Last week I offered some advice for library leaders on dealing with people who want to change the subject. This week I’d like to offer some advice on dealing with people who want to divide and conquer. Let me explain what I’m talking about.

When you’re dealing with a difficult or complex issue in the organization, the best approach is almost always – though not absolutely always (more on this later) – to get all the stakeholders around the same table at the same time. This may seem like an obvious principle, and that’s because it’s intuitively obvious that getting all the stakeholders together at the same time makes it most likely that all relevant views will be heard in a forum where they can be discussed openly, and that all relevant issues and facets of the problem will be aired openly.

The problem is, when you’re dealing with complex and (especially) contentious issues, it will not be in every employee’s personal best interest for all relevant views to be heard and all relevant issues and facets of the problem to be openly discussed and evaluated. There may be one or more people in the organization for whom such discussion will be threatening, because they already know how they want the issue to be resolved and open discussion might lead the library to a different conclusion.

When this is the case, sometimes that employee or group will attempt to divide and conquer, by which I mean he/they will try to have sidebar conversations with members of library leadership or other responsible parties, in which he will press his case and try to influence the decision, hoping either to derail the broader conversation or to change its direction from behind the scenes.

I’m going to propose two simple principles for dealing with such situations, and then propose a complicating factor that can create complexity in applying these simple principles.

The simple principles are:

First, Sunlight is the best disinfectant. What I mean by this is that when conflicts arise, or when different organizational interests are in conflict, the conflicts are usually best identified, understood, and resolved in an open and (to the degree appropriate) public way. Such an approach is one manifestation of the default to openness that I have urged from the very beginning of this newsletter, and which I have found to be almost always the best approach. Obviously, “public” is a relative term – it doesn’t mean that every meeting should be open to all library employees. It does mean that all genuine stakeholders should be at the table and should have a voice in the resolution of the conflict.

Second, More brains make better decisions. Getting all genuine stakeholders around the same table at the same time is not only fairer and more likely to bring to light all relevant issues and variables; it also creates problem-solving synergy by getting stakeholders with a variety of perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, backgrounds, and experience sets focused on the same problem at the same time. In my experience, this almost invariably leads to better decisions. No library leader knows enough about her or his organization to make big decisions alone; no library leader knows enough about her or his organization to know how accurate a single employee’s account of a problem or an interaction is. More eyes, more brains, and more perspectives are almost always needed if you want to get to the best outcome.

So when you’re approached by a Divider/Conqueror, be prepared to respond with statements like this:

This is potentially very useful information, thank you. Let’s make sure we discuss it in our upcoming meeting.

I really appreciate you bringing this to my attention. I think others in the group may have important perspective on this information as well, so let’s talk about it together.

This is an important issue, and I’d like to hear other stakeholders’s perspectives on it as well. Let’s put it on the agenda for our meeting.

Now, here’s the complicating factor: you can’t expose all problems to the same amount of sunlight, and you can’t always involve every stakeholder in every conversation. Sometimes people genuinely need to bring confidential information to the leader that can’t or shouldn’t be discussed in a wider meeting, or that they have a genuine need to share anonymously. That’s okay, as long as the information is both genuinely relevant and genuinely confidential, and as long as its accuracy can effectively be assessed. But just because one person wants information to be treated confidentially doesn’t mean it should be treated that way; and leaders always need to be very careful not to go off half-cocked based on one person’s account of another person’s behavior or of a difficult situation.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Defaulting to transparency almost always leads to better resolutions.
• Not everyone in your organization will always want open and transparent discussion of every issue, and you need to be prepared to deal with behind-the-scenes and backdoor approaches.
• Are there any pending issues in your library that you are trying to resolve right now, and that are being complicated by people taking a divide-and-conquer approach? What can you do now to defuse that approach?