Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

Just about every academic library has one: an employee who has figured out that he or she (I’ll just say “he” from now on, for simplicity) can get what he wants by making life miserable for everyone else unless he gets it. In politics this is called the “terrorist’s veto” — basically a strategy that says “Give me what I want or I’ll wreak havoc.” In libraries, where actual terrorism and murderous threats are relatively rare, the milder term “heckler’s veto” is probably more apt. But in both cases, the fundamental strategy is the same. It may be the last recourse for a person who realizes he’s not winning the argument in a group deliberation or a democratic process, or it might be a way of extorting a manager or leader when the heckler disagrees with her about goals or priorities. Just as a single heckler in the audience can completely disrupt a performance or speech, a single heckler in the library can significantly disrupt the organization’s work.

So one of the most important functions of a leader is to ensure that the heckler doesn’t get a veto.

But how?

Obviously, the answer depends on how the heckler’s veto is being wielded, so to answer that question, we have to look at common manifestations of this gambit in the academic library, and some suggested ways that a leader can deal with them.

The Filibuster

Manifestation: The heckler attempts to essentially take over a meeting or a discussion, addressing his concern at length and refusing to cede the floor to someone else. Regardless of the specifics of the concern, the underlying message is usually “This issue is more important than observing the niceties of meeting etiquette. Leadership is not giving this issue the serious attention it deserves, and I’m commandeering the floor in this meeting in order to convey the issue’s seriousness and force everyone to listen.”

Management Response: In this scenario, there are usually two issues: first, the heckler tries to take up more time than is reasonable; second, the heckler starts repeating himself. If you’re in charge of the meeting, it’s the repetition that will give you the most natural opportunity to short-circuit the heckling. If he’s not repeating himself, but instead following a single long line of argument, you’ll have to wait for him to take a breath, and then simply interrupt: “Fred, I hear the point you’re making. We have other agenda items that we need to address today, but let’s make an appointment for you and me to talk more about this issue.” (Of course, in some cases the heckler will already have talked to you, and/or submitted a proposal, and is upset that doing so hasn’t led to him getting his way. But you can still offer to meet with him again. The point is to interrupt the filibuster, and to demonstrate publicly your willingness to hear him out in a more appropriate forum.) The heckler will not usually refuse outright to stop talking once told to do so, but if he does, the leader may have to ask him to leave. In an extreme scenario, where the heckler refuses to stop and refuses to leave, the person in charge of the meeting may have to dismiss everyone else. The heckler’s misbehavior, by this point, will have risen to the level of requiring some degree of formal discipline.

Refusal to Drop the Issue

Manifestation: This strategy is related to the filibuster, but it has an important difference. Refusing to drop the issue tends to be iterative; the heckler brings up the same issue in every meeting, refusing to accept the answers given. The heckler may not take an inordinate amount of time on the topic in any given meeting, but will insist that it be addressed over and over again and will express frustration that all he ever gets are the same unsatisfactory responses. Along with this strategy will often come an unwillingness to discuss the issue one-on-one or in a smaller meeting: “No,” the heckler might say, “I want you to answer these questions in a public forum.”

Management Approach: This situation calls for deep reserves of patience on the leader’s part. Just as the heckler is frustrated that he’s not getting satisfactory answers, the leader will likely be frustrated that her answers (which may be the only answers available) are never satisfactory. Here the heckler has an advantage: he can show his frustration openly, while the leader needs to be very careful to hide hers. The first few times this happens, a wise leader will simply respond, truthfully and candidly, as if each were the first time. But after, say, the third time, the leader can say “I’ve answered this question multiple times already. If you’re still not satisfied with the answer, let’s talk further one-on-one instead of making everyone else hear the same question and answer over and over.” If the heckler is unwilling to have a one-on-one conversation, that’s his choice.

Harassment

Manifestation: Hecklers who have become particularly frustrated with normal processes and procedures may resort to behavior that amounts to harassment: encouraging multiple people from outside the library to contact a library decision-maker in support of his cause; following the leader or manager out to their car; yelling at them in their offices or in public spaces of the library; leaving them anonymous notes; etc. It’s rare, but I have even seen instances of vandalism.

Management Approach: Harassment is where the heckler’s veto starts becoming more like the terrorist’s veto. Library leaders cannot permit harassment in any form, and must treat it as a disciplinary issue from the moment it arises. When the leader becomes aware of this kind of behavior, she should immediately involve the library’s human resources manager and meet with the heckler promptly, making clear the expectation that the behavior stop immediately and laying out the consequences (as per both library and campus policies) if it does not.

Circumvention

Manifestation: Sometimes the heckler will exercise his “veto” by circumventing the leader and taking the issue up one or more organizational levels — most likely to the person to whom the library leader reports, but sometimes all the way to the institution’s top leadership. Campus administrators are used to this happening, and (except when the heckler is making an accusation of genuine malfeasance) will invariably refer the heckler back to the library leader.

Management Approach: If this happens, prompt action is (again) essential. The leader should explain the inappropriateness of such circumvention to the heckler, explaining that it both constitutes potentially actionable insubordination and undermines the library itself in the eyes of campus administration. Involve HR, document the behavior, and make clear to the heckler that further instances of it may lead to disciplinary action.

Undermining

Manifestation: Undermining can be subtle, and therefore challenging to deal with. The line between appropriate critique and actionable insubordination can be fuzzy and, to some degree, subjective; in my experience, wise library leaders give those they lead broad latitude to speak critically of the organization and its leadership. But there are limits, especially when it comes to external communication. It’s one thing to badmouth the library’s leadership or practices internally, among library colleagues; it’s another to do so with student patrons, campus faculty, or members of the broader community. Such a strategy can be tempting to a library employee who feels strongly that the library should be doing something differently and has become frustrated at his inability to convince leadership to change course.

Management Approach: As noted above, wise library leaders do not try to clamp down on internal dissent; instead, they try to work with the dissenters both to give a good-faith hearing to their concerns and to help them keep their expressions of dissent appropriate and professional. But undermining the library and its leadership with external constituencies calls for a firmer response. A leader who learns about such behavior should meet promptly and one-on-one with the person responsible, ask careful questions to ensure that she genuinely understands what was done and said, and then be clear in her expectation that it not happen again, documenting the meeting and keeping the documents on file. Repeated manifestations of this behavior should be treated seriously as a disciplinary matter.

Final Note

Some of the above behaviors (notably harassment) should be treated as disciplinary matters immediately. But leaders need to be careful not to overreact when a heckling behavior is more annoying than genuinely disruptive or abusive. In most cases, formal disciplinary action is only justified when the behavior is persistent and the heckler is not responding appropriately to informal counsel and guidance.

I’ve learned many things (so many things) the hard way over the course of my career, and especially during my time as a manager and administrator in academic libraries.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that writing really benefits from the “buddy system.” You know about the buddy system — it’s the primary way that we keep large groups of small children from getting lost or running out into the street when we take them out on field trips. You have the children pair up, making each member of each pair accountable for the location of the other. When the time comes to get onto or off of the bus, or to move to a different location, or to walk along a busy street, you yell “Buddy up!” and all the children have to find their buddy and stay with him or her throughout the process. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it doesn’t have to be; it just has to increase the ease of keeping the kids together and reduce the likelihood of a child getting lost or hurt.

Buddying up is also a valuable tool when it comes to producing documents, especially documents designed to communicate a message from library leadership.

Here’s the thing: I’m now old enough to have a pretty good idea of what I’m good at and what I’m bad at. One thing I’m good at is writing. I’ve been a good writer since I was six, and I’ve become a better one since. I don’t claim to be a great writer, but it’s something I’m very good at.

What I’ve learned over the years, however, is that being a good writer is not key to producing good professional and administrative documents. It’s definitely helpful, but it’s not key. What are the key elements of a good document? There are actually three:

A good administrative document includes correct information, which is presented clearly and concisely, and answers more questions than it raises. A document that is awkwardly written but still accomplishes those three goals is better than an elegantly written document that fails to accomplish them. (Of course, poor writing can be poor precisely because it’s unclear; but awkward, lifeless, and even ungrammatical writing can also be admirably clear and concise.)

Being a good writer is not key to producing good documents.

Most people in positions of library leadership will be at least reasonably good writers; it’s hard to get to a leadership position if you don’t have a history of clear and effective written communication. And the danger of being a good writer in leadership is that you may come to the mistaken conclusion that you don’t need help producing important documents.

Experienced leaders reading this essay are probably already nodding their heads ruefully, remembering a time they drafted a public or organization-wide email, memo, policy statement, or press release without getting help from their team, and came to bitterly regret it. Certainly this has happened to me, more than once (I may write well, but I learn slowly). Here are three lessons I’ve learned, each connected to one of those three key elements of a good document:

1. As a leader, you do not have enough information. It’s in the nature of your job to be a fox (who knows many things about your organization) rather than a hedgehog (who knows one area of the organization very well). This is both inevitable and essential, and it puts you in a very good position to say broad things about the library as a whole. But you need the hedgehogs to help ensure that you say accurate things about the specific areas of the library they know well.
2. As a writer, you are not as clear and concise as you think you are. You need other people to help you kill your darlings and pare down your writing to what’s essential and what really serves the purpose of the document. A phrase you love may be a phrase that gets in the way, and only someone who doesn’t love it will be able to help you see that.
3. As a reader, you cannot read your document the way another reader can. You know what you mean before you start reading your own document; you need it to be read by people who don’t already know what you mean. They will be the ones able to identify which questions you’ve answered and which new ones you’ve created, and thus to help you either change what’s written so those new questions aren’t raised, or adjust the writing so that those questions are answered in the document.

As I’ve learned these lessons, I’ve come to adopt a practice that has saved me untold heartache: I almost never send an important email, policy statement, or other significant document out to the library organization, to the campus community, or to university administration without first running it past the members of my leadership team and asking “What am I missing or miscommunicating here?”. The feedback I’ve received from them has saved my bacon (and, more importantly, preserved the library’s reputation) more times than I can count.

For those who might be coming to the party late, “Two and a Half Cheers” is the unifying theme for my occasional interventions on practices, characteristics, or approaches to librarianship and library leadership that I feel are unjustly maligned — at least in part. “Two Cheers” signals that I’m going to suggest the issue at hand be given a fresh look; the fact that I’m only willing to go half a cheer beyond two (rather than all the way to three) signals that I understand why the practice, characteristic, or approach has been maligned, even if I don’t fully agree with that stance.

With all of that said, let’s look at the issue of collegiality.

This issue is closely related, though not identical, to those of civility and niceness, which I’ve addressed in previous Two and a Half Cheers pieces. As I pointed out previously, civility is a rock-bottom standard of behavior in any organization. A person who is genuinely incapable of civility, or unwilling to be civil, should not be retained as an employee. Niceness represents a significant step up from civility; it involves not just treating other people with basic human consideration, but also demonstrating actual care for other people.

As I suggested in one of those earlier pieces, collegiality operates in the same general neighborhood as civility and niceness, but here I want to explore its more specific focus: it has to do with employees’ relationship to each other not just as human beings generally, but as work colleagues specifically. Where civility means not being actively mean and niceness means demonstrating interpersonal care, collegiality implies working together effectively as well as nicely.

Unlike both civility and niceness, collegiality itself is often a specific performance parameter against which library employees are judged. (In this capacity, the term can itself incorporate both civility and niceness; while one can be both civil and nice without being collegial, it’s hard to imagine how someone can be collegial without being civil and at least somewhat nice.) The fact that collegiality is a slightly fuzzy concept, and therefore to some degree subjective, can create controversy when it’s used as an evaluation parameter.

Collegiality is about employees’ relationships not just as human beings,
but as work colleagues.

More dangerously, collegiality can be wielded inappropriately as an evaluation parameter in a bullying mode. Many of us, as library employees, have found ourselves asking questions like:

• Is my boss rating me as needing improvement in collegiality because my behavior towards colleagues is genuinely unacceptable, or because he just doesn’t particularly like my style?

• Did my colleague complain about my lack of collegiality because I actually mistreated her in some way, or because I didn’t give her what she wanted?

• If I express a minority view on some issue, do I run the risk of being docked for “uncollegiality” simply for not seeming like a team player?

So there really are certain dangers in trying to hold people to standards of collegiality. For one thing, rigorous standards of collegiality are hard to define; for another, the degree to which an employee adheres to even a very elegantly and fairly constructed definition of collegiality will be subjective. And in academic libraries in particular — where a tenure bid can be derailed by a negative vote from colleagues — this subjective criterion can make or break a librarian’s career.

On the other hand, we can’t pretend that collegiality doesn’t matter. It really is essential that library employees treat each other with both human respect and professional consideration. So how do we thread this needle?

Sadly, there’s no simple answer to that question. But I can suggest a few principles that help:

Transparency. Don’t leave your employees wondering whether collegiality is an evaluation criterion in your library. Make it one, and make that fact clear — not only by talking about it publicly, but by documenting it and making sure the documentation is easily findable.

Clarity. You won’t come up with a perfect definition of “collegiality,” or even with an imperfect one that everyone in your library will agree on. But you can come up with one that works for your library. It will work to the degree that it’s clear and reasonable. And of course, you may find that you need to tweak your definition over time. Nothing wrong with that.

Consistency. However you define “collegiality” in your library, and however you apply it as a criterion of evaluation, your biggest challenge will be applying it in a consistent way that reflects real behavior. You will have the problem of people accusing others of non-collegiality when they don’t get what they want, or when they just don’t get along with them. How will you adjudicate those situations? Be prepared to answer questions like “Why am I getting dinged for a lack of collegiality when so-and-so is such a jerk?” and “How am I supposed to be collegial when half of my job is telling people ‘no’?”.

It’s easy for me to say that, isn’t it? Saying “Be prepared to answer questions like…” is much less helpful than saying “Here’s how to answer questions like…”

That’s why collegiality gets only two and a half cheers.

Last week I grumped about the phrase “If you build it, they will come,” which I’ve heard countless times over the course of my career — usually referring to a new service or program that someone in the library feels must be established. When asked searching questions about the evidence for need, or the potential for a good balance between cost and benefit, too often the answer is a solemn (or puckish) incantation of “If we build it, they will come.”

In reality, of course, libraries build things all the time to which no one comes.

But that’s an easy observation to make. The more difficult question is: how do you build something to which people are likely to come?

About ten years ago I wrote a column in Against the Grain in which I discussed the difference between water and broccoli. Or, more accurately, I discussed the difference between thirst and vitamin deficiency. I pointed out that when a person is thirsty, that person will naturally and automatically crave water (or, in my case, Diet Coke), and will recognize water immediately as something that will ease her thirst. However, someone who has a deficiency of vitamins C and A will probably not crave broccoli — despite broccoli’s high levels of those vitamins. In the case of water, there’s a natural confluence between the person’s actual need and the person’s felt need. In the case of broccoli, there will usually be a marked disconnect between actual and felt need.

In libraries, we see something very much like this dynamic as well when it comes to our services. Some of those services are like offering water to the thirsty: interlibrary loan (“Help! I need this book that the library doesn’t own!”), textbook collections (“Help! My textbook costs $300 and I can’t afford it!”), and online journals (“Yay! I can access the article I need without leaving my dorm/office/home!”) are all examples of these.

But some of the services we offer are more like trying to convince someone with a vitamin deficiency to eat broccoli, even though it doesn’t sound yummy to them: institutional repositories (to which we struggle to attract faculty authors, no matter how carefully we explain the benefits of deposit); help desks (which are sometimes busy, but not usually, and even at their busiest serve only a tiny fraction of our constituencies); print collections (usage of which has radically fallen with the migration of scholarly content online) are examples of these. The benefits of these services may be entirely real, but for the most part our patrons just don’t feel compelled to use them.

So what’s the solution? We can approach a problem like this from two different directions.

The first is the demand-side approach: it is to shift from trying to convince our patrons to behave differently, and instead focus on giving our patrons whatever they want.

The second is the supply-side approach: it is to increase our efforts to change users’ behavior, through some combination of structural restriction (making it harder for them to do what we think they shouldn’t) and education (hopefully increasing their desire to do what we think they should).

Obviously, these two approaches do not represent a binary choice: every library combines them to some degree and in different degrees with regard to different services and programs. But it matters very much how these approaches are balanced in your library.

It should also be obvious that I can’t prescribe for any other library what that balance should be at an organizational level, still less how that balance should be achieved in specific library areas. But I can suggest a few principles that it makes sense for all of us to bear in mind when considering this issue in our libraries:

• For time-sensitive needs, focus on the demand side. Sometimes people don’t have time to be taught how to fish — they just need a fish, quickly, before they starve. And yes, it’s true that sometimes a patron’s time-sensitive needs are time-sensitive because that patron has managed his time badly. Try not to worry too much about that — honestly, teaching patrons how to manage their time is outside the library’s remit.
• For more systemic needs, focus on the supply side. But bear in mind that purely library-based education efforts are most likely to be effective if they’re undertaken in collaboration with (or at the behest of) members of the teaching faculty — for the simple reason that the library is rarely in a position to make education offerings compulsory. Inviting patrons to come to the library and be educated is going to be much less effective than bringing library education to places they’re already required to be.
• Align strategies with faculty goals and be flexible. Bear in mind that some faculty may be very anxious for you to support them in their educational efforts; others may need you to focus on meeting immediate student needs quickly; others may want to be left alone to do bibliographic literacy work themselves. A library that becomes rigid and doctrinaire regarding patron education will quickly lose support.
• Don’t give up on education, but don’t rely on its efficacy. To the degree possible the library should be intuitive and effortless to use. That should be our goal. But because we’ll never reach that goal completely, it’s also essential to offer education. But we need to be very careful not to confuse necessity with virtue.

And that will actually be the topic of my next post — bibliographic instruction as a necessary evil.

OK, OK. Maybe the title for this post is a little overly dramatic. But stick with me.

I’ve long been frustrated by how easily people seem to be hoodwinked into believing nonsense as long as the nonsense is couched in a catchy phrase (still more so if it rhymes). Consider the idiocy of popular sayings like:

• “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (Unless it leaves you, you know, permanently disabled.)
• “Cheaters never win” (Guess what? Cheaters win all the time.)
• “The customer is always right” (… said no one who has worked with customers, ever.)
• “Money can’t buy happiness” (It sure can — to a reasonable degree, of course.)

Today I’m going to get grouchy about a phrase that, throughout my career as a librarian, I’ve been hearing people evoke as if it had any semblance of validity in real life:

If you build it, they will come.

Those of us Over a Certain Age will immediately recognize this as the catch phrase that remains as the lasting legacy of an old Kevin Costner film called Field of Dreams. (In the movie, Costner’s character was convinced by a disembodied voice to build a full-sized baseball field on his property so that the ghosts of a bunch of legendary baseball players could come play there.)

Anyone who has worked in libraries in the past 30 years will have heard this phrase invoked countless times, in support of ideas that have ranged from utterly foolish to very good. And anyone who has worked in libraries for any amount of time will be able to cite numerous examples of things that they built, on the assumption that building the thing would automatically attract people, but to which… no one came. And yet we still hear that phrase, over and over, invoked like a talisman .

Here’s the problem: things that we build in libraries have no natural attractive properties. Whether it’s a web page, a libguide, an institutional repository, a lecture series, a support service — whatever it is, the fact of its appearance will not automatically create attraction.

How do we build things to which people will come? The answer is both simple and elusive: people will come to things that meet a felt need. Not necessarily an actual need, but a felt need.

What do I mean by that? Tune in to my next post, on The Difference Between Water and Broccoli.

In my last post, I promised to share some important principles that should underly the creation of policy in the library. Please note that I don’t pretend this is an exhaustive list — and I welcome suggestions of additional ones. But I believe all of the following are fundamentally important:

The first is one that I touched on briefly in that last post: good policies are based on strategic organizational needs, not on individual personalities. In every library, there will be a temptation either to forego creating a policy because the people currently in place don’t seem to need it, or to create one specifically for the purpose of solving a problem with an individual employee. In both cases, the temptation is to let personality drive policy — which is always a mistake. Personalities change as personnel change; good policies are grounded in principles that remain consistent over time.

Another principle that should always inform policy formation and maintenance arises from the question of whether the library and its patrons would benefit more from consistency or from flexibility in a particular regard. For example, when it comes to library hours, everyone usually benefits from consistency; when it comes to employee dress expectations, everyone may benefit more from flexibility. Policies are always a tool for providing consistency. In areas where you want to preserve flexibility, avoid creating a policy.

Another purely pragmatic principle is this one: a good policy resolves more problems than it creates. Rest assured that every policy will create problems — hopefully minor ones, but there will always be a problem. The policy will liberate some people and frustrate others; it will expose issues in the organization that no one anticipated; it will lead to new questions no one thought of. The same will be true when you eliminate an existing policy. So when considering establishing a new policy or eliminating an old one, the important question is not “will this lead to problems?”, because the answer to that question is always yes. The important question will be: how likely is it that this course of action will solve more problems (or more important problems) than it creates?

One important function of a policy is to locate authority — in other words, a policy should always make clear who is responsible for what. A good policy puts authority where it belongs — which may be with a particular individual, or with a unit, or with the library (i.e. the library administration). Generally speaking, you want to push decision-making down to the lowest feasible organizational level, but determining what “lowest feasible” means will be an ongoing effort in every library.

The last principle I want to invoke here is sort of a meta-policy principle: policies should be set according to a consistent and principle-based practice of policy creation and maintenance. In other words, every library needs a “policy of policies” that answers questions like:

• Who can set policy at the unit and organizational levels?
• When two policies are in conflict, how will we decide which one prevails?
• When someone wants to propose a new policy (or the revocation of an old one), is it clear how they can do that?
• When someone proposes a new policy, what happens?
• How are new policies (or the revocation of old ones) communicated to the library and, as applicable, to its patrons?

What other principles have you found to be important when it comes to policy creation in your library? Comments welcome.

As I’ve discussed previously, policy creation is a bit of a two-edged sword: on the one hand, if you’re going to hold people accountable for certain practices and behaviors (or for refraining from certain practices or behaviors), it’s only fair to document those expectations clearly so that everyone knows what the expectations are. On the other hand, if you try to create an organizational policy to account for every possible eventuality, you’ll end up driving everyone crazy with unnecessary constraint — not to mention with trying to keep the policy library updated as things change.

With all of that in mind, though, let’s address an issue that every library has probably encountered: resistance to policy creation based on the argument that “we don’t need that policy because people are reasonable and can work out these issues for themselves.” Versions of this argument often arise when one or both of the following are true:

1. The purpose of the proposed policy would be to resolve conflict between two individuals or departments (the person objecting to the policy will usually be the one who has historically prevailed in the conflict), or
2. Someone has benefited from ambiguity that the policy is intended to resolve.

Examples of situations in which this kind of argument is likely to arise might include:

• One department’s workflows is in conflict with those of another department, and a policy is proposed to resolve that conflict.
• It’s not clear who is responsible for a particular area of work, and a policy is proposed that would clarify stewardship boundaries.
• Resource-allocation decisions (such as for travel or student hiring) are being made according to the whims and preferences of an individual, not according to clear and strategically formulated policy.
• An individual has become the sole source of authoritative information about a workflow or practice, with the result that the only way for others in the organization to learn what is expected is to ask that individual.

In all of the above circumstances, it’s easy to see why a person or an organizational unit might resist the creation of a formal policy. When two departments’ workflows are in conflict, it will usually be the case that one of the two departments has historically prevailed; that department may not be happy about a new policy that resolves the conflict in a way that doesn’t favor them. The same is true when stewardship boundaries are ambiguous; resolving that ambiguity may not be equally welcome to both parties. When an individual has become either the sole source of authoritative information about a workflow or has become the person to whom others must appeal for funding, that situation vests power in the individual that he or she will probably not want to give up.

One of the salutary things about policy is that it takes power away from individuals and vests it in the organization. This can also be a downside of policy.

One of the salutary things about policy is that it tends to take power away from individuals and vest it in the organization. This is a benefit when policies are created strategically and with reasonable restraint — but it can be a problem when policies are created in a haphazard way or to account for personalities rather than for larger organizational needs. And, of course, we often don’t want to disempower people — we want our folks to feel fully empowered to act within the scope of their stewardship. But this also means we need to make sure everyone fully understands where their stewardship ends and someone else’s begins, and we don’t want individuals creating de facto library policy without appropriate organizational oversight.

A key principle that I believe can be very helpful in threading this needle is: make policy based on principles, not personalities. A policy isn’t less necessary just because the people it would affect are good and reasonable people who can be trusted to act appropriately — for one thing, even good and reasonable people have bad days; for another, the people who will be in those positions one or two or ten years from now may not be as reasonable as the ones in place today. A policy is needed when the library and its patrons would benefit from clear and consistent expectations; the more important the program or service, and the more people it affects, the more important it will be to have clear and principle-based policies that apply to it.

What should those principles be? Tune in to the next post for some discussion about that.

Everyone knows that you can’t be an effective leader if you’re not willing to listen to the people you lead. But there are so many ways of doing that, some more useful and constructive than others — and some more useful and constructive in some situations and contexts than in others. This post, unfortunately, is not one in which I’m going to offer clear advice based on my experience — instead, I’m going to raise complicated and as-yet unresolved questions based on my experience. Hopefully these questions will be helpful to others wrestling with the challenge of soliciting feedback.

When I came to my current position leading the library at Brigham Young University, I inherited from my predecessors a program we call the Pulse Survey, which is sent once a month to all non-student library employees. The survey consists of three parts:

1. A single question to which employees are invited to submit a free-text answer. Past questions have included “What could we do to better include all voices in decision-making, especially those from underrepresented roles or perspectives?” and “What motivates you to do your best work each day at the library?”.
2. A “Kudos” section, which gives employees the opportunity to praise someone else in the organization.
3. A “Suggestion Box” section, which gives employees the chance to suggest changes or improvements to library policy or practice.

Historically, all responses to the Pulse Survey have been anonymous, and all responses have been shared with all library employees. (The only exception being when an employee submits a response that is in some way patently inappropriate, such as a direct personal attack on another employee or a response that reveals confidential information. Such responses are redacted from the publicly-distributed version of the survey results.)

As one might imagine, the anonymous nature of this survey is a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, there is tremendous value in providing a forum for people to speak their minds freely without fear of retribution. The leadership team has gained valuable insights into the thinking and concerns of our staff by offering that freedom — insights that we certainly never could have gotten from in-person conversations or meeting discussions.

Anonymous public feedback is always a mixed blessing.

On the other hand, there is significant risk in providing a forum for people to speak their minds freely without accountability. At times the Pulse Survey has, unfortunately, served as a platform for axe-grinding and for intemperate and sometimes uninformed criticism of colleagues, policies, and practices — comments that also would almost certainly never have been made if the commenters were not anonymous.

Of course, there are other limitations inherent in gathering information by means of a voluntary and anonymous survey. Response rates tend to hover around 20%, which means that even when a clear majority of respondents express a particular view, we can’t be certain that the expressed view is representative of the library staff’s feelings generally — it may only be representative of those most motivated to respond.

Over the past year, we had noticed an uptick in negative (and, particularly, in unconstructively negative) Pulse responses, and while we recognize the value and importance of such responses (even when they’re not very constructive), we also began to suspect that the Pulse format was starting to create more negativity than utility, and started talking about what we might do to reconfigure it so that it would encourage less axe-grinding and more useful feedback, while still preserving a forum for critical or negative input.

One change with which we are currently experimenting is an alteration in our anonymity policy: now, instead of all Pulse responses being shared publicly with all in the library, we tell survey respondents that while all responses will be reviewed by the library’s leadership team, only signed responses to the survey question and the Suggestion Box section will be shared publicly. (Kudos, signed or not, will still be shared with everyone.) Our hope is that this compromise will strike a good balance between making sure that people can still offer critical responses to the library administration, and not providing a public forum for unconstructive spleen-venting.

Will this prove to be the right balance? We don’t know. At this point we’re in trying-stuff-out mode. I’d be interested to hear from readers who have other ideas, or who approach this issue in a different way in their institutions.

A couple of weeks ago I made a note to myself to write a post on this topic, and then the other day I heard that Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert, had just died. So I guess now is the time.

Most of us have probably read Dilbert at some point during our careers. It was a comic strip that ran for decades, dealing with the absurdities of corporate life, and that tended to take particularly sharp aim at failures of management and leadership. The humor — and the strip was regularly very, very funny — often hinged on the cluelessness, venality, egocentrism, and ignorance of people charged with supervising the work of others and furthering the strategic goals of organizations. (Strategic goals themselves — or the lack thereof, or the incoherence thereof, or the manifest idiocy thereof — were also a frequent target.)

Almost 30 years ago, I was in a conference session at which a library director gave a talk during which she expressed her frustration with Dilbert and what she believed was its tendency to foment and nurture cynicism among the workforce. What I found interesting was that the solution she proposed to her audience was not to avoid the kinds of management approaches that were regularly lampooned in Dilbert — instead, what she proposed was that we try to get our employees to stop reading Dilbert.*

The irony of this stance should be immediately obvious; it’s exactly the kind of solution that a clueless manager in Dilbert might have suggested. But it’s also a helpful negative illustration of an important principle of management and leadership. That principle is: you can’t outlaw cynicism; you can only undermine it by genuinely earning your people’s trust. In fact, if you try to outlaw cynicism, all you’ll do is increase it.

You can’t outlaw cynicism in your workplace; you can only undermine it by genuinely earning trust.

Imagine if you were one of the speaker’s library employees in that meeting, and heard your library director say “People need to stop reading Dilbert; it just makes them cynical about the workplace.” What thoughts would be going through your head? If that were me, I would probably be thinking things like:

• “If she thinks we’re going to identify with Dilbert, then doesn’t that suggest there are things that need to change in our library?”
• “Does she really think that avoiding Dilbert will make us less cynical about our workplace?”
• “Can she hear herself? She’s a library director who is literally trying to tell us what not to read.”

But the real lesson for us as leaders isn’t really “don’t tell your staff not to read Dilbert.” In this regard I think this particular library director was an outlier and — let’s be charitable — was speaking off the cuff and may very well have just been having a bad day. The real lesson is that if we find ourselves struggling with an environment of cynicism and mistrust in the units or organizations we lead, the first place to look is not at the failings in our employees’ reading habits, but at the workplace culture for which we have responsibility. If you’re sensing disaffection or grumpiness in the people you lead, start asking around: is that a general vibe, or are you just noticing a few people who are exceptionally unhappy for some reason? Talk to supervisors: how do they read the mood in their particular areas? If you are getting the impression that discontent is generally distributed throughout the library rather than concentrated in a particular trouble spot, consider soliciting anonymous feedback and reviewing it with your leadership and management teams.

Of course, soliciting anonymous feedback is complicated itself, and comes with both pros and cons. We’ll discuss these in my next post.

* Note: I’m aware of Scott Adams’ racially problematic views and his practice of airing them publicly. To be clear, the experience I’ve related here took place many years before those views came to light; this library director’s unhappiness with Dilbert clearly arose from the content of the comic strip itself — it was not a call to boycott Dilbert because of Adams’ views on race.

Let me start out by acknowledging that “Science and Religion in the Library” is a provocative subtitle, and to some degree it’s meant to be. Let me explain what I mean by it.

For my purposes here, I’m going to define as “science” those aspects of library work that deal with figuring out and describing things as they are, and as “religion” those that deal with figuring out how things should be and why they should be that way. In the sense that I’m using the terms here, science is descriptive, and religion is prescriptive; science is involved with “is” questions, while religion is involved with “should” questions.

Both are important: on the “science” side, we need to know whether and to what extent our resources are being used by patrons, how much money is left in the budget, and where current trends will take us if they continue. On the “religion” side, we need to be clear on the ultimate goals behind what we do and on the values that inform our policies and practices. Furthermore, unless there’s considerable agreement among library leaders and staff as to those foundational values, we are liable to find ourselves working at cross purposes with one another.

In my previous post, I proposed a Venn diagram that illustrates three spheres of endeavor in the library, two of which represent the things we should do (which is a “should,” or religious question) and those we can do (which is an “is,” or science question). In that post I focused on the imperfect overlap among the three spheres and on why I think it’s important that we understand the dynamics behind their interactions. In this column I want to focus on the essential differences between is and should and on what I think those differences imply for the way we think about and carry out our work in libraries.

In the library, we are constantly faced with “science” questions. For example: 

• “How often do our patrons use Chemical Abstracts?”
• “At what point in the future will we have to start canceling individual journal subscriptions in order to continue paying for our comprehensive Elsevier journal package?”
• “What has been the ten-year trend line for book circulation in our library?”
• “Is the information in this catalog record accurate?”

I characterize these as “science” questions because they deal with data that can be detected, analyzed, and measured and from which inferences and projections can be made. Different people may disagree about the answers, but, at least in principle, the disagreements can generally be settled by an appeal to objective facts and data. The answers to these questions will tell us what is, but they will not, in and of themselves, tell us what we should do.

In order to proceed from seeing what is to deciding what ought to be, we will have to bring a very different set of questions into play. These might include the following (notice the should terms in italics): 

• “Are our patrons using Chemical Abstracts at a level that justifies the expense?”
• “Which individual journal subscriptions should we cancel before we start seriously considering unbundling the Big Deal?”
• “Given the circulation trend line, would it be wise to redistribute our materials budget?”
• “Do we have the right amounts of the right information in our catalog records?”

Each of the above is a should question rather than an is question. I categorize them as religious—not because they have to do with the supernatural but because we won’t be able to answer them by simply appealing to facts; in order to answer them, we will have to appeal to values.

And this is where things can get dicey in the library. When two people disagree about whether Chemical Abstracts got 100 uses or 1,000 uses in the previous month, the dispute can be settled by an appeal to data—but when they disagree about whether the usage is sufficient to justify renewal, a different dimension of decision-making comes into play. “Sufficiency to justify” is not an is criterion but a should criterion and can only be answered by reference to values.

Most of us understand this more or less intuitively. If a colleague says, “I reject your circulation data because they say that our patrons decreasingly value the book collection,” most of us will recognize that this stance represents an inappropriate conflation of is and should (“I reject your data because I don’t like what they show”). But we aren’t always as strictly clear about this important distinction in our meetings and policy discussions as we should be. Too often, we do conflate is and should considerations in ways that make it harder to solve problems and serve our patrons. It’s understandable, of course. Consider how similar they can be, at least on the surface: 

• Is: “We can’t afford to give our patrons everything they want.”
• Should: “It’s not our job to give patrons everything they want.”

• Is: “We have to cut another journal if we’re going to subscribe to Journal Y.”
• Should: “Journal Y is too expensive and its publisher makes too much money.”

• Is: “We are regularly losing staff members who leave for higher-paying jobs.”
• Should: “We don’t pay our staff enough.”

Sometimes it’s even harder to tell the difference between should and is statements because one is couched in the terminology of the other—the phrase “we can’t do that” might mean “we don’t have sufficient resources to do that,” or it might mean “doing that would constitute a breach of our values and mission.” The same is true of statements like “we can’t afford Journal X” (which usually means “subscribing to Journal X would require us to cancel something more important”) and “we can’t hire so-and-so” (which may mean either “he doesn’t meet the posted minimum requirements” or “I think he’s an unacceptable candidate”).

Again, it’s important to emphasize that “science” questions are not better or more important than “religion” questions, nor vice versa. Both are essential. But if we’re going to manage our resources and serve our patrons well, then recognizing and dealing with the differences between those kinds of questions is essential.

What does recognizing and dealing with them mean? In practice, for the most part it means simply paying attention and guiding discussion (especially in meetings) accordingly. If you’re running a meeting and encounter religious statements masquerading as science, it might be a good idea gently to unmask them: “John, you mentioned that we can’t afford Journal X—it looks to me like we could afford it if we canceled these three titles from our annual review list. Is it possible that would be a good trade-off?”

Do make sure you unmask them gently, though. No one likes having their religion challenged, no matter what it is.