Demonstrate professional leadership and communication skills
Understanding the Competency
Competency M is stated differently from the others in this program. Where the other competencies name a body of knowledge and ask me to show that I understand it, this one lists examples of evidence. On the leadership side it names conference presentations, published book reviews, elected student office, service on a school committee, peer mentoring, poster sessions, leadership in a current work position, and leadership taken up inside a group project. On the communication side it names teaching skills and collaborative ways of creating, inventing, and sharing ideas. None of those is a definition, but are experiences, and a statement that only matches instances against a list has described activity rather than demonstrated competence.
The first task is therefore to say what the experiences have in common. Every one of them involves a person taking responsibility for something they were not assigned, or explaining something to an audience that does not already understand it. Often both at once. A poster session is teaching to strangers. An elected student office is authority granted by peers rather than by an institution. Leadership inside a group project is the clearest case of all, because the project arrives with no appointed leader and someone has to become one.
Professional leadership, in the sense this competency uses, is not a position. Ammons-Stephens et al. (2009) make this explicit by building a leadership competency model for the library profession rather than for its directors. Their model organizes seventeen competencies under four meta-competencies, which are cognitive ability, vision, interpersonal effectiveness, and managerial effectiveness. The authors are deliberate that even the last of these is not confined to managers, noting that although leaders are not always in management positions, the competency applies to everyone. This is because it involves managing oneself, as well as others and the organization. The distinction matters for anyone entering this field, because most information professionals will never hold a director title, and nearly all of them will still be asked to lead a project, an implementation, a committee, or a change that other people have to accept.
Communication, as the competency frames it, is similarly specific. Both teaching and collaborative creation describe moving an idea out of one person's head and into a form other people can use. Teaching does it by building understanding in someone who lacks it. Collaboration does it by making an idea available for other people to change. What the two share is that the measure of success sits with the audience rather than with the speaker. An explanation that satisfies the explainer and leaves the listener confused has failed, however accurate it was.
Read together, the two halves describe a single capability. Leadership supplies the initiative to raise something nobody asked about. Communication supplies the means to make other people care about it. Separated, each one fails. Initiative without communication produces a proposal nobody understands. Communication without initiative produces a very clear account of a decision somebody else made.
I developed this competency in three settings rather than in coursework alone. In INFO 285, Research Methods–Evaluating Programs and Services, I evaluated a real grant-funded program and built a briefing addressed to the stakeholders who would decide its future, though the briefing was a course deliverable rather than one I stood up and gave. As Executive Assistant at Dark Horse Media I developed and presented a proposal to the company's Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer. In my current role on the Product team at NBCUniversal I am part of the team launching a digital asset management system across Universal Destinations and Experiences, which means working with business units that have their own priorities, their own deadlines, and no obligation to adopt anything.
Leadership and Communication in the Information Professions
The profession has spent considerable effort trying to specify what leadership consists of, and the resulting literature is more useful than its surface suggests. Ammons-Stephens et al. (2009) produced the model that most later work responds to. A five-member team from the 2008 class of the American Library Association's Emerging Leaders program built it on assignment from the Library Leadership and Management Association, drawing on the library literature, competency models from nursing, business, nonprofit management, the military, and law, and interviews with leaders across public, academic, and special libraries. Following Kurz and Bartram, they separate competence (meaning mastery measured against a predefined standard) from competency (meaning the behaviors that underpin successful performance). They argue that most of the library literature to that point had described the former while claiming the latter. The model groups seventeen competencies under four meta-competencies. Cognitive ability covers problem-solving, decision making, and reflective thinking. Vision covers global thinking, creativity and innovation, and forward thinking. Interpersonal effectiveness covers cultural competence, accountability, team building, staff development, inspiration and motivation, and communication skills. Managerial effectiveness covers managing change, resource management, strategic planning, collaboration, and flexibility.
Two features of the model matter to a student using it. The first is that a fifth category, personal attributes, appeared in the original conference poster and was then set outside the model. The team debated whether qualities such as being principled, honest, humble, gracious, and teachable are competencies at all. They concluded that these traits describe what a person is rather than what a person does, and printed the category anyway with the disagreement attached. The second is that the model is proposed rather than validated, and the article publishes the case against its own approach (including Hollenbeck and McCall's argument that competency models rest on questionable assumptions and a former ALA president's assessment that they are structurally useful but small thinking). A framework that prints its own opposition is a sturdier thing to build an argument on than one that does not.
The Library Leadership and Management Association's Leadership and Management Competencies (n.d.) is that same model after professional consensus has worked on it. A LLAMA task force and then a standing committee worked the four meta-competencies and seventeen sub-competencies over from 2011 onward, aligned them with ALA's own Core Competences of Librarianship, surveyed the association's membership, and settled on a flat list of fourteen. Published in 2016 under the heading Foundational Competencies for Library Leaders and Managers, the list consists of communication skills, change management, team building, collaboration and partnerships, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, evidence-based decision making, conflict resolution, budget creation and presentation, forward thinking, critical thinking, ethics, project management, and marketing and advocacy.
These two sources are not independent agreement. They are one body of work at two stages. What the list gains is the field's own ratification. What it loses is the structure, since a flat list no longer shows which competencies assume positional authority and which do not. LLAMA has since merged into Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures.
Kreitz (2009) tests Goleman's four emotional intelligence domains empirically. She adapted an existing instrument to test, and surveyed directors and senior management team members at Association of Research Libraries institutions in the western United States. She asked each group to rank the ten traits most important for an ideal director and the ten most important for an ideal senior team member. Twenty-seven usable responses came back from eight libraries, six from directors and twenty-one from senior team members.
The finding is not that the two groups agreed. It is that the ideal profile differs by role, and that the groups disagree about several of the differences. Respondents put vision and persuasion at the top for directors, naming knowing where one is taking the organization, articulating a direction for the library, being visionary, functioning in a political environment, and motivating people toward a shared vision. For senior team members they named a different cluster, consisting of cognitive ability for complex situations, understanding and harnessing the talents of staff, leading in a shared decision-making environment, consensus building, accessibility, team building, and facilitation. A third list held across both roles, consisting of listening and delegating, integrity, good judgment, interpersonal skills, effectiveness in leading change, and realistic self-understanding. Kreitz's conclusion is the one that bears on this essay. Leadership in these organizations is not the property of the person at the top, but a shared and interdependent endeavor. Importantly, no individual is expected to hold the whole set. Her sample is small and regional, which she states plainly, so the lists are better read as a described pattern than as a measured one.
McBrayer (2025) asks what has changed. Using the same competency framing, she ran six sequential focus groups with thirty-two academic library staff and faculty across the United States, three groups of people not in leadership roles and then three of leaders, carrying the first set's findings into the second. Seven skills and strategies emerged as newly or differently important, which are creating workplaces that support the whole person, modeling self-care in leadership, creating sustainable workplaces, managing conflict, managing flexibility, building team culture and community, and advocating strategically by creating alignment.
Set against the 2016 list, the useful result is not that communication, clarity, and trust still matter, which McBrayer expects and finds. It is that advocacy has separated from marketing. In the LLAMA list the two are a single competency. In McBrayer's findings advocacy means building alignment between the library's purpose and the parent institution's, developing relationships across campus, accumulating political capital, and then making that work visible to staff who need to see it happening. One of her participants draws the distinction directly, saying that advocacy has limits and that a leader who only ever acts as the squeaky wheel becomes nothing else. McBrayer also argues that competency models are contextual and malleable rather than prescriptive, and calls for the library leadership model to be updated.
The communication half of the competency has its own standard. The Association of College and Research Libraries' Standards for Proficiencies for Instruction Librarians and Coordinators (2007) organizes the work of teaching into twelve categories, which are administrative skills, assessment and evaluation, communication, curriculum knowledge, information literacy integration, instructional design, leadership, planning, presentation, promotion, subject expertise, and teaching skills. It defines forty-one core proficiencies for instruction librarians and twenty-eight further proficiencies for those who coordinate instruction programs.
The structure is itself an argument, and two features of it carry into this essay. Instructional design and teaching skills are separate categories rather than one, which treats the construction of materials as a different skill from their delivery. Several proficiencies describe problems that are not specific to classrooms at all. The standard asks three things of the effective instruction librarian. The first is to design instruction around the learner's prior knowledge, experience, motivation, and circumstances. Second, to scale presentation content to the time and space available. Lastly, to clarify confusing terminology, avoid excessive jargon, and use vocabulary appropriate to the audience. Those three are the whole of the communication problem described later in this essay, written down in 2007 for a different setting. Leadership and promotion appear as categories of their own, with the standard asking instruction librarians to demonstrate initiative by actively seeking out opportunities rather than waiting to be assigned them, and asking coordinators to advocate for instructional services with the people who control training, facilities, and resources.
Lasewicz (2015) takes up advocacy at the point where it is hardest. He begins from a problem familiar to anyone who has worked near a corporate information function, which is that archives are treated as discretionary rather than strategic and are therefore exposed every time a budget is reviewed. He personifies the audience as Jack Welch, the General Electric chief executive whose maxim was to forget the past and love the future, and he notes that a research report prepared for the Society of American Archivists in 1984 had already found that resource allocators consider archives nonstrategic and that archivists fail to communicate effectively with them. Three decades later he judges the problem unsolved. He also observes that most corporate archives were founded not because anyone recognized their strategic value but because an anniversary raised historical awareness, which leaves them unusually vulnerable once the anniversary passes.
His diagnosis is that archivists have not produced a business case in terms executives accept, so he went looking for one in the business literature, reviewing more than eighty academic articles across organization theory, change management, marketing, communications, and related fields. The distinction he draws from that reading is the part worth carrying. History is the body of immutable facts held in the documentation archivists collect. Heritage is the applied use of those facts, a thematic and purposeful selection from the larger record, curated to inform and influence particular constituents. Heritage is adaptive in a way history is not, because an organization that changes direction can shift which part of its past it emphasizes. He is careful that this is not fabrication, since heritage stays grounded in the factual record, and he acknowledges that some scholars regard the practice as a packaged past anyway. On that foundation he locates two places where the strategic case is strongest. The first is organizational change, where an institution's past can be used to demonstrate continuity with a new direction or, conversely, to argue that a break with it is overdue. The second is what the literature calls the corporate identity mix, meaning reputation, brand, public image, and stakeholder trust. He is candid that the financial value of heritage remains unquantified and that a fully irrefutable case is not yet available. What he offers instead is a vocabulary, and the vocabulary is the point. An archivist who argues for preservation on preservation's own terms is speaking to people who already agree. An archivist who argues brand and organizational resilience is speaking to the people who decide.
Saunders (2020) addresses what part of professional knowledge is core to the field and what part is specialized to a particular role or institution. She surveyed more than 2,400 information professionals and LIS faculty through five iSchools, of whom 830 were academic librarians, asking them to sort fifty-three knowledge areas, skills, and abilities into core, very important, important, specialized, or not important. Core meant that every graduate of an accredited program should have a foundation in it regardless of career path.
Ten were ranked core by half or more of the academic librarians, and seven of the ten are interpersonal or communicative rather than technical. Interpersonal communication was named by 89 percent, writing by 80, teamwork by 76, cultural competence and customer service by 66, interacting with diverse communities by 65, and reflective practice grounded in diversity and inclusion by 55. Only three sit in the domain knowledge of the field, which are knowledge of professional ethics at 81 percent, search skills at 76, and evaluating and selecting information resources at 72. Not one technology skill was ranked core by half the respondents. Two further findings cut against the easy reading of this essay and are better stated than avoided. Leadership was ranked core by only 33 percent of academic librarians, significantly fewer than the 43 percent among other information professionals, which suggests the field does not regard leadership as something every graduate needs. Management of archival records and manuscripts was the most specialized item in the entire survey, called specialized by 73 percent. Saunders's own conclusion resolves both. She argues that the knowledge a professional needs has more to do with job function than with the type of institution they work in, and recommends that programs and students organize around roles rather than settings.
Why It Matters to the Profession
Libraries, archives, and corporate information functions share a problem that has nothing to do with the quality of their work. The value they produce is indirect and largely preventive. A well-governed asset library saves time that is never counted, because the hours nobody spent hunting for a file appear on no report. An archive protects against losses that, when prevention works, never happen. Work of this kind is structurally difficult to defend, and it tends to be defended by whoever can explain it rather than by whoever does it best. That is why Lasewicz (2015) treats the business case as an urgent professional problem rather than a presentational one. His argument is that archives lose budget decisions they should win, because the profession has not learned to argue in the language of the people holding the budget. The same holds anywhere an information function sits inside an organization whose core business is something else. Translation is not adjacent to the work. In those settings it is the condition under which the work continues to exist.
Leadership in this profession is also mostly distributed rather than positional. Ammons-Stephens et al. (2009) build their model for the profession rather than for its directors, and state that even managerial effectiveness applies to everyone, since it includes managing oneself. Kreitz (2009) arrives at the same place from the other direction, concluding that leadership in an academic library is a shared and interdependent endeavor and that no one person is expected to hold the full set of traits. In practice a new professional is far more likely to lead a system migration, a digitization project, an instruction program, or a committee than to lead an institution. Those are real leadership situations, and they are harder than managing in one specific way. A manager who is ignored can escalate. A project lead who is ignored has to persuade.
Teaching is understated in most job descriptions and central to most jobs. The ACRL proficiencies (2007) formalize what practitioners already know, which is that instruction is a distinct professional function with its own design problems rather than something one does occasionally. The standard's separation of instructional design from teaching skills makes the point precisely, since building the materials is not the same activity as standing in front of people. Every information professional teaches. A reference interaction is instruction. A metadata standard rolled out to a team is instruction. A finding aid is asynchronous instruction. Doing any of it well requires deciding what the audience already knows, what they need to know, and what can be left out, which is what the standard asks of instructional design, and it is a design task whether or not anyone calls it one.
There is an access dimension to all of this that is easy to overlook. Services for populations with less institutional power are the ones most often cut, deferred, or never proposed in the first place, because fewer people inside the organization are arguing for them. A program serving blind and low vision adults does not sustain itself on merit. It sustains itself because someone can explain to a funder what it accomplishes and what would be lost without it. The communication skills this competency names are distributive in that sense. They help determine whose needs get articulated in the rooms where resources are assigned.
Applying Research Methods in a Particular Information Environment
My environment is information work inside organizations whose core business is something else. That describes my current role on a product team at an entertainment and destinations company, my previous role at a comic book publisher, and the cultural heritage institutions I expect to work in. The common feature is that the information function is infrastructure. It makes other people's work possible, and when it is working properly nobody notices it. The conditions that follow are not complaints about these settings. They are the conditions any leadership or communication has to be designed around.
The first is that the function rarely has authority over the people whose behavior it needs to change. A digital asset management system does not succeed when it is deployed. It succeeds when people use it, and the people who have to use it report to someone else. The same was true of the archive proposal I made at Dark Horse Media, where I held no archival role and no budget. In both cases the only available instrument is persuasion, which is exactly the situation Ammons-Stephens et al. (2009) describe when they separate leadership capability from managerial position.
The second is that competing priorities are structural rather than a failure of goodwill. A business unit asked to adopt a shared system is being asked to spend time against its own deadlines for a benefit that accrues mostly to the organization as a whole. Treating that resistance as obstruction is both inaccurate and useless. Treating it as a rational response to a real cost opens the only productive question, which is what the change is worth to that unit specifically. Kreitz (2009) would place this in the social awareness domain, and the placement is accurate, though in practice it looks less like empathy than like doing the work of understanding what someone else is measured on.
The third is that senior attention is scarce and granted in single meetings. An executive audience will not read a long document and will not reconvene to hear a second version. Whatever is going to be understood has to be understood the first time. This places an unusual weight on sequence and omission. Deciding what to leave out of a proposal is a larger part of the work than deciding what to put in it.
The fourth is that the profession's vocabulary does not travel. Provenance, controlled vocabulary, taxonomy, original order, and metadata schema are precise terms that mean nothing outside the field, and using them with a general audience signals that the speaker has not thought about the listener. The requirement is to translate without diluting, which is harder than either simplifying or using the jargon, because the underlying concept still has to arrive intact.
The response to these conditions is consistent across the three artifacts that follow. Lead with the audience's problem rather than the professional standard. Quantify what can be quantified and say plainly where quantification fails. A number offered with a caveat is more persuasive than a number offered without one. Phase an ask so that the first commitment is small enough to approve. Raise the strongest objection yourself, before the audience does. Lastly, treat the presentation as instruction rather than announcement, which means building up from what the audience already knows instead of reporting conclusions from the top down.
Evidence 1
The first piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency M is my evaluation briefing “Braille Literacy for the Next Century,” dated November 23, 2024. It was solo work completed for INFO 285, Research Methods–Evaluating Programs and Services. The program it evaluates is a real one run by the Braille Institute Library, and the findings reported in it come from that program's own participant data. What the briefing is not is a presentation I gave. It was written for the program's stakeholders as a course deliverable and never delivered to them, so what the artifact demonstrates is the quality of the communication decisions in it rather than their effect on an actual funding decision.
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GeYgKCJMR85mCCi_g_ZrgXPf7TTpdxdU/view
Description of the Artifact
The artifact is a ten-slide presentation with a full narration video, reporting evaluation findings and recommendations for a grant-funded program that distributed refreshable braille displays to visually impaired adults and trained them in their use. The intended audience is the program's stakeholders, meaning the people who would decide whether the program continued and in what form. Every choice described below was made for that audience.
The deck opens with a title slide and a table of contents naming six sections, which are purpose, methodology, findings and results, recommendations, call to action, and closing. The Purpose slide states what the program set out to do in three sentences and notes that the trainers were themselves often visually impaired. The Methodology slide reduces the evaluation design to four labeled elements, which are self-reporting, goal completion, barriers, and competency. The accompanying narration expands each one, states that the approach relied on participant self-assessment, and names the resulting limitation directly, which is that self-assessment leaves room for bias and that the evaluation lacked objective metrics.
The findings occupy two slides. The Competency slide presents paired grouped frequency distributions for participants' self-rated ability to use a refreshable braille device, shown as pre-program and post-program bar charts across five intervals. The Goals slide presents a coded frequency chart answering the question of whether participants met their goals, accompanied by the full coding legend. The legend defines the outcome codes as fully met, partially met, and not met, and defines the reason codes as device issues, time constraints, motivation or personal circumstances, and training.
The Recommendations slide names four areas for change, which are training delivery, time management and motivation, device issues, and evaluation methods. The narration develops each into a specific proposal, including more frequent classes and a hybrid in-person and virtual model, structured schedules and a progress reward system, a partnership with a single device manufacturer to secure technical support, and the addition of objective measures such as task completion rates and braille reading speed. The Call to Action slide closes with three statements acknowledging what the program achieved, what it has yet to resolve, and what continued support would make possible.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
I selected this artifact because it demonstrates the communication half of the competency most directly. Additionally, the communication problem it had to solve was a difficult one. The findings were mixed–one of them was unfavorable–and the brief required persuading an audience to continue supporting a program that had not fully worked. The audience was an assigned one rather than a real funding body, the artifact cannot show that the argument succeeded. It can show how the argument was built, and the choices below are the ones I would defend in front of the real version of that audience.
The clearest demonstration is the handling of the unfavorable finding. Participants' self-rated ability to use the device went down rather than up between the pre-assessment and the post-assessment. I reported it rather than omitting it, named it as surprising, and then offered two competing interpretations. The first is that participants had developed a more realistic understanding of the device's complexity and were now rating themselves against a higher standard. The second is that something in the program had caused confusion or impeded learning. The second interpretation reflects badly on the program I was reporting on, and including it was a deliberate choice. An evaluation that presents only the flattering reading of its own bad news has told the audience that its good news cannot be trusted either. Kreitz (2009) found integrity among the six traits that directors and senior management team members alike ranked highest for any leader in either role, placed second only to listening and delegating. Reporting a result against interest is where that trait becomes visible, and the choice was a real one even in an assigned brief, because the flattering version of the slide was available to write and I did not write it.
The artifact also demonstrates teaching skills, which the competency names explicitly. The audience for this briefing was not a research audience. They needed to understand enough of the methodology to judge whether the findings were credible, without being taught a course in evaluation design. The Methodology slide solves that by reducing the design to four labeled concepts and letting the narration carry the detail, including the limitation. The Goals slide solves a harder version of the same problem. A chart whose horizontal axis reads 1, 2, 3, A, B, C, D is meaningless to anyone who has not seen the coding scheme, so the legend sits beside the chart and defines every code. That decision is the difference between a slide the audience can read and one they have to take on faith. The standard asks the designer to work from what learners already know and to scale content to the time available, and that is the choice each slide makes.
The sequence of the deck is itself an argument about the audience. A research report moves from literature to method to results. This presentation moves from purpose to method to findings to recommendations to a call to action. Purpose comes first, because the audience needs to recall what they funded before they can evaluate how it went. The call to action comes last, because that is the decision they are being asked to make. The methodology sits in the middle, where it is available to anyone who wants to interrogate it and skippable by anyone who does not. Structuring the material around the audience's decision rather than around the order in which the work was done is the applied form of what the ACRL standard asks when it tells the instruction librarian to sequence information in order to guide the session, rather than to present it in the order it was produced.
Finally, the artifact shows the step from reporting to leading. An evaluation that stops at findings has described a situation. This one names four barriers and then proposes four specific changes, each answering one of them. Proposing the manufacturer partnership in particular went beyond what the data strictly supported, because the data showed that device failures obstructed participants and did not show that a single-vendor relationship would fix it. Making that recommendation meant taking a position and accepting that it could be wrong. That is the difference between analysis and leadership, and in the ACRL standard it is the point where the leadership and promotion categories take over from teaching, since both ask the professional to argue for a change rather than to describe a situation.
Evidence 2
The second piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency M is “The Mike Richardson Archive and Museum: A Vision For Our Future,” a proposal I developed and presented to the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Operating Officer of Dark Horse Media in May 2025. I was employed as an Executive Assistant at the time. The proposal was unsolicited, and the work was my own.
Link to Slide: https://canva.link/dark-horse-media
Description of the Artifact
The artifact is an eleven-slide proposal, accompanied by a numbered handout packet keyed to individual slides, arguing that Dark Horse Media should establish an archive and museum for its own history. I presented this to both the CEO and COO of Dark Horse Media. The deck is built in the company's visual identity, and illustrated throughout with original art from the company's published properties. While I have provided the link to the deck, much has been retracted for confidentiality. Additionally, I will not be attaching the hand-out, as the majority of it is also confidential.
The argument is structured as an executive proposal rather than as a professional case. After a short introduction, The Heart of the Idea states the premise in two sentences, which are that organizations in difficult periods must decide who they are and who they intend to become, and that the project is not about large immediate spending but about establishing a direction. The Why follows with three reasons, which are that employees after a hard year want visible evidence that the company's identity and future matter, that the project delivers cultural, brand, and community value against a modest initial investment, and that a recently vacated company building in a central location makes the opportunity unusually available.
The fourth slide is titled “What About the Archives We Have?” It states the current position accurately, which goes over both the internal and external archives that are already in existence, and the downsides of the way they are structured. It then gives five reasons that bringing the material in-house would be preferable, which are unified control, operational agility, brand legacy, asset protection, and value as a cultural symbol.
The remainder of the deck is implementation. Starting Small, Thinking Big sets out three phases, moving from an internal archive organized for employees and stakeholders, to a small private exhibit space for employees and partners, to a public-facing museum with exhibits, events, tours, and retail. A rough budget follows, itemized separately for each phase with line items and totals. The Funding Strategy slide identifies three channels, which are private funding, external cultural preservation and arts grants, and donations and partnerships including sponsorship and naming opportunities. The Revenue Potential slide projects returns across short, medium, and long horizons, and states plainly that direct revenue in the first phase would be very little to none while indirect returns in employee engagement and partnerships would be high. The deck closes with three sequenced next steps, which are a feasibility study and formal business strategy, the establishment of a non-profit entity and pursuit of private sponsorship, and the securing of a space followed by grant applications.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
This artifact demonstrates leadership in a current work-related position, which the competency names directly, and it demonstrates it in the form that is hardest to produce. I was not the company's archivist. I held no budget authority, no mandate to examine the collections, and no professional remit over the company's history. Nobody asked for this proposal. Building it and asking for the meeting was the whole of the leadership, and it is the version of leadership that Ammons-Stephens et al. (2009) describe when they separate capability from position. The vision domain of their model covers global thinking, creativity and innovation, and forward thinking, and none of the three requires anyone's permission.
The proposal also demonstrates the specific advocacy problem Lasewicz (2015) identifies, and it demonstrates it closely enough that the mapping is worth stating. Lasewicz argues that corporate archives are treated as discretionary, because archivists have not made the case in terms executives accept. He locates the strongest available case in two places. The first is organizational change, where an institution's history can be used to steady or justify a transition. The second is the corporate identity mix, meaning reputation, brand, and stakeholder trust. My proposal argues both. The Why slide is an organizational change argument, since its premise is that a company coming out of a difficult year needs visible evidence of continuity. The five reasons for internalizing are an identity argument, with brand legacy and cultural symbol named outright. What the deck does not do is argue for preservation on preservation's terms. The words provenance, arrangement, and finding aid do not appear anywhere in it. That was deliberate, and it reflects the condition I described earlier, which is that the professional vocabulary does not travel and that insisting on it addresses an audience that has already agreed.
The strongest single move in the presentation is the fourth slide. “What About the Archives We Have?” is the question a skeptical executive asks, and it is a genuinely strong objection, because the company does hold archives and some of them are already professionally stored elsewhere. Raising it myself, before anyone else could, did two things. It removed the possibility that the proposal would be dismissed on a point I had failed to consider, and it established that I had examined the current arrangement rather than assuming a gap. The answer I gave does not claim the existing arrangement is failing. It argues that control, agility, and exposure to another institution's policy changes are the actual risks. Anticipating and answering the strongest objection is a persuasion technique, and it is also an honesty mechanism, because an argument that cannot survive its own best counterargument should not be made.
The treatment of money shows the same discipline. The Revenue Potential slide states that the first phase would generate very little direct revenue or none. That sentence was uncomfortable to include in a funding request and it is the reason the rest of the slide is credible. An executive audience has heard optimistic projections before and discounts them automatically. Naming the weakest part of the financial case first changes how the stronger parts are received. The phased structure works the same way. Each phase produces something complete on its own, so the company is not being asked to approve a museum. It is being asked to approve an internal archive, with the later phases available and not yet committed. Reducing the size of the first decision is how a proposal survives a meeting with people who are responsible for costs.
The presentation demonstrates the kind of social awareness Kreitz (2009) measures, though the term understates what it required in practice. The argument is timed and framed around the company's emotional state after a difficult year, and it is addressed to a founder by name in a deck illustrated with the art his company produced. Reading that situation correctly was not sentiment. It was an assessment of what this particular audience, at this particular moment, would find persuasive, and it shaped the framing of every slide. Kreitz found good judgment and interpersonal skills among the handful of traits that both directors and senior managers ranked highest for any leader, and a proposal that was technically sound but misread the room would have failed on exactly those.
Finally, the handout packet addresses the condition that executive attention is granted once. The slides carry the argument in the room and the numbered handouts carry the detail out of it, so that the material remains available when the people who have to consider it are no longer in front of me. That is an instructional design decision in the sense the ACRL standard (2007) means, since the standard asks the designer to scale presentation content to the time and space available, and it reflects a judgment about how the audience would actually use the material rather than about how completely I could present it.
Evidence 3
The third piece of evidence demonstrating my mastery of Competency M is a professional reflection on an embedded metadata mapping project I led on the Product team at NBCUniversal, where I work as a Product Specialist on the team deploying a digital asset management system across Universal Destinations and Experiences. The reflection describes a piece of work that began as a request from the marketing team and ended as an approved, automated workflow. I have written it at a level I am able to publish. The platform vendor is not named, no screenshots are included, and the metadata is described by category rather than field by field.
Link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18DZ7u-26dL4LJkwsfJzTqedQfAFFWLsAsLtf3r-hrjE/edit?usp=sharing
Description of the Artifact
A digital asset management system is a centralized platform for storing, describing, and retrieving an organization's media files. What makes one usable is a shared metadata structure, so that an asset can be found by people who had nothing to do with creating it. Everything in the work described below follows from that single condition.
The deployment I work on spans Universal Destinations and Experiences, with teams in the United States. The practical description of my role is that I sit between the groups who need the system to do something and the engineers who can make it do that thing. I gather requirements, I design the metadata structures those requirements imply, I write the specification engineering builds from, and I bring the result back to the people who asked for it.
The project began with a request from the marketing team. Their assets already carried embedded metadata, written into the files themselves by the cameras, the software, and the agencies that produced them. Two published standards govern most of that information, which are those maintained by the International Press Telecommunications Council and the Extensible Metadata Platform specification. The marketing team wanted that information to land in the system automatically on upload rather than being retyped by hand. Nothing in the platform did this for them, because the fields the information would have to land in did not exist yet. They had to be designed first.
The work ran in four stages, and the first two were about getting the structure right. I asked the marketing team for example assets rather than for a list of fields, because the files would show me what was actually present in their library while a list would only tell me what they remembered. I examined what those examples carried and compared it against what the standards make available. I then designed the fields and the controlled values on the platform side, and tested the mapping against the sample assets. Several rounds of testing were necessary, because embedded metadata is inconsistent in practice even where the standard is unambiguous.
The third stage was the specification for engineering. An automation that reads embedded metadata and writes it into platform fields on upload has to be told what to do with every case, including the cases where the embedded information is missing, malformed, or contradicted by what the uploader has typed. Writing that out is a translation problem. The engineers did not need to know why a metadata standard matters to a marketing team, and the marketing team did not need to know how the automation would be built. I was the only person who had to hold both. The fourth stage was presentation and approval. I demonstrated the completed automations to the team, walked through what would happen on upload, and secured their sign-off on the workflow before it went into use.
The reflection also records what I would do differently. The early rounds of testing took longer than they needed to, because I began by mapping broadly and narrowed later, when starting narrow and adding on request would have reached the same place with less rework. I would also bring engineering into the conversation earlier. I treated the field design and the automation design as sequential, and some of what I specified in the third stage could have been simplified had I known during the second what the automation would find straightforward and what it would find expensive.
Justification and Connection to the Competency
I selected this artifact because it demonstrates two things the other two cannot. The first is leadership exercised across a sequence of stages rather than delivered in a single event, and exercised over no one who reports to me. The second is collaborative creation, which the competency names explicitly under communication skills and which a presentation by its nature cannot show.
The Braille briefing and the Dark Horse proposal were both single occasions. Each was prepared, delivered, and concluded. The mapping project was not. It moved through four stages with the same people, and each stage depended on agreement reached in the one before it. A requirement I had misread in the first stage would have surfaced as a broken automation in the third. Ammons-Stephens et al. (2009) place managing change inside the managerial effectiveness domain, and the Library Leadership and Management Association (n.d.) names change management outright, but neither conveys what the work actually consists of, which is holding a shared understanding together across a run of conversations with people who have no obligation to keep attending them. McBrayer (2025) comes closer, since building team culture and community and advocating strategically by creating alignment both describe work that is continuous rather than delivered.
The competency's communication half names collaborative ways of creating, inventing, and sharing ideas, and that is the most precise available description of what designing this mapping required. A metadata structure cannot be designed by one person and handed over. The standards make a large number of embedded fields available, and the technically interesting answer would have been to map as many of them as the platform could hold. That would have been the wrong answer. The decision about which embedded fields were worth a place in the structure was not mine to make alone, because it depended on what the marketing team would actually search on, and only they knew that. I supplied the knowledge of what the standards made available and what the platform could do with it. They supplied the knowledge of what they would look for. Neither half was sufficient, and the structure that resulted is better than what either of us would have specified alone.
This is also the setting where influence without authority is most exposed. The marketing team does not report to the Product team, and neither do the engineers. The marketing team could have declined the workflow and gone on entering metadata by hand, and engineering could have deprioritized the automation in favor of work with a louder sponsor. Getting the project built required making the case to each group in the terms that group is measured on, which meant time recovered and error reduced for one, and a bounded, testable specification for the other. Kreitz (2009) would call that emotional intelligence. In practice it is closer to research.
The work is also instruction, in the sense the ACRL standard (2007) means. The last stage of the project was a demonstration, and a demonstration is teaching. It required deciding what the audience already knew, what they needed in order to begin using the workflow, and what could be deferred. It also required explaining an automation in terms of what the team would see when they uploaded a file rather than in terms of how the automation worked. That is the standard's instructional design category operating in a corporate setting rather than a library one.
Finally, this artifact makes an argument about transfer that the essay as a whole depends on. Saunders (2020) concludes that the knowledge a professional needs is determined more by job function than by the type of institution, and recommends organizing preparation around roles rather than settings. That is the argument this section needs, and it has to be made carefully, because the same study found management of archival records and manuscripts to be the most specialized skill in its entire survey. The resolution is that the specialist knowledge does not transfer automatically while the functional problem does. What I built for the marketing team is a crosswalk, which is a mapping between two metadata schemas so that information described under one can be found under the other. I did not learn that term or that technique from the software industry. I learned it in this program, applied there to catalog records rather than to media files. The leadership and communication demands were the same demands in different clothing. What my three artifacts have in common is not the institution. It is the professional problem, which is that information work has to be explained and argued for by the people who understand it, in whatever setting they find themselves.
Conclusion
Taken together, these three artifacts trace one capability exercised at increasing scope and increasing exposure. The Braille briefing is the most contained of the three. It has a defined audience, a finished body of work behind it, and a single decision to inform, and it was produced for a course rather than delivered to the people it addresses. The Dark Horse proposal raises the stakes in every direction. The audience is two executives, the subject does not yet exist, nobody requested it, and the proposal had to survive a real meeting rather than a reading. The work at NBCUniversal removes the boundaries altogether, because the audience is many groups at once, the agreement has to be renewed continuously, and there is no point at which the task is delivered and finished.
What holds across all three is a pair of moves. Something gets raised that was not already on the agenda, and it gets explained in terms the audience already values. Neither move is sufficient alone. The Dark Horse proposal would have failed if it had argued preservation to people responsible for a budget, and it would never have existed if I had waited to be asked. The Braille briefing would have failed if it had buried the finding that did not flatter the program, because the recommendations that followed would have carried no weight. The pattern is the same each time, which is initiative paired with translation, and it is the pattern I would point to if asked what kind of professional I intend to be.
I expect to apply this competency constantly rather than occasionally. In archives, digital curation, and themed entertainment, the information function is almost never the organization's core business, which means its value has to be argued rather than assumed. Lasewicz (2015) is blunt that the profession has not yet built a case its funders find irrefutable, and anyone entering corporate cultural heritage work inherits that problem. I also expect to spend more of my career teaching than my job titles will indicate, since every system rollout, every onboarding, and every finding aid is instruction in the sense the ACRL proficiencies (2007) describe.
To remain current I will follow Core, the American Library Association division that now houses the former Library Leadership and Management Association, along with its journal Library Leadership and Management, which is where the competency research I relied on here was published. I will follow the Society of American Archivists, and in particular the work of its Business Archives Section, which produces practical advocacy material for archivists making the case to corporate leadership. For the digital asset management side of my work I will follow the Journal of Digital Media Management and the Henry Stewart DAM conferences, which are where practitioners in this specialization present. Finally, the competency itself names conference presentation as a form of professional leadership, and I intend to move from attending to presenting. The arguments in the Dark Horse proposal are not specific to one company, and the problem of making a cultural heritage case to executives who have not asked for one is common enough to be worth presenting to people facing the same situation.
Note on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
Claude (Anthropic, 2026) was used in preparing this essay to help identify relevant scholarly literature, to suggest the essay's organizational structure, and to check grammar and APA formatting. All writing, evidence selection, and analysis are my own.
References
Standards for proficiencies for instruction librarians and coordinators: Approved by the ACRL Board, June 24, 2007. (2007, October 1). College & Research Libraries News, 68(9), 570–575. https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.68.9.7871
Ammons-Stephens, S., Cole, H. J., Jenkins-Gibbs, K., Riehle, C. F., & Weare, W. H. (2009). Developing Core Leadership Competencies for the Library Profession. Library Administration & Management, 23(2), 63.
Kreitz, P. A. (2009). Leadership and Emotional Intelligence: A Study of University Library Directors and Their Senior Management Teams. College & Research Libraries, 70(6), 531–554. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.70.6.531
Lasewicz, P. C. (2015). Forget the Past? Or History Matters? Selected Academic Perspectives on the Strategic Value of Organizational Pasts. The American Archivist, 78(1), 59–83. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.1.59
Library Leadership and Management Association. (n.d.). Leadership and Management Competencies. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/core/continuing-education/leadership-and-management-competencies
McBrayer, L. W. (2025). What we need now: leadership skills, strategies, and competencies in today’s academic libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 51(4), Article 103068. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2025.103068
Saunders, L. (2020). Core Knowledge and Specialized Skills in Academic Libraries. College & Research Libraries, 81(2), 288. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.81.2.288
