At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly – a risk I take twice every week here at Vision & Balance – I want to warn all of us away from a common abdication of responsibility that masquerades as intellectual humility among leaders: the tired formulation “I have no answers, only questions.” Every time I hear or read it, you can hear me muttering to himself like an old man with neighborhood kids on his lawn.

Let me start out, though, by acknowledging some obvious and important truths:

• No leader (or follower, or anyone else) has all the answers.
• No one should be embarrassed about not having answers, at least at the beginning of a problem-solving process.
• Questions are incredibly important, and it’s usually essential to start with questions.
• Some questions have no answers, or at least no single universally correct answer.

Having acknowledged these important points, why am I then criticizing the position “I have no answers, only questions”?

Because library leaders have to do more than ask questions, or encourage others to ask questions. The library is a service organization that exists to solve problems and accomplish tasks for its patrons and its sponsoring institution. Leaders who wish to do those things effectively, and in a way that nurtures and empowers library employees, will approach question-asking as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and will take responsibility for ensuring that questions lead to answers that result in problem-solving and employee nurturance.

In other words, a wise leader’s posture might be better summarized as “We have questions. Let’s work together to find good answers and apply them.”

The work of library leadership does not require you always to be right. But it does require you to do more than ask questions.

But what do you do when there isn’t a single clear “right” answer, or when there’s disagreement within the leadership team or the organization as a whole as to what the best solution is?

These are the situations in which leaders earn their leader salaries – not necessarily by being the one to make the hard call (though that will sometimes be necessary), but by doing the hard work of cooperative analysis and, in some cases, doing the very painful work of deciding who will win and who will lose (an issue discussed previously here and here).

What’s clear, though, is that an academic library leader’s work consists not only of asking good questions and keeping an open mind, but also of working through those questions and arriving at answers that move his or her library forward in support of the people and the institution the library serves. The answers will not always – will, in fact, very rarely – be perfect, and they won’t even always be right. They will sometimes be appropriate at one time but become less so as circumstances change. There’s nothing wrong with that; the work of leadership does not require you always to be right. But it does require you to do more than ask questions.