In my last post I introduced a five-part series on the crucial quality of dependability for academic library leaders, promising to explore it in four different dimensions. The first of those four that I want to address is the dimension of institutional alignment (about which I’ve written a couple of times already, and will almost certainly will do so again in the future because it’s so fundamentally important).

Usually when we think about leaders being dependable, we think in bottom-up terms — about whether the people being led can have confidence in their leader. That’s an essential dimension of dependability, and in fact that dimension will be the focus of three of these four discussions. But for this first one, we’re looking at dependability from the top down: in other words, the degree to which those to whom the library leader reports can have confidence in him or her.

In order for an academic library leader to be effective — in order not only to keep the library in the institution’s good graces, but also to advocate effectively upwards on behalf of the library team — the college or university administration has to know several things about him or her, including that s/he:

• both understands and supports the larger institutional mission,
• is fostering understanding of and support for that mission within the library’s faculty and/or staff,
• is communicating institutional messages clearly and supportively to the faculty/staff, and
• is using allocated resources in a manner that reflects both understanding of and support for the mission.

There’s a bit of a paradox at work here: the more confidence the institutional administration has in the library leader’s consistent, dependable mission alignment, the more freedom and autonomy the library will have to pursue its own agenda; conversely, the less confidence the administration has in the library leader’s alignment, the more granular oversight it is liable to impose on the library’s day-to-day work — and the greater the risk that the library will eventually lose support (including funding and possibly worse).

Now, I want to be clear: this kind of dependability does not — or should not — entail brain-dead acquiescence to every administrative idea or initiative. Academic library leaders are, typically, also campus leaders, and have a voice in the running of the college or university as a whole. Often, this takes the form of membership in a council of deans or similar leadership cohort. In that role the library leader is expected to speak up and contribute, including raising a voice of concern or critical analysis as needed. But obviously, there is a very big difference between expressing a voice of concern over a proposed program or project and undermining the mission of the institution. The former is part of the library leader’s job; the latter is exactly the opposite of the library leader’s job.

I should also point out that being mission-aligned does not mean never being frustrated with particular administrative actions or postures, or defending actions that you don’t believe you can defend in good faith. Good leaders are authentic, and sometimes they have to say to their people “Look, I can see why you’re frustrated by this new policy. I raised concerns about it myself. But many different perspectives from around campus were taken into account, and now the decision has been made. It’s now our job to move forward and support it.”

Of course, there could arise campus initiatives, policies, or programs that the library leader feels he or she genuinely can’t support in good faith. That puts the leader in a genuinely difficult position. Depending on the importance of the issue involved, and the degree to which it goes to a genuine moral conflict between the individual and the institution, the leader may find him- or herself in a situation where a choice has to be made between undermining the institution and staying true to the individual’s moral compass. Luckily, such choices arise relatively rarely in the context of library work — but they can arise, and each leader needs to know where that line is, and what he or he would do when forced to confront it. There may arise a case in which the leader feels that his or her only morally acceptable path is to resign.

But that’s a grim place at which to end this post. The next ones will address more positive scenarios.