INSIGHT ‘‘ HLG The benefits of co-leading


Like many of the posts on the HLG committee, Sustainability Lead is shared by two people: Janine Hall, Librarian at Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust’s Danielle Freedman Library; and Adam Tocock, Library Manager at Whittington Health Library.


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N an increasingly divided world where it seems like consensus is sadly a thing of the past, we feel


that acting on consensus rather than an individual’s caprice gives our decisions an extra level of legitimacy.


There is also surely something to be said for this more collaborative model opposed to more traditional “strong masculine leadership” (the type of leadership which has pushed the world in general to the desperate point of necessitating sustainability co-leads...).


In purely practical terms, working as a pair we are able to check each others’ biases and challenge our ideas at the earliest stages before they are shared with the committee and membership. Together, we are able to run our plans past each other, develop them more fully, and help each other out by picking up the slack when one of us is unavailable due to our day jobs.


Duties


Where one of us cannot make a meeting with a third party, we are able to trust our co-lead to represent us both and debrief the absent partner. Committee duties like report writing are shared, a co-lead is a great safety net that helps catch mistakes and correct them, and two leads means two networks and two spheres of influence to act within and expand. Before instant communication was ubiquitous, sharing a leadership post like this could mean that decisions might not be made nor actions taken as quickly by


April-May 2026 Co-operation


Like our HLG Committee colleagues, we are also guided by our peers. In our case, the Sustainability in NHS KLS Community of Practice (https://tinyurl.com/ nhzb438w) adds further to our collaborative approach, with its membership setting our agenda through discussion and feedback at online meetings. Here again it is sharing and co-operation that directs our actions: in this case, like so much climate action, it grows organically from the ground-up. We understand our


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Committee duties like report writing are shared, a co-lead is a great safety net that helps catch mistakes and correct them...


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co-leads who would need to consult each other, but in the post-COVID world of Teams and WhatsApp amongst so many other channels, we have not found this to be an issue as we keep in constant contact.


Influence


Some notable diarchies have struggled with disagreements (and less notable ones including, fittingly, the Green Party’s previous leadership pairing), where one co-lead would publicly contradict another, but in the case of sustainability in libraries we find that there are few if any fundamental points of disagreement between us. The climate crisis’ ever more pervasive influence on our lives and the guidance provided centrally via the Green Libraries Manifesto (www.cilip.org.uk/ GreenLibrariesManifesto), the Green Libraries Campaign (www.cilip.org.uk/GreenLibraries) – both of us are amongst the leadership here too, and of course Greener NHS’s Delivering a Net Zero NHS (www.england. nhs.uk/greenernhs/a-net-zero-nhs/), help to ensure that we are both in concord.


colleagues’ strength of feeling and it keeps us honest, keeps us from the mealy- mouthed box-ticking that is all-too-often the reality of corporate sustainability roles.


Future


Thinking longer term as well, sharing a leadership post means that when it is time for either of us to step down and hand-on the torch, the culture of the position can be maintained as the other postholder will be able to ease our successor into their new role and responsibilities. Quite what kind of future they’ll be responding-to is the driver behind our involvement in the committee as sustainability co-leads. IP


In purely practical terms, working as a pair we are able to check each others’ biases and challenge our ideas at the earliest stages...


Janine Hall, NHS Librarian at Danielle Freedman Library and HLG’s co-sustainability lead.


Adam Tocock, Library Manager at Whittington Health Library and HLG’s co-sustainability lead.


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