The fourth idea I want to address as an essential task of library leadership is really kind of a non-task: letting managers do the work of management.

Now, I realize that this may seem like a trivially obvious prescription – why would you have managers if you didn’t want to let them manage their units? But reality, especially human and organizational reality, is complicated, and leaders often keep organizational structures unchanged simply out of inertia even when they’ve been working (usually unintentionally) in ways that undermine the effectiveness of those structures. 

And then there’s the ever-present temptation of micromanagement. Every library leader has particular areas of the library that are of special interest and concern – we all came to organizational leadership through particular channels of specialty and will therefore tend to notice what’s happening in those areas especially. As someone who was an acquisitions librarian, then a collection development librarian, and then a specialist in scholarly communication over the course of my career, I absolutely notice and naturally pay special attention to what my library does in those areas – and I have not been entirely innocent of interfering when I notice practices in those areas that rub me the wrong way. I fight this tendency, but I don’t always win the fight.

But letting managers manage isn’t just a matter of thinking critically about organizational structure and avoiding micromanagement. It goes beyond that: it means not only avoiding stepping on your managers’ toes, but also making sure your managers know you have their backs, and making sure they have the tools they need so that they can get on with their work. The other side of this coin is that it also means training them, because “having their backs” doesn’t — mustn’t — mean supporting them in bad practices or (worse) malfeasance. A good leader of managers doesn’t just say “I’ll always support you”; he or she says “As long as you’re doing the right thing you can count on me to support you, even when it will be costly for me – and here’s what I mean when I say ‘the right thing’.”

So as a leader, how do you strike that balance between honoring your managers’ scope of stewardship and exercising appropriate leaderly oversight? Here are a few thoughts:

1. Give your managers a clear scope of stewardship and leave them alone to work within it. Your managers need to know what the scope of their stewardship is, and they need to have confidence in you that you’ll give them the space to manage and make decisions within that scope. That confidence is not owed to you; you have to earn it, not only by saying the right things, but (more importantly) by consistently honoring their stewardships over time. 
2. Resist the temptation to weigh in on workflows. This is one of the biggest challenges for me. I’m not only the library’s director, but I’m also a patron, and I sometimes encounter frustrations in that role. It’s entirely appropriate for me to tell my people when I’m running into frustration as a patron; what would not be appropriate would be for me prescribe solutions. And when I say it would not be appropriate, I mean that it would be both unwise(because I don’t understand their work as well as I think I do) and improper (because I would be interfering unnecessarily with their scope of stewardship). This doesn’t mean that a leader can’t ask questions about workflows, of course – it only means that they should let those charged with decision-making about workflows make the decisions.
3. Don’t go around managers to their people without looping them in. This is another perennial hazard of executive leadership: you want to be accessible to everyone in the organization, and you want to make sure they know you see and appreciate them, and sometimes you have questions you want to ask, so you send an email directly to the line employee. Sometimes this leads to an extended exchange on a topic. Before you know it, ideas are flowing or previously unexamined issues are arising, and now the line employee is in an uncomfortable situation: his manager hasn’t been a part of this conversation and it will now be awkward to pull her in. He doesn’t want to offend you by suggesting that you should have included her from the beginning, but he also doesn’t want to continue down the path of this conversation without her knowledge. (The smart employee will alert her privately and keep her in the loop that way, but you shouldn’t put the employee in that situation.) Here’s a simple rule of thumb I’d suggest for communicating with those in the library who don’t report directly to you: if you’re writing to praise them for something, email the employee directly and copy the manager. (This sends the message “Not only am I pleased with what you’ve done, but I also want to make sure your supervisor knows.”) If you have a concern, start with just the manager: lay out your concern and ask for counsel as to the best way forward. You both may agree that a direct message to the line employee is a good idea – but now the manager is in the loop and you’ve respected her scope of stewardship. If your communication is neither praise nor a concern, but maybe just a procedural or factual question, it’s more complicated – but when in doubt, just start with the manager. (In a future post we’ll talk more about the vexed issue of “aggressive cc’ing.”)
4. When complaints about managers make their way up to you, listen to them carefully – but don’t assume you know the whole story. Just about every line employee has a conflict with his or her manager sometimes. Usually they figure out ways to resolve the conflict together, but sometimes resolutions are more difficult and the line employee may feel the need to go over his supervisor’s head. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with that; it’s the appropriate channel for registering concern with a supervisor or manager. But the leader needs to be very careful about taking such reports completely at face value. (The same is true, of course, regarding reports from managers about the behavior of those they supervise.) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten myself burned by acting on the assumption that a report of misbehavior or malfeasance on someone else’s part was the whole story. It’s a lesson I keep being taught and keep failing fully to learn: wait to judge or act until you’ve heard both sides of the story.

I’d be interested to hear other good rules of thumb for leaders in letting their managers act fully in their roles as managers.