The other day we discussed the vital importance of communicating too much.

Next in the eight-part series of Things Every Library Leader Has to Do is another essential one: document, document, document.

When we talk about the importance of documentation, most often we’re talking about it in the context of progressive discipline: you have an employee who is consistently failing to perform, or who is actively causing problems for the organization, or who is making life miserable for everyone else. Finally the employee’s supervisor has had enough, and comes to you saying “Today was the final straw. We have to fire Steve.”

Only you go back to the employee’s annual reviews for the past five years, and lo and behold — all of them say that he’s a star.

You bring these to the supervisor’s attention, and he says “OK, he performs his job tasks fine, but he’s abusive to everyone around him. No one will serve on a committee with him; people call in sick on the day of department meetings so they won’t have to be in the same room with him; every patron he interacts with goes away in tears.”

“Has any of this been documented?”, you ask the supervisor, who visibly deflates in front of you. “No,” he says.

The problem here is obvious: if you haven’t documented bad behavior or poor performance, it’s really hard to fire or even sanction someone for bad behavior or poor performance. They can submit a grievance on the basis that their sanction was based on hearsay, and they’ll probably win. Then you have an even bigger problem.

But anyone who has been a supervisor or manager knows all of this. The question is: what other things do you need to make sure you document, as a leader? Let me offer three big ones:

• Policies. Again, this may seem obvious, but you might be surprised how many libraries fail consistently to apply a rigorous and systematic approach to policy formation and management, instead relying on tradition and word of mouth to communicate the rules of the organization. This will create huge problems for you, for reasons I’ve outlined previously in these pages.
• Conversations. Not all conversations, obviously — in fact, as a library leader you will have some conversations that it would be very unwise to document, as the documentation could become discoverable in the event of a legal action. But in some cases, it’s essential to document conversations, and there are two particularly good ways of doing that: first, email. I’m always happy to entertain questions or comments from people who pop by my office, but if our conversation looks like it’s going to turn substantive and/or will need to involve others I usually ask them to send me an email that I can use to pull others into the discussion. This also allows me to keep an automatic record of what we discussed and decided — which, for me at least, is essential because my memory is incredibly unreliable. Email has saved my life more times than I can relate, because it has allowed me to go back later and retrace the steps of an essential conversation. Second, contemporaneous notes. If you’ve had a difficult meeting with someone, write a summary of the meeting immediately after it ends. Date and file your summary, and keep it safe. In the event of a negative action in the future, contemporaneous notes carry a lot of evidentiary weight — and they also serve as an annex of your own memory.
• Action items. Virtually every time you meet with your leadership team, members of the group will come away with assignments of some kind. Keep careful track of those assignments and follow up on them at the next meeting. “Review of Action Items” is the first agenda item for each of my leadership meetings. We make clear that “Pending” or “Still in process” are both fully legitimate responses when asked whether an action item has been completed — the important thing is to keep track of them and know when they’ve been accomplished.

What’s another major area of essential documentation for leaders, based on your experience? Share in the comments.