In 2019, the Georgia Tech Library was coming out of a painful period of transition where lofty change initiatives had created significant toxicity in the culture. New leadership was brought in to rectify the situation. Through a series of efforts that translated institutional efforts, departmental actions, and team-based support, the Georgia Tech Library turned a corner and started working towards creating a culture of belonging. In this participatory case study, the authors proposed a nested model of cultural support in which the underpinnings of individual support flow from the team, the department, and the institution. Each part has a role to play in working to create a culture of belonging, understanding that the work is never complete, and that while the example of the Georgia Tech Library has made progress, there is still much work to be done.
TopIntroduction
A culture of belonging is one in which people are appreciated for what they bring to a group, genuine relationships are made, and the differences between people are acknowledged and celebrated as strengths (Efron, 2022). Culture does not occur in a vacuum; instead, it is discursively created through the interactions of people inside of an institution (Driskill & Brenton, 2019). As such, efforts to create a culture that centers belonging as a key aspect must inherently cope with the extant circumstances that an organization finds itself in. It must be able to assess where it is, build a framework for future action, and then put that action of care into practice.
In 2020 under the leadership of President Ángel Cabrera, The Georgia Institute of Technology(Georgia Tech or Tech) completed its ten-year strategic plan (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020).1 Building a culture of belonging in the Library is nested within Georgia Tech’s mission, vision, values, and focus areas as the Library collectively repairs fissures in its communities, cares for its people, and prepares for interconnected futures. These priorities are framed by the Institute’s strategic plan and the focus areas of expanding access, cultivating well-being, and leading by example and underscored with the values of excellence, diversity, collaboration, and nurturing. Leadership teams at the Institute and Library levels demonstrate how a focused, mission-driven, inclusive commitment to diversity can co-create a culture of belonging. On the library leader level, work can be done on a structural basis to change the overall direction of the library. Actions like Institute strategic plan alignments and initiatives, support of DEI-oriented councils, unit-wide policies, and promotion of institution goals are all actions that must be taken to move the organization. As important as these efforts are, their wide-ranging, Library-wide natures makes them resource-intensive to develop and implement, and they often occur over timelines that last months or years. This work began at the GT Library in 2019 when Leslie Sharp became the interim CEO (and subsequently Dean of Libraries in 2020), boosted by Tech’s new leadership and strategic plan implementation, and continues with the hiring of a new leadership team that includes associate deans, heads of departments, and other people dedicated to redressing the past and transforming the culture. Sharp and the rest of the Library leadership work to ensure that all their work is driven by the Institute’s mission, vision, and values.
This work is encapsulated in a nesting model (modified from Kennedy’s [2021] model) for a culture of belonging in which the work of the supervisor for a team is situated within the work of the departmental leader which is itself situated within the work of the institution. At each level of this work, each group has different activities that they are best suited to achieve. The working theory of our approach to creating a culture of belonging is that it is embodied in leadership at all levels of an organization. As such, within academic library structures, the responsibility for developing this culture and transformation exists at the institution, library, and individual team levels or to quote Kennedy and Jain-Link, “all hands on deck: senior leaders, managers, and employees at every level of the company”(Kennedy & Jain-Link, 2021). Further, moments of change—both within and external to an organization —provide an in-built time for transition that can be leveraged to seek cultural change for the good of individuals and the library more broadly.
This case study provides a sample of this framework in action and will potentially offer others in similar situations a toolkit for emboldening their own cultures of belonging. Because of the context of this framework, the ability of frontline and non-supervisory workers (while important) is not considered within this chapter.