This paper outlines the emerging trends for leadership in the knowledge era. It discusses these within the context of leading, creating and sustaining the performance development cultures that libraries require. The first step is to recognise that we all need to take leadership personally no matter whether we see ourselves as leaders or followers. Leadership literacies for the knowledge era are relationship based and require us all to be aware of and surface underlying values, assumptions and ideologies that are in play and to understand how leadership and followership practices affect production in a knowledge-intensive economy. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)