Many years ago I was reading a novel in which the main character purchases a ramshackle second home in the country with the intention of fixing it up and turning it into an escape from his first home in the city. As he’s inspecting the basement, he notices something alarming: an upright post that should be anchored to the floor and supporting a transverse beam in the basement ceiling (and thus helping to support the floor above). Instead, for some reason, the post doesn’t quite reach the floor and is hanging from the beam that it was meant to support – thus not only failing to perform its intended function, but actually contributing to the problem it was meant to solve.

This mental image – that of a beam holding up a post instead of being supported by the post – has come to my mind on many occasions during my work as a library manager and a leader, when I’ve encountered workflows and practices that were created in order to facilitate tasks that were of questionable value, or found that our library had created elaborate protocols in support of programs that were intended, themselves, to provide support to the library and its staff.

For example: have you ever worked in a library that held lots of professional

development events and programs in which few employees were very interested, and then enlisted staff to try to drum up attendance at those events and programs? In this scenario, the professional development programming is supposed to be the post holding up the beam of staff morale and development, but the staff end up expending morale and bandwidth in holding up the post of professional development programming. (The solution may be to improve the programming, or to do less of it, or to rethink the library’s professional developments completely and go back to the drawing board.)

Another hypothetical: suppose your library has used book approval plans for decades, expecting the subject librarians to review weekly the books sent in their disciplines and indicate which ones should be kept and which returned. But now suppose that since the plans were instituted back in the 1980s, the librarians have mostly turned to other selection practices and tools. However, because your head of collection development has always loved approval plans and is deeply invested in them as a program, he continues to insist that the subject librarians review the books and title notifications every week. In this scenario, the approval plan is supposed to be a post holding up the beam of efficient collection development and saving time for the subject librarians – but instead, the librarians are taking time away from their other collection development duties in order to support a program that doesn’t work well for them. (In this case, the solution may be to streamline the approval program or to do away with it altogether.)

As you look around your library, you may well find situations like these, in which processes that are intended to provide support to the organization are instead being supported by ill-considered or just outdated processes and workflows. Unfortunately, identifying these is the relatively easy part; the more difficult part is working with your staff to institute what could in some cases be radical but necessary changes to their workflows. For some thoughts on how to deal with such situations, see “Dealing with Resistant Staff: Some Principles and Some Practices.”

Takeaways and Action Items

• All library workflows and programs should demonstrably support a key library function.
• Don’t be afraid to cease or radically change a workflow or program that doesn’t.
• Look around your library: are there any longstanding practices that don’t have a clear purpose in relation to the library’s mission and priorities? Are there any workflows that seem designed to support areas or practices that are actually supposed to support those workflows? Talk to the relevant managers. Chances are good that they share your frustration but don’t think it’s possible to change them.