Blatant Berry: Memo to Baby Boomers

Strike a balance in the confrontation of the generations

By John N. Berry III, Editor-in-Chief -- Library Journal, 6/1/2004

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The most difficult lesson in my career was learning to let go. A successful library career usually means steadily increasing responsibility, probably growing expertise, and, frequently, increased control over both operating and policy decisions. At the very least you get more say over your turf. The number of people reporting to you may have grown but not always. If you're like me, your confidence in your view of how things ought to be done increases with your "power." It isn't really power, of course. There's damn little real power in most library careers but there is advancement in authority, expertise, and control.

Whatever we call it, new or young librarians want it and older librarians and those in higher level jobs don't want to give it up. For you baby boomers, that huge constituency of folks born sometime after "the war" and before 1960, the problem is a real one right now. To be able to coexist with the new generation of librarians, already arriving on the job, you have to learn to let go. The oldest among you will probably retire but not soon enough to open up a slot for the growing number of unemployed librarians waiting out there. If you haven't learned how to let go, the realities of retirement will show you—fast. Some of my cronies love it; others miss the job, the work, and the interaction.

The rest, too busy to retire, will stay on the job. That means you'll have to interact with the newer crowd, get used to their costumes, their body decorations, and their attitudes. Their new grievances have an awful similarity to the old ones, and their new ideas may sound like the latest reinvention of the wheel.

Letting go means showing respect to these new librarians, their styles, and especially their ideas about how we can improve library service. More than respect, it means developing receptivity to the onslaught of the new generation. It means letting go of the need to tell them how they do it wrong, how we tried their idea years ago, or how we solved that problem long before.

Crucial to that respect and receptivity is stifling our incessant blather about what the young must learn or know to be leaders, managers, or great librarians. I know we old folks have plenty to teach, but we must try to remember how boring it was to get those lessons over and over at every conference, in every library publication, and at all those programs designed to educate the next generation of leaders. Some current leaders went to those programs and swear by them. Many learned a lot from the courses and literature of leadership and management. But if you dig a little you find that they loved any mentoring they got along the way far more than all the lessons.

There is no greater turnoff than to be told that because of your age or inexperience you need more "lessons" in librarianship or library leadership. New librarians, just like the current leaders, treasure the relationships they have developed with mentors. That word relationship is the key, because it embraces both the regard and openness so crucial to interactions between young and old. To mentor is not always to teach, and it is never to lecture.

I hope we all can strike some kind of balance in this confrontation of the generations. The burden is on the boomers. They are in loco parentis here, and the model of their leadership will not be in the articles they write, the lectures they deliver to the young, or in the syllabi to the courses they teach. The real leaders among the boomers will be remembered for how accepting they are of the attitudes, customs, and ideas of new librarians. The boomers will be remembered for how gracefully they let go.

jberry@reedbusiness.com