One of the more difficult situations you’ll have to negotiate as a library leader is when the people you lead believe strongly that you should be advocating for something on their behalf – a policy change, a budget increase, a program proposal – and you feel that advocating for that thing would be a mistake. 

When you’re a library leader, especially a dean or director, one of the things you’ll hear a lot is that the reason campus administration isn’t giving the library what your people want is that you’re not pushing hard enough. How will they know when you’ve pushed hard enough? When they get what they want. The assumption here, of course, is that you’ll always get what you want if you just push hard enough. There are two problems with this position: first, it’s simply not true, and second, you can do real damage to your ability to advance other priorities by pushing too hard for the wrong thing at the wrong time.

When you find yourself reluctant to push campus administration for something your people want, your unwillingness will usually arise from one of two categories of concern:

1. You disagree with the proposal in principle. Your staff may want something that you think would be wrong for the library, its patrons, or your host institution. This creates particular difficulty if the proposal you believe to be wrongheaded is widely supported among the people you lead.
2. You agree with the proposal in principle, but don’t believe it would be strategically wise to pursue it. What your team wants may be fully justifiable, but you may feel that pursuing it would cost more in political capital than it would justify – this could be because you believe the request is so unlikely to be successful that there’s no point in expending political capital pursuing it, or because you think even success would yield less benefit for the library than what it would cost. And your concern might be situational (i.e., the timing is wrong) or more fundamental (in other words, you may feel that the cost in political capital will probably always outweigh whatever benefit might accrue from pursuing the desired goal).

So how do you navigate this kind of situation?

Obviously, there’s no single right answer; the best approach will vary by situation. But here are a few ideas that might help:

• Test the water. If you think the proposal makes sense in principle but are not sure whether it would be wise to pursue it, have an informal conversation with the provost or other administrator to whom you report. Make it clear that you’re not advancing the proposal, but asking for a reality check on your feeling that the time or situation may not be right. This approach will generally not reduce your fund of political capital in the way that simply advancing the proposal would; it may even increase your political capital as you demonstrate your sensitivity to the campus political environment.
• Be open and clear about your concerns. If you are not convinced that the proposal makes sense in principle, don’t give your people false hope by pretending to be supportive. It may be tempting to curry favor with your team by pretending you intend to champion the proposal even if you don’t intend to make a strong argument for it to the administration. But here’s the thing about being dishonest with your staff: they will figure it out. Unless you’re a sociopath, it’s very difficult to lie successfully, especially over time. Much better is to explain as clearly as you can why you don’t support bringing the proposal forward. Will some of your people be upset? Yes. But doing what you believe is the right thing will often upset some people. Taking a leader’s pay means being willing to do the right thing even if people don’t like it (and then working carefully and kindly with those who are upset to help them move forward).
• Explain what you’re going to do and why. The people in your organization who went to the trouble of discussing and drafting a proposal deserve to know both what you’re going to do with it, and why. Their proposal should not go into a black hole. If you’re not going to carry it up to administration, say so and explain why. If you are going to bring it forward but think it’s highly unlikely to be approved, explain both why you’re going to advance it and why you’re skeptical of its success. Trust me: your people would rather know that you’re not supportive (and why) than labor under the false belief that you’re going to champion their proposal.
• Don’t backbite. When talking with your staff, it might be tempting to denigrate (either explicitly or implicitly through eye-rolling or tone of voice) the campus administration; when talking to the administration, it might be tempting to do the same about your staff. In both contexts, resist that temptation with everything you have. I’ll talk more about this in next Tuesday’s article.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Defaulting to transparency and openness is especially important when deciding whether/how to bring proposals from your library up to campus administration.
• Don’t lie to your staff. It’s wrong, and it won’t work.
• Ask yourself now how you’ll respond the next time your staff ask you to bring a proposal to campus administration with which you aren’t comfortable. What questions will you ask? How will you explain your discomfort? How will you decide what to do, and then explain that decision?