Following on from Tuesday’s discussion of “Five Sucky Things about Being a Library Leader,” I’m going to address what I think are five of the best things about being a library director (though I think they translate well into other leadership contexts too). 

Now, to be very clear: I’m not saying these are necessarily the only five good things, or even the five best things – only that they are five of the best things, and of course in this as in most things I write about here, I freely acknowledge that other leaders’ mileage may vary significantly from mine. These are things that, for me, have been really great aspects of the library leadership experience. I present them in no particular order of awesomeness.

1. When you’re in charge of a library, you have a bully pulpit. Remember all those times when you were a line employee or a middle manager, and you had important things to say but no effective way to get the message out and no real authority to put behind them? Once you’re a library administrator (and especially a dean or director), that’s over. You now have a channel for sharing those thoughts and ideas – and, more intoxicating still, you have at least some power to transform them into direction. Obviously (or at least, I hope this is obvious), that power must be wielded with tremendous care, thoughtfulness, and charity. But it’s real, and having it is a great blessing if you are careful, thoughtful, and charitable enough to wield it well. 
2. When you’re in a leadership position, you can give others a bully pulpit. First and most importantly, this is a way to help others that was not available to you before being appointed to leadership. (In a future issue I’m going to talk more about the fundamental importance of genuinely desiring the advancement and success of the people you lead.) Less importantly, but still importantly, it is also a way you can get messages out to your organization without people feeling constantly hectored by you. To be clear: I’m not saying that the awesomeness of being able to give others a bully pulpit consists in the ability to use others as sock puppets; I’m saying that there are people in your organization who have great ideas, and as the organizational leader you are in a position to give them space to get theirmessages out to the organization. Doing so nurtures a fundamentally more healthy library in multiple ways: by giving voice to a diversity of perspectives and viewpoints; by modeling an equitable approach to organizational communication; by emboldening those who would feel intimidated into silence if the only organizational voice was that of the leader; by encouraging creative thinking; by setting an example of thoughtful and effective leadership to your other administrators and managers; etc.
3. As a leader, you’re in a position to fix organizational problems that have frustrated you in the past. Every line employee and every manager is driven crazy by something (most likely by multiple somethings) in the organization for which they work, and for most line employees and managers, the things that drive them crazy are outside of their own scope of stewardship and oversight. As a library administrator your scope of stewardship and oversight expands significantly; as a library director, it expands radically. Now you can finally deal with those nagging and frustrating organizational issues that have been a burr under your saddle for so long. (Of course, your efforts in this direction are likely to lead you to a new and much more nuanced appreciation for both those problems’ complexity and the unintended consequences that will attend trying to fix them – but that new and more nuanced appreciation is its own kind of win.)
4. As a leader, even your small gestures of kindness, thoughtfulness, and encouragement have an outsized impact. Members of the organization you lead will give greater weight to your kind words of praise and appreciation than they do the very same words from their peers or immediate supervisors. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this necessarily has anything to do with you as a person; the impact of your gestures isn’t really rooted in who you are. That enhanced impact is mainly a function of the chair you occupy. So instead, think of this as a temporary opportunity to really leverage your ability to do good. While you’re in a leadership position, your five-pound lift of kindness can yield twenty pounds of benefit to others – so how will you take advantage of that? How many people can you encourage and uplift today by, say, sticking your head into an office and saying “Thanks for those insightful remarks in yesterday’s meeting,” or stopping someone in the hall and asking how their child’s first day of school went, or thanking someone for their service as a committee chair? Praise and thank people both privately and publicly, and whenever possible, do so in terms that make clear your actual understanding of the good work they’ve done (as opposed to just saying “Hey man, you’re the best! Keep up the great work!”). The impact of doing so will be greater than you think.
5.  This last awesome thing is particularly relevant to academic libraries, which tend to employ a lot of students. Being a library leader gives you the chance to encourage and strengthen student employees. They think you’re very important; they also think you’re very smart and mature and accomplished. You may think their assessment of you is inflated, but so what? Work with it. Use their assessment of you to create opportunities for them to feel seen and encouraged by someone they look up to. Don’t let false (or real) modesty get in the way of your opportunity to give students a lift. You will occasionally, in the future, hear from former student employees who will tell you that a brief, thoughtful conversation you had with them made a big difference in their college experience. You may not even remember that conversation. Now is the time to think about that – about the degree of positive influence you can have on young people who think (rightly or wrongly) that you’re really cool because you’re the library director.

So: are there sucky things about being a leader? Of course there are. But on balance, I think it’s a pretty awesome opportunity. No matter how hard the bad days can be, I’m very grateful I’ve had the chance to do it. I hope you feel the same way about your experience.