Earlier this year I offered three posts on the topic of library policy management: the first addressed both the importance of written policies and the tendency of libraries to create too many; the second described what I call a “healthy policy regime”; the third warned about ways in which policies can be hijacked.

In this, the fourth installment in what will likely turn out to be an open-ended series of posts on this theme, I want to talk about the danger of letting policy creation and rescission be driven by strong personalities. This can happen in at least two ways, from at least two directions:

First, in the direction of policy creation: people with strong personalities can drive the creation of inappropriate policies.

Second, from the direction of policy rescission: people with strong personalities can push the organization to stop observing policies, or to create inappropriate policy exceptions or interpretations.

Both of these things tend to happen when leaders are willing to take a leader’s pay but not willing to do a leader’s work – which, often and very importantly, includes being strong and principled when faced with pressure from difficult and strong-willed employees. They also tend to happen when the library does not, in fact, have a healthy policy regime – or, in other words, does not have a clear and robust system in place for creating and rescinding policies (or a good “policy of policies,” if you will).

What does this kind of situation look like? Here are a few hypothetical scenarios:

• A librarian comes to you and says “We need to put some limits on what people are allowed to microwave in the lunchroom. There’s one guy who keeps microwaving fish and it’s disgusting.” You know this librarian to be someone who really struggles to take “no” for an answer and who, unless you accede to his request, is probably going to keep bringing the idea up endlessly until you give in – and will probably go around the library looking for people he can enlist in his crusade.
• A staff employee comes to you and says “Phyllis is driving me crazy. She keeps sending my expense reports back whenever there’s the slightest error, even just a typo. Can’t we simplify our expense reports so that she has less opportunity to throw her weight around and make our lives miserable?” You’ve heard other complaints about Phyllis and her zeal for enforcing the minutiae of expense reporting, so you know this is an issue for others in the library as well.
• Three librarians come to your office with a demand that the library’s standard working hours be changed in order to better accommodate the needs of employees with small children. These three librarians have come to you with similar demands in the past, and have always managed to make your life miserable when they didn’t get what they wanted. As the director, you have the authority to change library hours as you see fit, so you’re seriously tempted to just give them a “win” on this issue.

Let’s look at each of these scenarios in turn, and analyze them from the perspective of personality and policy.

In the first scenario, the person with the strong personality is the one who is bringing you the policy proposal: he wants you to create a policy saying what can and can’t be put in the lunchroom microwave. Because you’ve dealt with him in the past and know his patterns, it would be tempting to just give him what he wants and have signs put up in the lunchroom saying “Stinky foods are not allowed in the microwaves.” This would get your difficult employee out of your office and short-circuit the crusade that would surely follow if you rebuffed him (for now, anyway). However, because you’ve bypassed the normal procedure for creating library policy, this approach will lead to problems. For one thing, whose definition of “stinky food” will prevail? (What if the fish-eater doesn’t know or agree that her food is stinky?) For another thing, what if there are more people in the library who want the freedom to microwave whatever they want than there are people who object to that freedom? If you follow a normal policy formation protocol, these important questions (and others) would be addressed and dealt with as part of the process, before the policy was enacted. However, the end result might not satisfy your difficult employee.

Policies must be based on clear and fair principles, consistently applied – not on the leader’s desire to avoid conflict with difficult people.

So what would be the better response to your importunate librarian? Something along the lines of “I can see the value of a policy limiting what can and can’t be put in the lunchroom microwaves. How about if you draft a policy that would set some parameters, and send it up the line through your supervisor so that we can consider it in a future leadership meeting, to which we’ll invite you so you can explain the context for the proposal?”. With this response, you’re not saying no – but you’re also not letting your desire to avoid confrontation with the difficult employee drive you to create a policy that may or may not make sense.

In the second scenario, the strong personality is not the person asking for a change in policy (in this case, the information required in an expense report); instead, it’s Phyllis who may have become overzealous in enforcing the policy. In this case, the temptation will be to thwart the overzealous employee by unilaterally changing the expense form. But this would be a mistake, because you haven’t established that there’s anything wrong with the expense form itself. Instead, it’s very possible that the form needs to remain the same, and that Phyllis needs to be counseled on her behavior. Of course, it’s also possible that Phyllis is handling the situation in exactly the right way, and that the person who is complaining about her is actually the one who needs to change – perhaps by paying more attention to the seemingly small but actually very important details of his expense reporting.

Whichever the case, the wise leader will not let herself be goaded into a premature policy decision by the behavior of an employee with a strong personality. Instead, she will do some due diligence, which will include learning more about what Phyllis is actually doing as well as analyzing the expense form to make sure that everything it requires is really necessary. (Or, even better, delegate these tasks to the relevant manager.) Then, if it seems like changes are necessary, the normal policy-adjustment protocol can be put into action.

In the third scenario, the leader is tempted to make a policy change for the primary purpose of giving three people who rarely get what they want a “win” – and, let’s be honest, also to get them off the leader’s back. But these are both terrible reasons to change a library policy that affects everyone, patrons and employees alike. Changing the library’s hours will affect when patrons can use the library; it will have implications for the staffing of service desks; it will disproportionately impact employees with longer commutes; etc. All policy changes have knock-on effects and unintended consequences – this is why we follow careful practices and procedures when considering policy changes. If the three people who want this change are upset by the leader’s insistence that their demand follow the normal policy protocol, and if they subsequently make his life miserable, the best response is not to give in to their demands – it’s to hold them accountable for their behavior.

Across these scenarios, the consistent factor is principle: policies need to be based on principles that are applied consistently and fairly, and need to be enacted and rescinded according to procedures that are followed consistently and fairly.

Allowing personalities to drive organizational change ends up causing grief for everyone – ultimately, including those the leader is trying to mollify by giving in.

Takeaways and Action Items

• The library’s policies and organizational structure need to be shaped by the fair and consistent application of principles, not by the preferences of strong-willed individuals.
• Policies should be both enacted and rescinded as a result of procedures that are clear and that are applied consistently. Ensuring this is the leader’s job.
• Practice responding to someone who comes to you with a demand for a new policy, or for the change or rescission an existing one. Imagine that this person is very upset and is threatening to make your life miserable if you don’t accede. How will you respond? What will you say, and what questions will you ask?