Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

One of the things about being in a position of organizational power – whether you’re an internal unit head or a library director – is that people will be constantly trying to convince you to do certain things. Those things may be micro (“I need a raise”; “We need more student employees”) or  macro (“The library needs a new remote-work policy”; “The library needs to do more to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion”), or they may be somewhere in between. But you will regularly be dealing with arguments both in favor of and against doing particular things, and the people advancing those arguments are likely to offer data in support of their contentions.

And here’s something I’ve noticed about how people present data: when they use percentages but don’t tell you raw numbers, or use raw numbers but don’t tell you percentages, you should be cautious in accepting the data at face value. Because in many contexts, either the raw numbers or the percentages – when presented alone – will be misleading.

For example, consider the following statements:

• “Circulation of books on chemistry has increased by 200% in the past year.”
• “The price of Database X went up by over $1,000 with this renewal.”
• “Interlibrary loan transactions are down 20% over the past five years.”
• “Twenty of our student employees have quit, this semester alone.”

In each of the above cases, you’ve been presented with either a percentage or a raw number; and in each of those cases, your first question should be about the data point that wasn’t offered. For example:

• “How many chemistry books circulated last year, as compared to this year?”
• “What percentage increase is represented by the new price for Database X?”
• “How many ILL transactions have we conducted in each of the past five years?”
• “What percentage of our total complement of student employees is represented by those twenty?”

Why are these follow-up questions important? Because in any of the cases above, either the raw number or the percentage by itself may give you a distorted impression of what’s going on. If Database X went from $5,000 to $6,000 in price, that $1,000 increase represents a 20% jump in cost; but if went from $30,000 to $31,000, it’s a 3% increase. A thousand dollars is a thousand dollars, of course, but it does matter whether the database provider is imposing a huge price hike or a modest one.

Or consider the chemistry books. If 30 of them circulated in 2023 and 90 of them circulated in 2024, that’s a very big percentage increase – but because the real numbers can only represent the behavior of a small number of patrons (perhaps only one or two), this is a data point that offers pretty limited information on which to make collection development decisions. On the other hand, if the 200% increase in circs was an increase from 3,000 to 9,000 circulations (which would almost certainly represent the behavior of a relatively large number of patrons), that would tell you something different.

To be clear, I’m not saying that whenever someone hands you raw numbers without percentages (or vice versa) they’re trying to mislead you. More likely, they’re just offering data that supports their argument and not thinking too hard about whether the data are fully complete. Gentle follow-up questions are the best way to get to a more complete and accurate picture – and to help teach your staff about the responsible use of data.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Are there items in your to-do list that are based on data you’ve been provided by advocates for one course of action or another? Review the data and make sure you can be confident in its completeness and reliability before proceeding with that action item.
• Ask yourself how you approach data and statistics in your own decision-making and case-making to the leaders to whom you report. Are you always providing the most accurate possible picture of reality, as opposed to the version of reality that best supports your desired course of action?
• Think about how you’ll respond when someone presents a case based on what looks like a partial and perhaps misleading data point. How will you ask for more and better data without making the other person feel criticized or attacked?

Some of the worst examples of leadership I’ve seen over the course of my career have been provided by people who seemed to feel that being the leader had to mean being the smartest person in the room at all times – and, if they weren’t the smartest person in the room, making sure that the smarter people were kept quiet so that they wouldn’t show the leader up.

Obviously, such a mindset is deeply counterproductive in leaders, and can lead to severe organizational dysfunction (not to mention very unhappy employees). 

The good news about bad examples is that if you’re willing to learn from them (rather than just succumb to frustration and resentment) they can teach you a great deal. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from examples of toxic or ineffective leadership is the importance of letting other people be smarter than you.

It’s not just a matter of recognizing that other people in the organization have specific knowledge and skillsets that you don’t have. Even the most narcissistic and self-regarding leader will usually acknowledge that his IT director understands network administration better than he does, or that his senior cataloger has a superior understanding of name authority rules. More than that, it’s about recognizing that no matter how smart and how talented you may be, there are people in your organization who are smarter and more talented – and being willing (or, even better, eager) to give them room to move and space to shine. 

Now, please note: “giving them room to move and space to shine” does not mean failing to hold smart people accountable for their work and their at-work behavior, nor does it mean giving them a pass on adhering to policy, or making everyone else change their practices or workflows to accommodate them. Some things that it does mean include:

• Looking for chances to put them in the spotlight. Do you have someone in your library who is exceptionally good at data analysis? Instead of just asking for data that you can bring to your next meeting with the provost, bring your analyst to the meeting instead and have her share some particularly important insights about trends in the library. If a reporter calls to ask you questions about a multimillion-dollar gift that was recently announced, encourage him to talk to the exceptional development person who did all the work rather than to you. When you run into the university president at an event and she congratulates you on the library’s recent rise in national rankings, don’t just say “We have a great team”; give her two or three specific examples of work done by exceptional people in your organization that contributed directly to that change in ranking, identifying those people by name. And so forth.
• Watching for signs of particular talent among your staff, and looking for ways to let them use it. There are few things more exhilarating than being given free rein to do something you’re really good at, and leaders who provide those opportunities will command both respect and loyalty from the people they lead. More importantly, they will have provided the employee a chance for growth and development and the organization a chance to benefit more fully from that employee’s talent. Have you noticed someone in your library who is a particularly good strategic thinker? Put her in charge of a renovation project. Is there someone who seems particularly good at dealing with difficult people? Put him at the head of a task force charged with investigating ways to improve library morale.
• Expressing sincere, detailed appreciation for the unusual talents and skills shown by the people you lead. In an earlier post, I mentioned that while it’s always good for people to hear general words of encouragement from their leader (“You’re the best!” “Thanks for all you do!”), what’s even better is for them to hear words of encouragement and appreciation that demonstrate the leader’s attention to their work:
  • “You nailed that presentation yesterday. Thanks very much – you made the whole library look good.”
  • “I really appreciated your insightful comments in yesterday’s meeting about the remote work policy. I’m going to be discussing your ideas with my leadership team and will probably be getting back to you with some follow-up questions.”
  • “Your supervisor tells me that you fixed some longstanding issues with the withdrawal workflow in Acquisitions – I’m so glad you’re there and grateful for the difference you’re making.”

Wise leaders not only recognize the superior intelligence and talent of others in their organizations; they also openly acknowledge it and look for ways to encourage its full expression for the benefit of the library organization and its patrons.

Takeaways and Action Items

• The leader is not necessarily the smartest or most gifted person in the organization, nor should s/he want or expect to be. Instead, focus on what you can do as a leader to provide opportunities for those who are smarter and more gifted than you.
• Look around you in your organization: who is particularly smart and gifted, either generally or in very specific areas? Ask yourself what you can do to provide more opportunities for them to express those gifts.
• Ask yourself how you respond when you’re in a meeting that includes someone who is obviously smarter than you. Is there a part of you that gets a bit irritated? What will you do about that?

In Tuesday’s post, I shared the experience of hearing fellow managers say “My library really needs to do [X], but my staff would never accept it.” To which I tended to respond (silently, in my head) “If you’re going to take a leader’s money, you need to be willing to do a leader’s work.”

That’s easy to say, of course. But what exactly is the important work that, as leaders, we’re sometimes tempted to avoid doing when dealing with recalcitrant or resistant staff? And how do we do it?

I have a few thoughts.

First of all, as I mentioned briefly in my previous post, in these situations leaders and managers always have to manage two countervailing temptations: to either exercise dictatorial power (“I’m in charge and you’ll do as I say”) or avoid conflict (“Oh, you don’t want to do [X]? Okay, you don’t have to”). Some of us are more inclined to take the power-move approach, and some of us are more inclined to try to appease – but both approaches are bad, for multiple reasons. These include:

Both approaches are lazy. Whether you’re wielding power arbitrarily or running away from conflict, you’re taking the easy way out and avoiding doing the actual work that leadership requires.

Both approaches are ineffective. You might be able to force someone to do your will in the short run, but forcing them to do it will lead them to do as little of what you want as possible, and probably also to look for ways to undermine you later. On the other hand, simply acceding to the wishes of recalcitrant staff might save you the pain of conflict in the short run, but it will radically undermine your ability to move the library in the direction you need it to go.

Both approaches increase staff dissatisfaction. Staff who are bullied will be unhappy with their leader; staff who see their leader letting himself be bullied will also be unhappy with their leader, because they will know that their leader can’t be relied upon to do the right thing in a difficult situation. Leaders whose goal is to make everyone happy will, invariably, end up making everyone unhappy.

Both approaches are selfish and put the wants of the leader above the needs of the organization. The leader who bosses people around is indulging her ego and/or her laziness rather than handling personnel in the way that will best help them and the organization; the leader who avoids conflict at all costs is indulging his desire for social comfort rather than doing the difficult work required to help bring resistant staff along.

So much for diagnosis. What, exactly, is the “leader’s work” that I believe leaders must do when it comes to recalcitrant or resistant staff?

I believe it consists primarily in these three things:

First, being willing to hear that you’re wrong. Because guess what: recalcitrant and resistant staff are not always wrong. They always – always – understand things about your library that you do not, and you ignore their perspectives at your peril. Before dismissing them as reactionary or reflexively rebellious, listen carefully to the content of their concerns and objections. (Of course, ideally you will have done this before setting out on a course of action anyway.) Analyze what they tell you on its merits, not based on whether it will be frustrating for you to have to stop or delay your plans. This kind of listening is some of the most difficult work that leaders are called upon to do. The expectation that they do this difficult work is one of the reasons leaders get paid more than the people they lead.

Second, being willing to absorb abuse. Change sometimes makes people angry, and sometimes for good reasons. Most people are able to control their anger and handle it professionally, but in my experience, every library contains at least one or two people who can’t (or won’t) behave professionally when they’re angry. Now, to be clear: abusive behavior, even by subordinates towards leaders, is never acceptable, and those who engage in such behavior need to be held accountable. But leaders can’t let the fear of being yelled at, or simply of making people unhappy, stop them from doing the right thing.

Third, being willing to do the difficult and sometimes time-intensive work of bringing people along. It takes no time at all, and very little effort, to say “Shut up and do what I tell you.” And it takes no time at all, and very little effort, to say “Never mind, I’m not going to make you change.” What may – and often does – take a lot of time and effort is the process that follows a conversation during which you say “I realize that this change is going to be very distressing to you. The change is necessary, and we have to do it. What can I do to help make this transition less difficult for you?” Note that this approach acknowledges two important things: both the necessity of the change in question, and the impact of the change on the person who is upset. It does not put the angry staff member in charge of whether change is going to happen, but it acknowledges the reality of his or her distress and signals the leader’s desire to help minimize the pain. It empowers the staff member (“Here’s how you can help me”), but leaves the leader in charge of organizational direction. It does not eliminate the conflict – the leader and the staff member still disagree and the disagreement is obvious – but it shifts the conversation to what can be done to help make things better. And it makes obvious the leader’s sincere concern for the wellbeing of the staff member.

The interpersonal problems that arise from implementing organizational change are among the most difficult, complex, and stress-inducing problems that a leader will ever deal with. But dealing with them effectively, fairly, and consistently is among the most important duties of a leader. And a leader who isn’t willing to undertake that work really isn’t a leader at all.

Many years ago, I gave a conference presentation on a controversial change that my department had made to its workflows. At the encouragement of my dean at the time, I had investigated the possibility of eliminating what was generally considered an essential task of serials management; we had tried out a new approach and found that it worked fine – and, of course, my dean and I wrote an article about the experience.

Unsurprisingly, the article generated quite a bit of controversy in the serials world, with the result that I got to give some conference talks about our experience. And after those talks, I found myself having a similar conversation over and over: a serials manager from another institution would come up to me (or email me later) and say something like “All of your arguments make sense and I would love to do what you did in my library. But I would never be able to get my staff to go along with it.”

While (for obvious reasons) I never said this out loud, I came away from most of those conversations with the same thought: “Why is it up to your staff?”. And this thought led me to formulate in my own mind, for the first time, something that I think is a bedrock principle of leadership: if you’re going to take a leader’s pay, you need to be willing to do a leader’s work.

A leader’s work consists in lots of things, of course. Setting an example of diligence, productivity, and balance is part of a leader’s work. So is resolving conflict. So is workflow management. Setting (and following) a strategic direction is part of a leader’s work, and so is helping one’s organization stay on the right strategic path, and so on. But one of the most important roles of a leader is – leading. That means, among other important things, taking responsibility for moving one’s organization in the right direction. A leader doesn’t say “X is the right thing to do, but my staff won’t like it, so I guess we can’t do it.” A leader says “X is the right thing to do, and I anticipate resistance among my staff. How will I work with them to overcome that resistance as effectively and humanely as possible?”.

Of course, what I’ve just said presumes that the leader has in fact truly determined that X is the right thing to do – which implies due diligence, which very often includes counseling together with staff. It’s essential to avoid locking yourself into a false choice between, on the one hand, simply bulldozing over your resistant staff and, on the other, letting resistant staff stop your organization from doing what it needs to do. Navigating the choppy waters between those two rocks is part of the difficult work of a leader; the expectation that leaders will do this difficult and challenging work is one of the reasons leaders tend to get paid more than those they lead. To take that money and then not do essential work of leadership strikes me as fundamentally wrong.

So how does an effective leader handle the problem of staff who resist necessary change? I’ll have some practical thoughts on that question in our subscribers-only post on Thursday.

On Tuesday, in my first post on the topic of workflow management, I discussed the importance of bringing complexity indoors, out of the patron’s experience. I called this internalizing complexity. 

Today I’m going to talk about the importance of moving the locus of authority for workflow management out of the offices and job descriptions of individuals, and putting it into policy or training documents – what I call externalizing authority.

To explain, let me share an anecdote – one that can stand for many such experiences over the course of my career.

Many years ago, when I was in a middle-management position, I supervised staff whose completed outputs were channeled to a different department. For this other department, it made a big difference whether or not my staff’s outputs were produced correctly. After a while, I noticed that a supervisor from the other department was regularly coming into my department to work one-on-one with my staff to train them in how to make their outputs acceptable. I didn’t have any particular concern about this arrangement until I started getting complaints from my staff that this person was training them to do things in a certain way, and then coming back a couple of months later to tell them they were doing it all wrong, and retraining them to do those things differently. This had apparently happened several times, leading not only to frustration on my staff’s part but also a lot of wasted time. 

I investigated and confirmed their reports. The problem, I concluded, was that authority over the workflow (and over the performance standard) was vested in an individual, rather than in a policy or workflow document. This meant that when there were questions or disputes about the workflow, they could only be resolved by appeal to the individual – which meant that this individual always won. More importantly, it also meant that my staff could never be 100% certain that they were doing this part of their jobs correctly, since there was no objective standard or set of criteria against which to compare their work. There was only the supervisor from the other department, who had been set up as the ultimate authority.

In a healthy library, personalities do not drive decisions and shape policies.

In other organizations, I’ve encountered a variation on this problem: a person who has been in charge of a particular workflow for so long that he or she has become the only person in the library who truly understands it, and who has adapted the workflow over time to accommodate his or her personal preferences – regardless of whether the resulting arrangement represents what’s best for the library or its patrons. People in this position often strongly resist documenting their workflow – partly because doing so would be time-consuming and difficult, and partly because it would remove authority from them and put it in a document that can be accessed and understood by everyone. When asked to document their work, people in this situation will often respond “Just let me know if you have questions.”

In cases like these, the solution is to externalize authority over the workflow – take it out of where it currently resides (that is, in the person of whoever oversees the workflow) and put it instead into a document to which everyone has access. 

In the first situation I described above, I ended up writing a memo to the supervisor from the other department, explaining that from now on, two things were going to be necessary:

First, since I (not she) was charged with managing the time of my staff and prioritizing their assignments, all future requests to train or retrain them should come first to me. She and I would discuss the request as needed and I would decide whether the benefit was likely to be worth the cost in staff time. 

Second, all such training in the future must result in documents that reflect the instruction given. This document would then serve as the standard against which the acceptability of their work would be judged. Changes to the document, and any necessary retraining, would be discussed as laid out above.

Unsurprisingly, this directive resulted in a massive decrease in the amount of time spent by this other supervisor in retraining my staff. But more importantly, it meant that authority for workflow standards had moved to where it belonged – in agreed-upon, written documents that could be referred to by all.

This is a general principle that applies in lots of different organizational contexts. The deeper principle that underlies it is this one: In a healthy library, personalities do not drive decisions and shape policies. Instead, decisions and policies are defined according to clear and fair principles, which are documented fully, communicated openly, and applied consistently. 

I know what you’re thinking: ”I’m a leader, not a manager. Workflow management isn’t my job.”

Two answers:

1. Managers are leaders, or should be, so workflows really are a leadership issue.
2. Administrative leaders may not manage workflows directly, but they create an organizational culture of workflow management (whether they intend to or not).

This week I want to talk about two leadership principles related to the culture of workflow management. These are principles that academic library leaders need to promulgate throughout their organizations both by precept and (whenever they can) by example. The first is internalize complexity. The second is externalize authority. I’ll focus on the first one in today’s public post, and on the second in Thursday’s subscribers-only post.

When I say “internalize complexity,” I’m invoking the principle that – to the degree possible – the library should deal with complexity behind the scenes in order to make the patron’s experience as straightforward and intuitive as possible. So: the processes involved with interlibrary loan may be complex, but the patron’s experience of using interlibrary loan should be simple and intuitive – we deal with the complex stuff so that the patron doesn’t have to. Cataloging is complicated, but if we’re doing it right – keeping the complexity behind the scenes rather than creating interfaces that require our patrons to understand how the catalog is structured – searching the catalog and getting relevant, high-quality results will be straightforward and intuitive. And so forth.

Now again, I can anticipate a couple of negative responses to this argument – because I’ve encountered them many times: 

1. “Our job is not to spoon-feed college students. This is higher education; it’s not supposed to be as easy as possible.”  To which I say: nonsense – at least in the context of the library. College students should be challenged by their coursework and by the content of our collections, not by the process of gaining access to library materials and services. The less time they have to spend trying to figure out how to use the catalog or the databases (or where to find the book they need, or how to fill out the ILL form, etc.), the more time they have to engage in the actual work of education, which has to do with encountering and processing ideas and concepts, not wrestling with library interfaces.
2. “Why is patrons’ time more valuable than ours?” To which I say: because they’re paying, and you’re being paid. I know that sounds crass and neoliberal and capitalist and managerial, but it’s still an important reality. Library patrons are not here to make our lives easier by adapting to our preferred workflows; our workflows are (or should be) adapted to make it easier for patrons to pursue their educational goals. And I’ll go further and say that anyone who doesn’t understand that should be working someplace other than an academic library.

Now, obviously, we can’t remove all complexity and difficulty from the lives of our patrons. No matter how hard we try to make the library easy and intuitive to use, it will still pose challenges to our users – to some of them more than to others. And of course, a big part of our job is helping them deal with that challenge. But it matters very much – and it makes a big difference to our patrons – whether our general strategy is to try to bring complexity indoors or to leave it in the patron’s experience.

So when it comes to workflows, what do I mean by “externalize authority”? Tune in Thursday to find out.

I’m going to close out the year with a lesson I learned many years ago from a column by Stanley Fish; I believe it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education (which, is, by the way, an essential read for any academic library administrator).

Fish made the seemingly odd observation that when it comes to staff and faculty morale, in some ways the best position an administrator can be in is to have absolutely no money to work with. Why? Because when you have no money, you can basically say “yes” to everyone – because saying “yes” is purely hypothetical and involves no difficult choices about resource allocation.

So, for example: if your travel budget is entirely exhausted, and someone comes into your office and says “It would be so great if I could present my paper at that

conference in Berlin,” you can say “Oh man, that really would be great. You wrote an excellent paper and the attendees at that conference would really benefit from hearing it and being able to ask you questions. I really wish I could send you.”

Or if you’ve just sustained a 15% cut to your personnel budget and one of your managers comes to you and says “I really wish I could give my staff a 5% salary increase across the board. They’re underpaid as it is and they’re doing such great work,” you can say “Absolutely. A raise would be well deserved and it would really help them out. I would love to do that.”

When you have no money, you can say “yes” to everyone – because saying “yes” is hypothetical.

In both of the above situations, the conversation is easy, because no difficult choices have to be made. You can express your sincere support, and while no one is getting the material things they want, they at least go away from the conversation knowing that you’re there for them.

When do things get tough? When you have some money to work with. When your travel budget is mostly depleted but still has enough left in it to send one person to a conference, but you have three equally deserving people who want to go, or when you’re given a small increase to your personnel budget and told to distribute it as pay increases to only your highest performers – and you have to decide who those are and how much they get. It’s these situations, when you have to make difficult decisions about allocating limited resources between deserving people and programs, that lead inevitably to hurt feelings and difficult questions about fairness and equity.

But those difficult decisions and tough conversations are an essential part of the leader’s work.  And as we’ll discuss when we come back from the holiday break, taking a leader’s pay entails the obligation to do a leader’s work.

And with that, I’m going to sign off for the next two weeks. I wish all of you the happiest of holiday breaks, and we’ll pick up the conversation again on January 7!

I came into my current position as a library leader about four years ago, saying what I’ve always known all good leaders are supposed to say in that situation: “Don’t expect me to swoop in here and starting being disruptive and making a bunch of changes. I’m going to spend my first year getting to know the organization and listening to you. Then, once I’ve had a chance to build that foundation of understanding – and not before – we can start having conversations about what might need to change.”

See, I thought that kind of messaging would demonstrate humility – a humility I genuinely felt as I took on the oversight of a large and complex academic organization. But what I truly thought was humility turned out, in hindsight, to be hubris.

Why do I say that? Because within a couple of days of my arrival, an inch-thick document was dropped on my desk. That document contained a carefully prepared proposal: one of the departments in the library wanted an additional 10,000 square feet of space, and had put a huge amount of effort into explaining and justifying their request, and I had to respond.

My hubris consisted in the idea that I could simply come into a large organization and choose not to make any big decisions in my first year. As if that were up to me! 

Of course, to some degree it was up to me – there were certainly issues that I could (and wisely did) put on the back burner while I gathered more information and experience. But no organization simply stands still for a year and waits for its new leader to get acclimated. The work of libraries requires things to be done every day, and some of those are big things that involve change and difficult decisions. Some of those things can be deferred, and some can’t.

So here’s the lesson I learned the hard way about hubris and humility for new leaders: instead of indulging in the hubris of thinking you can put your organization on hold for a year while you get to know the place, instead exercise humility by working with your leadership team to identify those issues that need prompt attention and those that can be deferred while you get your feet under you. 

Takeaways and Action Items

• Ask yourself what issues you unwisely deferred when you came into your new position. What were the downstream effects, for both you and others in the organization?
• Ask yourself what issues you unwisely took on before you had enough information. What were the downstream effects?
• Look around you at the constellation of challenges and projects your library faces. If you were a brand-new leader in your current position today, what would you take on now, and what would you defer? Why?

The words “simple” and “easy” are not synonyms. A task or process can be simple but not easy, and it might be easy but not simple. 

Let me provide a couple of quick examples to illustrate what I mean:

Driving a manual-transmission car is one of the most complex that a human being can do. It requires you to do multiple things with your hands (steering, changing gears) while engaging each of your feet in a separate task (one on the gas and one alternating between brake and clutch); furthermore, you’re required to make constant decisions about how to manage each of those tasks while maintaining a sharp focus on road conditions and making constant decisions about lane strategy and routing – some of them in a split second. Very few daily tasks require anything like this constellation of simultaneous duties and decision-making. And yet for most people who drive, the process is quite easy; for experienced drivers, a lifetime of practice and skill acquisition make driving a car, even one with a manual transmission, something that can be done without too much conscious thought – and can be accomplished safely and effectively while listening to music, carrying on conversation, thinking about work, etc. For most people, driving a car is not simple, but it’s easy.

Walking on a smooth, paved surface, on the other hand, is one of the simplest things a human being can do. It involves no skill beyond what most humans have typically acquired by the age of two. However, I once had an experience that really

conveyed to me the difference between simple and easy. My family and I were walking the trail up Mount Timpanogos to Timpanogos Cave. To call it a “trail” is almost laughable; it’s a paved walkway about one and a half miles long. Walking it is a very simple matter. However, the trail is very steep: over the course of that mile and a half you rise in elevation almost 1100 feet, and very soon you find yourself stopping to rest about every 20 yards. Walking this trail is simple, but it’s not easy.

Why am I making this point in Vision & Balance? Because over the years, I’ve noticed that in casual conversation, people often conflate these two words as if they were synonyms. And in casual conversation, it’s not usually a high-stakes problem – not one that really needs to be noted or corrected. In fact, noting or correcting it would probably make you sound like a pedant and a jerk. In an organizational context, however, the conflation can have more significant impacts.

For example, one institutional dynamic that is important to understand is that the further you are from a system, the simpler it looks. (I’ll be discussing this further in a future article.) Ask yourself how many times you’ve heard someone in your library say to someone else “Look, it’s simple: your department just needs to _________.” In this case, the speaker is usually arguing that the other person’s department needs to do something that he believes to be both simple and easy – but it may only one of those (or neither). The first person’s distance from the department in question is likely leading him to underestimate the actual work that would be required to make the requested change.

In other cases, a proposed course of action may be genuinely simple, and may be incorrectly perceived as therefore easy. You may have someone in your library who speaks up too often and at too-great length in meetings, making it harder for others to participate; you may have someone else who tends to erupt in anger in unprofessional ways and at inappropriate times. The bloviator needs to control his impulse to constantly speak up; the eruptor needs to control her tendency to lash out. Both of those are simple expectations; both may also be incredibly difficult for the people in question.

There are many complex tasks in librarianship that those who have been doing them for a long time, or who are particularly talented, might make look easy. Employees – including leaders – who allow themselves to be fooled by the ease with which their colleagues are accomplishing those tasks may be led to underestimate the tasks’ complexity, which can lead to strategic errors. (“Phyllis has no problem producing 25 original serial records every week. We should expect the same thing of our other two serials catalogers.”)

One of the important skills of a leader is the ability (and willingness) to see below the surface to realities that are not immediately apparent. Keeping alert to the distinction between “simple” and “easy” is one habit of mind that will help you do that.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Not everything that looks simple is actually simple; not everything that actually is simple is easy. Keeping this in mind will help you be effective and strategic in leadership.
• Ask one of your direct reports to tell you what he or she thinks is the simplest of your duties. Don’t correct that person if s/he is wrong – but consider why it is that s/he that the duty in question looks simple from that perspective. 

Ever heard the saying “reality always wins”? I have no idea who coined it, but I first heard that phrase some years ago, and for a long time I found it comforting. Sure, nonsense and denial might prevail for a time, but eventually we can count on the ineluctable power of reality to assert itself and prevail. 

However, in more recent years I’ve been reminded of another famous quote, this one much older and attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

The context for Keynes’ quote was the Great Depression, during which some economists argued against significant government intervention, saying that in the long run, the forces of an unassisted free market would bring balance back to the financial system. Keynes didn’t disagree exactly, but he pointed out that there would be a tremendous human cost to waiting for the market to self-equilibrate and argued that this cost could easily dwarf the costs of decisive intervention. His arguments prevailed, and changed the conventional economic wisdom for a whole generation.

But what does this have to do with library leadership?

In my experience, Keynes’ economic view translates pretty well to organizational problems more generally. There are some problems and conflicts that you can let play out on their own time, because reality is likely to intervene in a timely way and resolve them – and others that require quick and decisive intervention before they snowball or create potentially disastrous knock-on effects. Developing the judgment necessary to discriminate between those two categories of problem is an important element of preparation for leadership.

So how do you develop that judgment? Obviously, there’s no easy or simple answer to that question. But there are questions you can ask yourself, when faced with a problem in the organization, that I believe will help you decide whether (and if so, to what degree) intervention is needed: 

1. How does this problem interact with our mission? Does the problem you’re seeing represent a threat to the library’s ability to do its core work? If so, does it seem to pose an immediate threat – or is it a minor problem now that will only become serious if it drags on for a long time?
2. How does this problem interact with our strategic priorities? Is this problem affecting one or more of the areas of most strategic importance to your organization, or – if it does metastasize – is it most likely to have serious effects only on the margins of your strategic priorities?
3. What is this problem’s apparent trajectory of seriousness? In other words, if you leave this problem alone, does it seem more likely to get better on its own or more likely to get worse? A complicating (but important) question is: if the problem represents conflict between people or units in the library, does it seem likely that they (and the library) will benefit more from being left alone to work it out for themselves, or from intervention by a leader? If the latter, how likely does it seem that letting the problem work itself out in the long run will undermine the library’s mission or priorities in the short run – and to what degree?

So remember that “reality always wins” in the long run. But remember also that “in the long run we are all dead.” Sometimes we can wait for reality to win, and sometimes we need to step in and intervene. Discriminating between those two circumstances is one of the crucial skills of leadership – and unfortunately is more likely to be learned by experience than by precept.

(In the discussion above, I alluded in passing to the distinction between “simple” and “easy.” That distinction will be the topic of this week’s subscribers-only post, on Thursday.)