On Tuesday, in my first post on the topic of workflow management, I discussed the importance of bringing complexity indoors, out of the patron’s experience. I called this internalizing complexity. 

Today I’m going to talk about the importance of moving the locus of authority for workflow management out of the offices and job descriptions of individuals, and putting it into policy or training documents – what I call externalizing authority.

To explain, let me share an anecdote – one that can stand for many such experiences over the course of my career.

Many years ago, when I was in a middle-management position, I supervised staff whose completed outputs were channeled to a different department. For this other department, it made a big difference whether or not my staff’s outputs were produced correctly. After a while, I noticed that a supervisor from the other department was regularly coming into my department to work one-on-one with my staff to train them in how to make their outputs acceptable. I didn’t have any particular concern about this arrangement until I started getting complaints from my staff that this person was training them to do things in a certain way, and then coming back a couple of months later to tell them they were doing it all wrong, and retraining them to do those things differently. This had apparently happened several times, leading not only to frustration on my staff’s part but also a lot of wasted time. 

I investigated and confirmed their reports. The problem, I concluded, was that authority over the workflow (and over the performance standard) was vested in an individual, rather than in a policy or workflow document. This meant that when there were questions or disputes about the workflow, they could only be resolved by appeal to the individual – which meant that this individual always won. More importantly, it also meant that my staff could never be 100% certain that they were doing this part of their jobs correctly, since there was no objective standard or set of criteria against which to compare their work. There was only the supervisor from the other department, who had been set up as the ultimate authority.

In a healthy library, personalities do not drive decisions and shape policies.

In other organizations, I’ve encountered a variation on this problem: a person who has been in charge of a particular workflow for so long that he or she has become the only person in the library who truly understands it, and who has adapted the workflow over time to accommodate his or her personal preferences – regardless of whether the resulting arrangement represents what’s best for the library or its patrons. People in this position often strongly resist documenting their workflow – partly because doing so would be time-consuming and difficult, and partly because it would remove authority from them and put it in a document that can be accessed and understood by everyone. When asked to document their work, people in this situation will often respond “Just let me know if you have questions.”

In cases like these, the solution is to externalize authority over the workflow – take it out of where it currently resides (that is, in the person of whoever oversees the workflow) and put it instead into a document to which everyone has access. 

In the first situation I described above, I ended up writing a memo to the supervisor from the other department, explaining that from now on, two things were going to be necessary:

First, since I (not she) was charged with managing the time of my staff and prioritizing their assignments, all future requests to train or retrain them should come first to me. She and I would discuss the request as needed and I would decide whether the benefit was likely to be worth the cost in staff time. 

Second, all such training in the future must result in documents that reflect the instruction given. This document would then serve as the standard against which the acceptability of their work would be judged. Changes to the document, and any necessary retraining, would be discussed as laid out above.

Unsurprisingly, this directive resulted in a massive decrease in the amount of time spent by this other supervisor in retraining my staff. But more importantly, it meant that authority for workflow standards had moved to where it belonged – in agreed-upon, written documents that could be referred to by all.

This is a general principle that applies in lots of different organizational contexts. The deeper principle that underlies it is this one: In a healthy library, personalities do not drive decisions and shape policies. Instead, decisions and policies are defined according to clear and fair principles, which are documented fully, communicated openly, and applied consistently.