Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

This is one of those conversations that tends to happen between two lobes of my brain – I’ll refer to them as Rick Brain 1 and Rick Brain 2. Here’s how this particular conversation goes; maybe it’s somewhat the same for you:

Rick Brain 1: It seems to me that when you accept a leadership position, at that point you waive the right to talk about how tired or how busy you are. Leaders who talk that way sound like they’re complaining about the difficulties of leadership, which is annoying to those who might wish they were in leadership positions, not to mention to those who secretly feel that they actually work harder than their leader does. So I need to be really careful not to do that.

Rick Brain 2: OK, but what about the importance of modeling vulnerability and work/life balance? You’re always talking about “defaulting to openness.” Why shouldn’t you trying to show your humanness and vulnerability? Could it be that you’re really just worried your team will think less of you if they can see there are limits to your energy and bandwidth?

Rick Brain 1: If I’m being completely honest, I do like the fact that people seem to think I have unlimited energy. I don’t mind having that kind of reputation. But I don’t think that’s what my real concern is. I genuinely recognize the privileged position I inhabit, and I don’t want anyone to think I don’t appreciate and recognize that privilege. And I really don’t want anyone to think that I have illusions about being more fully employed than they are.

Rick Brain 2: But if a leader isn’t willing to express openly his feelings of overwhelm or fatigue, isn’t he sending a message to his team that they’d better not complain about feeling that way either? If you always put up a happy, energized front, are you sending the message “If I can do my big, important job without complaining, surely you all can do your smaller, less important jobs without complaining”?

Rick Brain 1: Maybe. But that argument cuts both ways. I once reported to a leader who never missed an opportunity to brag about how tired they were. They would come into meetings and put their head down on the table and say “I’m so exhausted,” at which point we were all expected to say things like “I don’t know how you do it!” and so forth, which was really annoying – in part because we were all pretty sure that we were just as tired as this leader was. That was the moment that I vowed I would never do that.

Rick Brain 2: I agree, that’s kind of obnoxious and oblivious. But surely you can be open about how you’re feeling without doing so in an obnoxious and oblivious way. You don’t have to choose between pretending to be Superman and fishing for sympathy – you can be open while still being thoughtful and exercising good judgment. And I think your employees will appreciate it – you may like being seen as a high-energy force of nature (or at least thinking they see you that way), but how does it benefit them for you to be seen that way? Maybe they’d benefit more from seeing when you’re stressed, and from seeing how you deal with it. 

Rick Brain 1: Maybe so. But I still worry about being seen to complain in any way about my job. Again, I know there are people in my organization who wish they had this position, and who think (in some cases, with good reason) that they’d do it better than I do. How will it make them feel if I’m complaining about how tough it is?

Rick Brain 2: So maybe what you need to do is figure out how to be open and human and vulnerable, but to do so in a way that doesn’t communicate “My job is so tough and demanding and I’m working so much harder than anyone else.” Maybe the key is to create context for your own openness by making sure you’re always noticing and expressing appreciation for the people you work with – so that when you do express feelings of overwhelm or fatigue, people see those expressions in a context of appreciation for them, and will be less likely to see what you’re saying as a sort of humble-brag about how hard you work and how much is expected of you.

Anyway, this conversation with myself is an ongoing one and I don’t suspect it will ever end completely – at least not until I retire, at which point the conversation will probably just change topics.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Think about how you handle the stressors of your job, and what messages your coping strategies might be sending to the people you lead. Are you confident that the messages you’re actually sending are the ones you want to send?
• When was the last time you openly remarked on the difficulties you deal with in your work? To whom were you speaking? Can you remember how they reacted? How would you have reacted if your places were reversed?
• Think carefully about how you balance the need to show confidence as a leader with the need to show openness and vulnerability. How do you strike that balance in your own leadership? Is it something you think about consciously?

When you were a child, there’s a very good chance that you were told by your parents to do something you didn’t want to do. And there’s a very good chance that you asked why you had to do it, and a very good chance that, at some point (perhaps often, and maybe it felt like every time) the answer you got was “Because I said so.” And there’s a very good chance you hated that answer, and for a very good reason: it’s a terrible answer.

Now, speaking as a parent and as someone who has nothing but empathy for other parents, I do recognize that sometimes that phrase is not the answer of first resort – sometimes it comes after an interminable exchange with your child during which you offered many very good reasons, none of which was deemed acceptable by your child, and that in those cases “Because I said so” may simply have been the only way to end an unproductive exchange.

The problem, though, is that no matter how justified you are as a parent in using the “Because I said so” gambit, it’s still a terrible answer. And if it’s a terrible-but-sometimes-necessary answer when dealing with, say, a seven-year-old, it’s a terrible-bordering-on-never-appropriate answer when dealing with professional adults.

Of course, as leaders dealing with professional adults, we almost never use the actual phrase “Because I said so.” But we often do find ourselves tempted to do what is functionally the same thing, by refusing to explain our decisions.

Why?

Very occasionally, it’s because there is a genuine reason for not explaining. The decision may have been informed by a sensitive personnel issue that can’t be shared, or by a confidential institutional situation that you can’t reveal. But that’s not the case with the great majority of decisions you make as a leader. Most can be explained, and should be – for multiple reasons.

Reason #1: Banking Political Capital. Earlier I wrote about the importance of defaulting to transparency, and explained that one reason for doing so is that by being transparent as a matter of course, the leader builds a fund of essential political capital with her team – a fund that can then be drawn upon, when necessary, in a moment when she needs to say “I can’t be transparent in this moment; I need you to trust me.” The leader who defaults to “Because I said so,” however, never builds that fund of political capital, and will eventually lose her people’s trust.

Reason #2: Effectiveness. Your team will function better if they understand the reasons they’re being asked to do things, and if they understand their leaders are doing the things they’re doing. Reasons provide context, and understanding context equips people to deal more effectively with ambiguity and unexpected roadblocks. 

Reason #3: Fairness. At a fundamental level, it’s not fair to issue instructions without telling people why. Now in some contexts, of course, it may be necessary. In the heat of battle, a commanding office can’t lead a discussion group every time he issues an order; during an emergency in the library, people may need to just do what they’re told in the moment and then seek deeper understanding later. But let’s be honest: in a library context, such situations are relatively rare. And again, a leader who has established a pattern of working with openness and transparency will have much more luck getting her team to respond with trust when a moment arises that requires unquestioned compliance.

Why do some leaders resist telling people “why”? In my experience, it’s usually for bad reasons. Sometimes they don’t like explaining their decisions because information is power and they want to keep that power for themselves; sometimes it’s because they know they can’t justify their decision on a rational or ethical basis; sometimes it’s because they genuinely aren’t sure what led them to their decision and don’t want to have to examine their own thought processes too closely.

But whatever the reason, a library leader who routinely refuses to explain his decisions to the people he leads is going to end up hurting them, himself, and the institution and patrons they all serve.

And, for that matter, to those who don’t. Today is a holiday in the US, so there’s no new Vision & Balance content today. But I hope all of you have a joyful weekend.

I’ve spent the last 20 years or so in library administration, and it’s taken me almost that long to figure out something essential. It’s simple, and it’s probably obvious to most people, but for me it took quite a while to sink in.

I finally realized, just a couple of years ago, that as a library director I am carrying around with me – at every moment of the workday – a big sack of something that is very much like money. But the “money” is unusual in several ways. First of all, it’s functionally limitless; I can spend as much of it as I want, and my supply is never depleted. Second, it’s of no value to me; I can’t spend it on myself. It only has value when I spend it on others.

A third thing that makes this “money” unusual is that it’s difficult to define it with complete rigor, and difficult to enumerate all the units of currency by which it can distributed. I can provide a few examples, though:

Encouragement. At any given moment on any given day, someone in your organization is discouraged and frustrated. Obviously, you can’t know the mood of everyone in your library at every moment – but you can pay attention, and when you see or hear that someone is struggling, you can take a minute to seek them out and express your support for and confidence in them. When you’re the library director, such expressions carry extra weight because of your position. They amount to something unusually valuable that you can give away without diminishing your supply of it.

Appreciation. Deep down, most library employees believe that their director has no idea what they do all day and doesn’t really understand the value of their work. They would love to be proven wrong. To the degree that you can (and the bigger and more complex your organization, the more difficult this will be), learn what’s happening on the front lines of your library, and take opportunities to express well-informed appreciation for the work your people are doing. I know it sounds obvious and simplistic, but the impact of such expressions can really be huge.

When you’re the library director, expressions of encouragement, appreciation, gratitude, and support carry extra weight because of your position. They amount to something unusually valuable that you can give away without diminishing your supply of it.

Gratitude. Gratitude and appreciation are closely related, but are not quite the same thing. Simply saying “thank you” is easy and quick and highly impactful – especially when it’s the library director saying it. Not all expressions of gratitude are equally valuable, of course; as with appreciation, the more they reflect real knowledge and understanding of the other person’s efforts, the more valuable they are. But no expression of gratitude is without value. Saying to your collections manager “I heard about that publisher negotiation you were involved with last week and I understand you saved us tens of thousands of dollars – that was really great work and I’m so glad we have you fighting for the needs of our students and faculty” might be worth more than just sticking your head into someone’s office as you walk by and saying “Hey, I just wanted to say thanks for the work you do – I’m really glad to be your colleague.” But even just doing that can be very valuable. 

Support. When I was a middle manager, one of the things that often held me back from doing things I felt were wise or even necessary was being uncertain whether my director would back me up in the event of a challenge. Now obviously, this is where alignment comes in – the director shouldn’t back up a manager who is trying to move the library in the wrong direction. But your people need to know that when they do the right thing, and especially when they do what you ask them to, you will be there to back them up if someone gets upset with them. The way they know this is, first of all, by you explicitly telling them you will; and second of all, by seeing you do it. Expressing support for your managers and making clear that you’re behind them is tremendously valuable, and costs you nothing. (Well, at least until you actually do have to back them up.)

Physical presence. I had an odd experience a few months ago. I was looking for a particular library employee, and I went to the area where she works, which is kind of out of the way, back behind a service desk, where there’s a bunch of cubicles and work stations. To be honest, I don’t think I had set foot in that area more than once or twice since coming to my current position four years ago. But when I came through the door, there were four or five student employees working at their desks, and one of them looked up and said “Oh my gosh, you guys, Rick is here!”. They were absolutely (and I think sincerely?) delighted to see me. Now, in sharing this story I want to make one thing very clear: none of those students knew me – they were not excited because I’m awesome and they love me. They were excited because the library director had come to their work area. Doing so cost me nothing; my presence in their area was nevertheless valuable to them. That moment taught me a very valuable lesson that I’ve been trying to do a better job of applying ever since.

Takeaways and Action Items

• As a library administrator, you are in a position to provide highly valuable encouragement, support, gratitude, and appreciation to the people you lead, at no cost to you.
• Consider setting a goal for yourself of saying “thank you” to a certain number of your colleagues every day. At least twice, make sure that your expressions of gratitude are detailed enough to make it clear that you genuinely understand the value of what you’re thanking them four. But hand out a few simple “thank yous” as well. 
• Ask yourself what areas of the library see you the least, and go out of your way to visit those areas more regularly.

Following on from Tuesday’s discussion of “Five Sucky Things about Being a Library Leader,” I’m going to address what I think are five of the best things about being a library director (though I think they translate well into other leadership contexts too). 

Now, to be very clear: I’m not saying these are necessarily the only five good things, or even the five best things – only that they are five of the best things, and of course in this as in most things I write about here, I freely acknowledge that other leaders’ mileage may vary significantly from mine. These are things that, for me, have been really great aspects of the library leadership experience. I present them in no particular order of awesomeness.

1. When you’re in charge of a library, you have a bully pulpit. Remember all those times when you were a line employee or a middle manager, and you had important things to say but no effective way to get the message out and no real authority to put behind them? Once you’re a library administrator (and especially a dean or director), that’s over. You now have a channel for sharing those thoughts and ideas – and, more intoxicating still, you have at least some power to transform them into direction. Obviously (or at least, I hope this is obvious), that power must be wielded with tremendous care, thoughtfulness, and charity. But it’s real, and having it is a great blessing if you are careful, thoughtful, and charitable enough to wield it well. 
2. When you’re in a leadership position, you can give others a bully pulpit. First and most importantly, this is a way to help others that was not available to you before being appointed to leadership. (In a future issue I’m going to talk more about the fundamental importance of genuinely desiring the advancement and success of the people you lead.) Less importantly, but still importantly, it is also a way you can get messages out to your organization without people feeling constantly hectored by you. To be clear: I’m not saying that the awesomeness of being able to give others a bully pulpit consists in the ability to use others as sock puppets; I’m saying that there are people in your organization who have great ideas, and as the organizational leader you are in a position to give them space to get theirmessages out to the organization. Doing so nurtures a fundamentally more healthy library in multiple ways: by giving voice to a diversity of perspectives and viewpoints; by modeling an equitable approach to organizational communication; by emboldening those who would feel intimidated into silence if the only organizational voice was that of the leader; by encouraging creative thinking; by setting an example of thoughtful and effective leadership to your other administrators and managers; etc.
3. As a leader, you’re in a position to fix organizational problems that have frustrated you in the past. Every line employee and every manager is driven crazy by something (most likely by multiple somethings) in the organization for which they work, and for most line employees and managers, the things that drive them crazy are outside of their own scope of stewardship and oversight. As a library administrator your scope of stewardship and oversight expands significantly; as a library director, it expands radically. Now you can finally deal with those nagging and frustrating organizational issues that have been a burr under your saddle for so long. (Of course, your efforts in this direction are likely to lead you to a new and much more nuanced appreciation for both those problems’ complexity and the unintended consequences that will attend trying to fix them – but that new and more nuanced appreciation is its own kind of win.)
4. As a leader, even your small gestures of kindness, thoughtfulness, and encouragement have an outsized impact. Members of the organization you lead will give greater weight to your kind words of praise and appreciation than they do the very same words from their peers or immediate supervisors. Don’t make the mistake of thinking this necessarily has anything to do with you as a person; the impact of your gestures isn’t really rooted in who you are. That enhanced impact is mainly a function of the chair you occupy. So instead, think of this as a temporary opportunity to really leverage your ability to do good. While you’re in a leadership position, your five-pound lift of kindness can yield twenty pounds of benefit to others – so how will you take advantage of that? How many people can you encourage and uplift today by, say, sticking your head into an office and saying “Thanks for those insightful remarks in yesterday’s meeting,” or stopping someone in the hall and asking how their child’s first day of school went, or thanking someone for their service as a committee chair? Praise and thank people both privately and publicly, and whenever possible, do so in terms that make clear your actual understanding of the good work they’ve done (as opposed to just saying “Hey man, you’re the best! Keep up the great work!”). The impact of doing so will be greater than you think.
5.  This last awesome thing is particularly relevant to academic libraries, which tend to employ a lot of students. Being a library leader gives you the chance to encourage and strengthen student employees. They think you’re very important; they also think you’re very smart and mature and accomplished. You may think their assessment of you is inflated, but so what? Work with it. Use their assessment of you to create opportunities for them to feel seen and encouraged by someone they look up to. Don’t let false (or real) modesty get in the way of your opportunity to give students a lift. You will occasionally, in the future, hear from former student employees who will tell you that a brief, thoughtful conversation you had with them made a big difference in their college experience. You may not even remember that conversation. Now is the time to think about that – about the degree of positive influence you can have on young people who think (rightly or wrongly) that you’re really cool because you’re the library director.

So: are there sucky things about being a leader? Of course there are. But on balance, I think it’s a pretty awesome opportunity. No matter how hard the bad days can be, I’m very grateful I’ve had the chance to do it. I hope you feel the same way about your experience.

This is Part 1 of a two-part essay, the first on downsides of leadership and the second on upsides. I debated with myself about whether the one that comes first (and is free to the public) should be the positive one or the negative one, and finally decided that since my Tuesday issues are usually the shorter ones and I’d rather say less about suckiness than about awesomeness, I’ll start with the negative and end with the positive.

So, leaders, let’s (relatively briefly) commiserate:

1. One of the first things you’ll notice about being in leadership is that no matter how many times you say something, you’re going to have to say it again. I once worked for a director who was struggling with the fact that people in the library were failing to grasp an essential element of his vision for the organization. In a leadership meeting, several of us told him “You’ve got to say it explicitly.” His response was “I’ve already said it explicitly!”. And of course he was right. But, as we all told him, “You’ve got to say it over and over, in multiple contexts and in multiple formats and platforms.” There’s no point in lamenting this aspect of human nature; we simply have to accept and deal with it. Repeating yourself is part of the job. 
2. You will never make everyone happy. A win-win solution is great when you can get it, but win-win solutions are not always possible; sometimes two people genuinely want mutually exclusive things, and only one of them will get what they want. Sometimes the tough work of leadership involves giving one person a win and another person a loss, and leaders who are incapable of doing this, or unwilling to do it, when necessary will end up making everyone miserable. Deciding who will win and who will lose is – not always, but regularly – part of the job.
3. No matter how well you do your work, some people (both inside and outside your organization) are going to be dissatisfied with your leadership. Do your job perfectly, make every decision correctly, and manage every resource with perfect balance and judgment, and your library will still have some unhappy employees and some unhappy patrons. Of course, if you do these things badly you’ll make even more people unhappy. But even consistently doing the right thing, and doing it in the right way, will leave at least some people dissatisfied. Making people unhappy is part of the job.
4. Everything you do will be under scrutiny. Some of the scrutiny you receive will be fair; some of it will be unfair, but you can’t – you mustn’t – assume that anything you do in your work as a library leader is (or will remain) invisible. Being seen is part of the job. At the same time, a lot of what you do will be neither seen nor appreciated at the time by anyone else, including those who benefit from it. This is not only inevitable; it’s as it should be. A lot of the work you do as a leader is designed to be unseen and unappreciated. You can’t assume that anything you do will remain forever under wraps, but you also can’t assume that every good thing you do will be seen and appreciated in anything like a timely way. Being unseen is also part of the job.
5. People will always assume you mean what you say. Sometimes you think you’re speaking off the cuff, whimsically, and/or with clearly casual or ironic intent. And yet in those moments, there is always a significant risk that what you say will be taken to be in earnest – perhaps by only a handful of your listeners, but perhaps by most or all of them. As a line employee you can say teasing or whimsical or facetious things that you simply can’t get away with as a leader – for the simple and good reason that as a leader, your utterances are invested with power that does not attend them when you’re not in a leadership position. It’s less dangerous to wave a chopstick around than to wave a baseball bat around – and like it or not, when you’re a leader you’re always carrying a baseball bat, and you swing it every time you speak or write to the people you lead. As someone with a highly developed sense of whimsy and (I like to tell myself) a keen sense of irony, this is a lesson I have had to be taught repeatedly, the hard way.

In Thursday’s subscribers-only post, I’ll spend a bit more time discussing five of the things I think are awesome about library leadership.

One of the stereotypes of librarians is that we’re all introverts. The assumption is that we were attracted to this profession because we’re quiet, bookish types for whom social interaction requires an unusual expenditure of energy, energy that is replenished for us as we do solitary, cerebral work by ourselves – ideally in our offices, while wearing headphones and listening to classical music. Then we go home and knit sweaters while holding cats in our laps.

And, like many stereotypes, this one does have some basis in reality. Sure, all of us know extroverted librarians. But I’ve worked in four libraries over the course of my career and have interacted with hundreds (if not thousands) of librarians from other organizations, and I think I can safely say that my experience suggests the presence of a disproportionate number of colleagues who are at least somewhere on the “introversion” side of the extro/introversion scale. Maybe your experience has been different, but that’s been mine. 

In any case, even with a statistically normal distribution of extroverts and introverts in librarianship, the law of large numbers would still suggest that a good number of library leaders will be more introverted than extroverted. And that’s going to lead to particular challenges.

Of course, either extroversion or introversion will produce challenges for a leader. But as someone who measures on the fairly extreme end of the introversion spectrum myself, I’m not in a great position to talk about the challenges that extroverts face. I can speak with some authority only about the challenges faced by introverts in leadership, and I can also offer some tips for dealing with them.

First, know yourself. Pay attention to how different social situations affect you. Do meetings drain all of your energy? How long can you stay at a fundraising event before you start wanting to crawl under a piece of furniture? Do you find yourself hoping you won’t run into a colleague while on your way to the bathroom? Pay attention to these responses on your part and use them to form a mental template of situations that are particularly energy-draining for you.

Second, once you feel confident that you know yourself: marshall your bandwidth. All of us – but maybe people in leadership positions especially – are better at comprehending limitations of time than of energy. In other words: we have a tendency to assume that our stores of mental, emotional, and physical energy will always expand as necessary to fill the time available for accomplishing tasks. Suppose that I, as an introvert, have spent a solid six hours in meetings, and I have a 30-minute window before my next one, and someone in my organization has been trying to get me for a 15-minute meeting. In this situation, the idea that I might not have the bandwidth available for that meeting (even though I have the time) might not occur to me. But in fact, it may be that the wisest course for me would be to sit quietly, alone, in my office for those 30 minutes and handle some intellectual work, thus preparing me better for the upcoming batch of meetings – and to schedule meeting later with my importunate colleague. (For an extrovert, of course, exactly the opposite dynamic might apply: having to spend the whole morning working on a document may be mentally draining, and she may need to recharge by having lunch with a few colleagues and talking with them for an hour.) 

All of us – but maybe people in leadership positions especially – are better at comprehending limitations of time than of energy.

Third – and on the other hand – remember that one of the most important things you can do as a leader is to be physically seen by your team. If you tend towards introversion, you will likely look at all time not spent in meetings as a time to hunker down in your office, regroup, and update documents or catch up on your email. There’s nothing wrong with doing those things, of course (that kind of work is an important part of the job and can be restorative, as noted above), but it’s also important to push yourself to fill some of those interludes with walking-around time: check in on that department chair who’s dealing with a difficult personnel situation; walk by a service desk and give a fist bump to the student employees who are there and tell them how grateful you are for the work they do; go looking for confused-looking patrons and ask if you can help them. If you’re an introvert, you may not naturally want to do this, so figure out structural ways to push yourself – maybe put something on your calendar at least once a day that says “Get out of your office for 30 minutes.” Or maybe have your assistant regularly ask you “Have you gotten out and talked to anyone today?”. Maybe decide that every time you take a bathroom break, you won’t return to your desk until you’ve had a conversation with a colleague you haven’t already interacted with that day.

Fourth, respect the extroverts. Introverts have been having something of a Cultural Moment of late; we are now, apparently – and maybe inexplicably – considered somewhat cool. Extroverts, on the other hand, come under a bit of cultural suspicion right now, caricatured as loud, superficial, back-slapping suck-ups. It’s always tempting to dismiss those who are very different from us, and introverts are no less susceptible to that human tendency than anyone else. If you’re a library leader, you need to be extra careful about this. Instead of rolling your eyes at the extroverts or steering clear of them, ask yourself this: what are they good at that you’re not? Do you need someone more extroverted than you in administration, not only to bring a different perspective on organizational issues but also to make up for your weaknesses when it comes to things like fundraising and internal events? Would a more extroverted person be able to help you analyze your own interactions with staff and see where you might need to be more careful to communicate enthusiasm and support? 

Remember: there’s no single perfect personality type for library leadership. Every leader is going to bring a mix of strengths and weaknesses.

Takeaways and Action Items

• How well do you know and understand your own social orientation? Are there social requirements of your position that don’t come easily to you as a leader? If so, what will you do about that?
• If you answered the above question “No,” get a reality check. Ask someone you trust, and who knows you well, whether there are social skills you need to sharpen in your leadership role. Brace yourself for the answer.
  • If you tend towards introversion, make a five-point list of things you need to push yourself to do more of. These might include items like:
  • Take 15 minutes each morning and each afternoon to seek out a brief personal interaction with someone on your team whom you don’t already meet with regularly.
  • At least once per day, seek out someone in your organization who has done something good, and praise them for it in person – preferably, in front of others. Members of your leadership team can help you identify good candidates.
• Make a special effort to talk at least once a day to students, especially student employees. They will appreciate this more than you expect.
• For one week, check your fund of emotional and mental energy at least twice per day, at different times. When do you find yourself most drained, and most energized? What do your findings suggest about how you should be managing your bandwidth?

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I argued that we need to think about innovation more critically, not pursuing it as an end in itself but rather making sure that we always explicitly harness innovation to the idea of improvement. 

Today I’m going to proceed from the assumption that when we say “innovation,” we really mean “innovative improvement.” And I’m going to make the (perhaps controversial) suggestion that innovation is overrated in library directors, and underrated in middle management. 

Let me explain my thinking.

Library directors can, and do, foster change – good ones foster change intentionally, wisely, kindly, and strategically; bad ones foster change unintentionally, wantonly, selfishly, and short-sightedly. But when directors try to foster change by being the drivers of innovative improvement in their libraries, it backfires as often as it succeeds – and even when it succeeds, it may backfire as well. Why? Several reasons: 

1. Innovative ideas that originate in administration will be experienced as top-down – because they are. Not all things that come from the top down are necessarily bad for the organization; pay raises come from the top down, for example. But when the message is “Here’s a new thing we should do,” the general response in the library will tend to be a collective eye-roll when the message is coming from administration (regardless of the idea’s merits).
2. The director is only one person, who directly supervises few; the management team is multiple people, who supervise many. Directors don’t scale well. Each library director is a single person who only sees the work of a small number of people on a day-to-day basis. His innovative ideas will not be informed by as much input from others as those that arise from his management team will be. 
3. Directors aren’t “at the coalface” and don’t usually have broad enough organizational knowledge to assess and implement innovative ideas. Directors are in a good position to dictate that things be done, but not to know what doing those things would entail. (We library directors tend to think we understand the inner workings of our libraries much better than we really do.) It will be easy for a director to see the potential benefits of an innovative idea, but not to see the real-world costs of implementing it. When managers propose innovative improvements, a realistic cost/benefit assessment is much more likely to be built into the proposal. 

What all of this means, among other things, is that when recruiting a library director, it’s much more important to find someone who knows how to identify and nurture creative thinkers than to find someone who is herself a creative thinker. And you definitely want to find someone who is happy to provide a platform for others to be innovative – and get the credit for it – rather than someone who has a lot of ego investment in being seen as innovative herself.  

All of that being said, when it comes to innovative improvement in the library, there are at least four very important things a director can and should do:

1. Set (and repeatedly invoke) a vision for the library that makes clear where the library is trying to go, and by implication what kinds of innovative improvement are needed.
2. Identify innovators and creative thinkers and give them space and resources to come up with ideas that will help advance the library. (This could involve creating a Skunk Works group or something similar.)
3. Stay abreast of innovative developments in the library and ensure that they stay aligned with library priorities and those of the host institution.
4. Use the administrative bully pulpit to communicate broadly an organizational posture in favor of innovative improvement (by, among other things, publicly recognizing and praising such improvements when they emerge).

Takeaways and Action Items 

• Ask yourself: Who are the most innovative thinkers in your organization? Where do the best and most interesting ideas come from? Then ask yourself: Do these people have enough space, and get enough recognition, to enable them to maximally help the library?
• If you already have a program in your library designed to foster innovation, are you monitoring its work to ensure that it’s staying strategically aligned?
• Look into your own heart: As a leader, how important is it to you that you be seen as the source of creative and innovative ideas in your library? How happy are you with shining the light away from you and towards your employees?

I’m pushing the second installment in my two-part series on innovation to next week, and bringing this week’s Thursday post forward by a day (and making it free to the public), because I think the time is right to address an urgent issue for library leaders: the question of what to do in the wake of a bitterly contested presidential election, when emotions among the people you lead will be running very high and they will be coming to work feeling a volatile mix of fear, elation, trepidation, disappointment, and uncertainty – and will be looking at each other with a mix of feelings as well, in some cases knowing how others voted and in some cases wondering, and perhaps feeling anxious about what their colleagues would think if they knew how they themselves had voted.

In this moment, those of us charged with creating and fostering an environment of inclusion and respect in our libraries need to bear several important things in mind.

First, the people you lead are more ideologically diverse than you think. You probably have a pretty good sense of where the majority of your employees stand on major social and political issues. However, there is more diversity of opinion in your organization than you believe. Why do I say that? Because it’s all too easy for each of us to assume that those around us – people we know to be intelligent, well-informed people of good faith – must think largely the same way we do, at least with regard to those social and political issues that seem most important and fundamental to the good of our country and society. But the reality is that intelligent, well-informed people of good faith often disagree on those important and fundamental issues. And in any organization, those who sense themselves to be out of step with what they believe to be the majority view will feel hesitant to express their views, sensing that to do so would be socially dangerous. This hesitancy tends to mask the ideological diversity of an organization, reinforcing an appearance of uniformity and increasing the social power of the majority. 

Second, you are the leader of the whole library, not only those you agree with. We’ve just completed yet another bitter and highly divisive election season, and we now know its outcome. Those you lead are coming to work today in a variety of moods – some relieved, some exhilarated, some depressed, some anxious, some frustrated. Those who believe themselves to be in the ideological majority will express their views more freely; those who suspect they’re in the minority will be quieter and more circumspect, and may even misrepresent their actual feelings in order to avoid social stigma. All will be looking at you – partly to get a sense of where you stand personally but also (and more importantly) for a signal as to whether a diversity of reactions is going to be tolerated in your organization. Publicly expressing solidarity with one side or another – whether explicitly or in code – will communicate clearly that those on the other side don’t actually belong in your library and had better keep their heads down. And this leads to my third and final point:

What you say (and don’t say) makes a big difference. Library directors should never make the mistake – whether through ignorance or false modesty – of underestimating the organizational impact of the things they say and don’t say. As a leader, you’ve probably been frustrated that you seem to have to say the same things over and over and over again before people hear them; at the same time, you might be very surprised to know how many times you’ve said something in an offhand, casual way that has had a significant impact on your organization. The fact is that what you say as the library director carries a different weight than what others in the organization say – you speak for the library as a whole, even when you don’t necessarily intend to. An awareness of this needs to inform all of your private and (especially) public speech in the organization.

What does this mean you should actually do in the context of your own library? I don’t know and can’t say. Each of us leads a different organization, with different social and political dynamics and different needs. But I believe that the principles listed above apply very broadly across organizations, and that keeping them in mind as we navigate the difficult waters of this political moment will greatly benefit the people we lead.

Sometimes I get a little worried when I listen to the professional discourse in the library world around the concept of innovation. My worry is that we may be starting to see it as something that is inherently good and worthy of pursuit – as if doing new things, or doing old things in new ways, is always a good thing. Or, worse, as if innovation is a goal to be pursued in itself.

It isn’t.

Innovation is a category of change – and change is value-neutral. In other words, change itself is neither good nor bad; it may be either, or it may be neither. Innovation is one particular kind of change, and I think the reason it benefits from a halo effect is that so much positive change over the past century or so really has been of the innovative kind: either old things done in new and better ways (the telegraph giving way to telephones and faxes giving way to email) or entirely new things that have solved longstanding problems (air travel, cures for diseases, etc.). But some innovations aren’t better – they’re just new. Even positive change is almost always a mixed bag, and some innovations represent, on balance, something both new and worse. The development of the hydrogen bomb was, incontrovertibly, an innovation; so was the invention of waterboarding. And air travel and email have both brought with them new problems even as they’ve solved old ones.

So I’d like to see us treat the idea of innovation a bit more critically. In my library, I’m not interested in seeing innovation itself, necessarily – I’m interested in seeing improvement. Improvement might involve doing new things, or it might mean doing old things in new ways, both of which represent different kinds of innovation. But such innovations only represent improvement if they entail doing new things that really need to be done, or doing old things in better ways. In both scenarios, what matters is not the newness of the activity, but the fact that the new activity represents something better. An unnecessary new activity, or change to an existing process that doesn’t improve its effectiveness and efficiency, isn’t more necessary or more effective or more efficient for being innovative. And, of course, all innovations bring with them unintended consequences that may, in some cases, be negative enough to fully offset the benefits they also bring. 

Now, I realize that many of you reading this piece are likely saying to yourselves “Well, duh, Rick – no one thinks innovation is a good thing unless it actually makes things better.” And that may be true, but my concern is that such critical and qualified thinking doesn’t seem to be reflected in much of the professional rhetoric I hear around innovation. Instead, I feel like we regularly invoke innovation as a goal to be pursued as if it were good in itself. I’m not going to cite any specific examples because I’m not interested in criticizing any particular individuals or organizations – I just want to focus on the issue itself. 

So how should we think about innovation? Here are three suggested action items: 

Takeaways and Action Items

• Don’t settle for easy talk of “innovation” in your organization. When the term is used, get more specific:
  • What do we want to change?
  • How do we want to change it?
  • What problem(s) will this change solve?
  • What would be some likely unintended consequences of this change?
• Provide material and cultural support in your library for innovative improvement. Instead of encouraging innovation as an end in itself, do what you can to reward improvements – in services, in processes, in management practices, etc. Support improvement and you will be encouraging exactly the kind of change you want to see, some of which will turn out to be innovative.
• Ask yourself: “What needs to change for the better in my organization? What can I do to creat a culture in my library that will foster and nurture that kind of change?”