “more with less” for decades has pushed many of us into scrambling to barely do “good enough” on way too many things continually until we eventually burn out.

I love that this is becoming a trend in libraries, because it centers the ideals that I embraced early in my career, before I had a name for them!

For my first couple of years as a librarian, I found myself overwhelmed by the constant demands on my time. It felt like there was never enough space to breathe, let alone to approach my work with the care and intentionality I knew it deserved. I wanted to do high quality work, but could only satisfice.

I reached a point where I had to start setting boundaries and prioritizing my time so that I could focus on doing fewer things well. Because I didn’t know of a framework like Slow Librarianship to reference, I got some negative reactions from colleagues who thought I was “being lazy” or “not a team player”. But I had to choose between slowing down or burning out, and I chose to slow down and adopt a sustainable workload for the long term.

That created space for me to begin putting more energy into practicing critical pedagogies, which then shaped my approach to leadership and led me to coaching.

I love this Slow Librarianship trend because it supports you carving out more time to embrace using a coaching approach to leadership by offering a framework to explain these decisions.

The challenge that most often comes up in discussions about adopting a coaching approach is the sheer number of demands on leaders’ time. It’s hard to lead from curiosity when you’re constantly putting out fires, always reacting instead of being able to be proactive.

And coaching does take more time up front than just giving instructions.

Over time, the goal is to develop your team members’ self-efficacy, their confidence that you’ll support their decisions on things that fall within their responsibilities, so that you spend less time answering questions about things you wish they’d take care of themselves.

But it takes time to get there.

Embracing Slow Librarianship can help you create the space you need in your workload now to be able to make that investment in developing a coaching culture in your unit.

And that’s why I developed a new program, Slow Librarianship for Sustainable Success!

We’ll discuss the mindset shifts involved in embracing Slow Librarianship AND work through strategies to actually get your workload under control. Mindset shifts are great and all, but you also need concrete strategies to actually put those shifts into practice!

If you’re ready to create a more balanced, fulfilling work life, I invite you to join the waitlist. By signing up, you’ll be the first to know when enrollment opens and help me pick meeting days/times that fit your schedule.