In my last post I addressed the essential quality of consistency for academic library leaders. Someone looking at the title of today’s post might reasonably ask: “Isn’t reliability just a synonym for consistency (and, for that matter, dependability)?” And the answer is: “Almost, but not quite.” Certainly a leader who is reliable will be consistent (and dependable), but a leader who is consistent may or may not be reliable in the ways that matter most.

Confused yet? I might be too, but I don’t think I am. Let me try to unpack this distinction and explain why I think it matters — and why reliability deserves its own, separate discussion.

Consistency is, most basically, the quality of doing the same things in the same way over time. For library leaders, consistency is manifested — in a good way — when they apply rules and policies the same way to everyone, when they don’t let their shifting moods guide their decision-making, etc. But the fact is that consistent leaders can be bad leaders, and their consistency can contribute to their failings if what they are consistent at doing are bad things, or good things in the wrong way.

Consistency, in other words, is essentially value-neutral. A leader can be consistently unfair or consistently fair; a leader can be consistently volatile, or consistently calm and measured. My post on the importance of consistency focused on the salutary manifestations of consistency among leaders, but consistency doesn’t have to be positive.

It seems to me that reliability, on the other hand, carries more of a normative vibe: a leader who can be relied upon is more than just a leader whose behavior can be predicted.

Library employees absolutely crave leaders who are reliable. Managers need to know that, for example, when they carry out a directive from library leadership and someone in their managerial downline gets upset and goes over their head to the library’s leadership, the leadership will back them up rather than cave to the pressure of an unhappy employee. Managers who don’t have that confidence in the library’s leader will not only be very reluctant to carry out policies and directives that they expect will be unpopular, but they will also constantly feel trapped between the library’s expressed, formal rules and the unexpressed, real-world rules that undermine them.

And it’s not just managers. Let’s consider another situation: imagine a library staff employee who works at a service desk, and has made a patron angry by enforcing a rule that says you can’t renew a book more than three times when other patrons are waiting to check it out. If the patron threatens to bring his complaint to the library director, that staffer needs to be able to count on her leader to back her up. If she has reason to believe that the director will buckle under an onslaught of vituperative complaint from the patron, she won’t have the confidence to enforce the rule. Worse, she won’t know which rules she can confidently apply and which ones she can’t.

Now, this does bring up an important caveat. As a library leader, there may in reality be times when you genuinely do need to override a library employee’s decision. How do you do that without undermining their sense of you as someone they can count on?

I’ll propose two answers to that question:

First, it comes down to principle. Earlier this year I discussed the issue of making exceptions, and proposed a question that should always be asked when you or your team are contemplating making an exception to a rule or policy: What clear and fair principle would we be applying in a consistent way if we were to decide to grant this exception? If you find yourself feeling the need to override the decision of someone in your library, a slight variation on that question would be helpful: What clear and fair principle am I applying in a consistent way in deciding to override my employee’s decision or action? If you can answer that question, you’re ready to have a fruitful and constructive conversation with the employee whose decision you overrode. Of course, they may or may not accept your explanation, which leads to the second answer:

You will never be able to make everyone feel like they can rely on you. The reality is that some people will feel like you’re unreliable because your decisions don’t go their way, or because your priorities aren’t their priorities. This is one of those areas of leadership in which it’s essential to manage a pretty difficult balance: you need to care what your people feel, but you can’t let your decision-making be driven by how they feel.

Figuring out that balance is the work of a lifetime.