2026 AALL Leadership Academy Recap

I recently returned from the 2026 AALL Leadership Academy in Chicago, and I want to share a few reflections and encourage anyone thinking about applying to do so.

Over my relatively short career as a law librarian, I have attended a range of conferences such as AALL Annual Meetings, regional meetings, and CONELL, among others. The Leadership Academy stands apart from all of them. A significant part of that comes down to scale. The smaller cohort format makes networking far less intimidating than the larger conferences where it is easy to feel lost in the crowd, and the connections I made over these two days are ones I expect to carry throughout my career.

The Leadership Academy takes place over two days in Chicago, and this year’s fellows included me and 39 other law librarians. As the name suggests, the programming focuses on library leadership. However, you don’t have to be in a director or assistant director position for the Academy to be beneficial to you, and in fact most of the fellows are not in those types of positions. The Academy focuses on leadership situations in all types of library roles, whether you’re managing an entire library, a few students, or even if you don’t manage anyone but need to sell your ideas and opinions to people in leadership and management roles.

The sessions were led by Shawn Devine of Devine Learning Solutions, and he was fantastic. I was skeptical about how much I would get from a program delivered largely by a single speaker over two days. That skepticism evaporated quickly once the Academy started. Shawn read the room exceptionally well, frequently going “off script” on topics that came up organically from fellows and resonated with the group. Instead of sticking to prepared slides and a rigid schedule, he would address the topic and open it up to conversation. This resulted in some great discussions that could have otherwise been stifled.

One of the main topics of the Academy was self-awareness and how it is the most common trait shared by effective leaders. Before attending, each fellow completed an “Everything DiSC” assessment to create a workplace profile. The results served as a lens throughout the program for understanding what drives your instincts and how your tendencies show up under pressure. There was also a focus on how the way you see yourself aligns with what others see, and how to shape how others see you through clarity, conviction, and consistency.

A highlight of Day 1 for me was the session on difficult conversations, something I am sure most of us dread or actively avoid. Shawn worked through realistic law library scenarios such as addressing a performance issue, pushing back on an unreasonable deadline, and delivering news nobody wants to hear. These conversations often go sideways because the person initiating them lacks a framework for the conversation. The workbook each fellow received includes pre-written notes and multiple pages of prompts for navigating these conversations at each stage, and it is something I see myself referencing throughout my career.

A moment from Day 2 that stuck with me was a reframe on public speaking. During a discussion about confidence under pressure, Shawn pointed out that the physical feelings you experience before speaking to an audience (the nerves, the elevated heart rate, the dread) are essentially the same feelings you get climbing the lift hill on a roller coaster. The only difference is that you signed up for those feelings on the roller coaster. As someone who genuinely loves roller coasters and genuinely dreads public speaking, this resonated immediately, and I cannot imagine standing up to give a presentation from here on out without that image coming to mind.

My attendance was partially funded by a LIT-SIS grant, and I highly recommend that anyone considering applying to the Academy also look into the LIT-SIS grant and any other grants available to them. The programming was useful for law librarians in a variety of positions, leadership or not, and there were plenty of opportunities to network with the other fellows. I cannot recommend the Leadership Academy enough and want to thank LIT-SIS for helping make my attendance possible.

Written by Justin Peters, JD MS. Research and Instruction Librarian at FSU College of Law Research Center