There are many ways to be an ineffective leader. One of the most destructive is to ignore the wishes, input, and feelings of the people you lead, and simply push forward your own personal agenda by brute force. Most (though not all) library leaders recognize intuitively that this is no way to lead.

Unfortunately, though, some leaders who recognize that brute force is no way to lead assume that a better way is to try to achieve consensus within the organization before moving forward with a decision or initiative. This is actually foolish, and can be equally destructive.

Why? Isn’t it a good thing to seek broad input and take everyone’s perspective into account before making organizational decision?

The short answer is yes: seeking broad input and taking it into account is not only good, but often essential.

The longer, and more correct, answer is that while seeking broad input is good and important, the input you get (no matter how broad and no matter how carefully gathered and considered) is unlikely, by itself, to lead you to the best decision.

There are two reasons for this.

First, you’ll never achieve real consensus in a large and complex organization – there are just too many competing views, needs, and perspectives. A strategy or policy that makes sense to the collections team will pose serious problems for the catalogers; a service posture desired by the team staffing a reference desk will create frustration for the circulation manager. And you’ll never get everyone to agree on what the library’s service hours should be, or which spaces should be quiet and which ones collaborative.

So if achieving true consensus isn’t an option, maybe an effective leader should instead gather broad input and get a sense of the organization’s majority view and desires, letting the majority view guide the decision. But this leads to the second problem:

The majority view will not necessarily be the correct view. This may seem like a controversial statement, but bear with me. To illustrate, let’s take a political example: in 2020, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States by a majority of American voters. In 2024, Donald Trump was elected president by a majority of American voters. Even without knowing what your political views are, I can be pretty certain that you regard at least one of those elections to have reflected an incorrect view held by the majority of American voters. Similarly, majoritarian views within an organization are important to elicit and know, but you can’t safely assume that they will always point your organization in the right direction. 

In other words, your job as a leader is not simply to carry out the wishes of your organization; that’s not leadership. Your job is to ensure that your organization is serving those it exists to serve as effectively as possible. This means not only listening to and taking seriously the wishes of the people who work for you – it also, very often, means guiding them in directions that some or even many of them may not fully agree with. Exercising the judgment necessary to decide when to give your organization its way and when to push against it is one of the most difficult, but also one of the most essential, tasks of library leadership.