Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

I don’t know if I’ve had a lot of great insights over the course of my career. There are things I’ve figured out, and things that other people have figured out and explained to me, but there haven’t been many times when I’ve experienced anything that really felt like a flash of professional inspiration.

It happened once, though. The thing is, I can’t remember the circumstances in which it happened. I just know that at some point, I suddenly understood a very important principle, and an equally important corollary:

1. The farther you are from a system, the simpler it will look to you, and
2. The easier and cheaper you will expect changing that system to be.

I think that insight may have been driven by years of listening to people characterize scholarly publishing as a simple matter of “authors creating content and giving it away to publishers for free so that publishers can sell it back to them at an enormous profit.” Of course, if you have little or no experience of publishing, this is exactly what it looks like. And because we, in libraries, work so often and so closely with publishers, it’s easy for us to think that we’re closer to that system than we actually are, and that we are therefore seeing it in all its complexity. But for the most part, we aren’t, and we therefore don’t see (or overlook) the highly complicated and wide-ranging network of interlocking pieces that make up a superficially simple-looking whole.

But obviously, this is a principle that applies to lots of other systems as well – and it absolutely applies within an organization, and is especially important for leaders to understand. Anyone who has been a library leader or who has been led by one has probably seen this principle in action, for better or worse. Certainly I have fallen prey to the assumption that I understand fully a process or system within my organization that looks, from my vantage point, much more simple and straightforward than it really is, and I’ve seen other leaders do the same.

I can imagine that some readers might be skeptical – it’s understandable to assume that we understand, at least to a reasonable degree, all or most of the processes taking place within our areas of stewardship. So let’s try a quick thought experiment: imagine for yourself what is involved in withdrawing a book from your collection. (No fair if, at some point in the recent past, you yourself were in charge of withdrawals. If that’s you, then think of a different process, one for which you have not had responsibility in the past.) Chances are you’ll be able to think of several important parts of the withdrawal process: documenting the withdrawal decision; removing the book’s item record from the catalog; physically removing or effacing property marks; etc. Think of as many such steps as you can, and write them down in the order you believe they should be accomplished. 

Now make an appointment with the person in your library who is in charge of withdrawals, and compare your list with his or her actual procedures. As you do so, ask yourself questions like:

• How many steps in this process reflect legitimate organizational needs of which you were not aware?
• Were you surprised by the existence of any legal or policy requirements?
• What specialized training is needed to carry out this process? Is any of it surprising to you?
• What mistakes are you less likely to make now that you understand this process better?

As you rise in the hierarchy of an organization, it’s important to remember that your distance increases from an increasing number of organizational systems – all of which will, as that distance increases, look more and more simple to you. This means that as your scope of authority – and therefore the opportunity to make high-handed decisions without input from others – increases, your ability to fully assess the implications of your decisions within the organization actually decreases. This is one reason why epistemic humility (a healthy recognition one’s own perceptual limitations and biases) is so vitally important to leadership.

Takeaways and Action Items

• The more authority you have in an organization, the less likely it will be that you have broad, nut-and-bolts understanding of how the component programs and processes of your organization work.
• If you want to gain your staff’s confidence, demonstrate epistemic humility: acknowledge your gaps in understanding, and actively invite them to educate you about their work.
• Conduct an experiment like the one outlined above, using a program area of the library in which you do not have much direct experience. What did you learn from doing so?

I have a number of pet peeves with the current culture of news reporting. I’m not going to get into all of them here, because this isn’t the venue, but one of my peeves in particular actually does dovetail nicely with the themes and purposes of this newsletter.

It’s the danger of the anecdote. Let me explain.

Stories are powerful, as we all know. And whenever something is powerful, that means it can be used powerfully either for good or for ill. Because most humans are naturally empathetic, stories are very good at evoking strong emotional responses. So when we hear about someone’s experience of triumph, or oppression, or disappointment, or joy, we tend to mirror those feelings ourselves, and the power to evoke such emotions can be used to encourage us towards actions either good or bad – and to advance narratives that may be true, or false, or much more complicated than the anecdote in question would suggest. And, most notably for us as leaders, the power of a story can also lead us to bypass critical thought in favor of reflexive reaction. 

Here’s a hypothetical example.

An employee comes into your office and tells you about a patron who has encountered serious frustration while trying to use the library’s digital collections. The frustration arises from the limitations of the library’s current digital-services platform, a platform this employee has long believed needs to be replaced. The story is offered to you as final proof that it’s time for the library to migrate to another platform. 

You now need to ask yourself two crucial questions:

Question 1: Is the story true?

Question 2: If so, what does it tell you?

The answer to the first question may seem straightforward (if potentially difficult to determine), but it isn’t. Like all stories, this one is almost certainly true to some degree and also at least partially distorted by the teller’s particular perceptions and biases. But for the sake of this example, let’s assume that the story is essentially accurate. Now you have to ask the second question: what does this story tell you?

And the answer is: it depends on the  degree to which the story represents an outlier patron experience or an example of a common patron experience.

And herein lies the problem with the argument from anecdote, and the reason why using stories as evidence can be so misleading – both in journalism and in organizational management.

Stories are powerful. And like all powerful things, they can be used powerfully for good or for ill.

The reality is that any individual story could represent either a dramatic outlier or an example of what’s typical – or, even more likely, something between those two extremes. This is important to bear in mind when listening to news reporting – because when a journalist uses an individual’s story to convey the reality of a complex situation, she may have carefully selected it for its ability to convey accurately the nuances of that situation, but she also may have selected it because it fits her own personal biases. Similarly, when an employee tells you about a patron’s unhappy experience with a library service, he may have selected it because it illustrated a common problem or because it helps to further his own agenda. 

 When you encounter argumentation from anecdote in a news story, you unfortunately don’t have the option of asking follow-up questions to determine the degree to which the anecdote may or may not be truly useful in understanding the larger situation. But with your employee, you do have that option. So in a situation like the hypothetical offered above, I’d recommend doing just that: follow up with questions like 

• “Do we have any survey data on patrons’ general experience with our digital collections?” (this patron’s experience may have been an anomaly)
• “Do we know how this patron feels about our services generally?” (this patron may be someone who is routinely dissatisfied with library services in a way that has more to do with him than with the services)
• “Are we confident that the patron’s frustrating experience arose from limitations of the platform itself?” (the platform could have experienced a glitch that day that arose from something other than the platform’s inherent limitations)

The answers to these kinds of questions will help you decide what, if anything, needs to be done next. 

Statisticians like to say that “the plural of anecdote is not data.” But this is nonsense; of course the plural of anecdote is data; so is the singular. The problem with an anecdote is not that it doesn’t represent data; the problem is that it represents only a single data point, from which it is not generally wise to derive a policy decision or a change in organizational direction.

Takeaways and Action Items

• When it comes to organizational decisionmaking, the problem with anecdotes is not that they don’t represent data. It’s that a) they are powerful, and b) they represent so little data.
• Don’t ignore anecdotes; let them lead you to questions that can take you beyond the anecdote to a data-informed decision.
• Think about the last time someone told you a story about something that happened in your library. What did they want you to do with that information? What did you do with it? In retrospect, should you have reacted differently?

One of the most frustrating things for a leader is when it’s clear (to the leader) that some kind of organizational change is necessary, but people in the organization resist accepting and implementing it. Such resistance can take many forms (we’ll talk more about those in future articles), but today I want to push back on a sentiment that I hear expressed commonly by leaders facing this frustration: “The problem with these people is they’re afraid of change. 

Now, to be clear: sometimes people really are afraid of change. This can be especially true in the library profession, which – let’s just say it out loud – has not tended historically to self-select for people who want a constantly changing job. In fact, libraries have not, historically, been rewarded for or even been expected to be places of constant change and nimble responsiveness. On the contrary: historically, the library has been expected to resist change, to be consistent and constant and reliable, and the profession has, unsurprisingly enough, tended to attract people for whom the challenges of consistency and constancy and reliability are interesting and rewarding ones to meet.

And yet, the world in which libraries do their work has been changing rapidly in recent decades, and it has been necessary for libraries to change as well. We’ve done so with varying degrees of both success and grace 

In this context, the leader who tries to introduce significant change in his library is likely to encounter at least some resistance. And when the resistance arises, that leader will be tempted to dismiss it as arising from a fear of change itself, or an objection to change in principle.

Resistance to change may arise from factors other than fear of change itself – and those factors may be critically important to consider

The wise leader will resist this temptation. Not because there aren’t library employees who fear or hate change itself – of course there are – but because the resistance may well arise from other factors, and it may be urgently important to consider those factors. Bypassing that consideration by dismissing the resistance as mere reaction might lead you to overlook substantive issues that need your attention and could lead to serious problems later. In other words, an objection to the proposed change may not reflect a fear of change itself, and it may not arise from “fear” at all; it may reflect only an objection to the specific change in question.

For example, imagine this scenario:

The associate dean over technical services has read an article arguing in favor of eliminating journal issue check-in, and found its arguments compelling. She calls in her serials manager and introduces those arguments to him, laying out the reasons why she thinks journal check-in can be discontinued and the benefits that would accrue from doing so. From the very beginning of the conversation, she can see him becoming agitated – he obviously hates this idea. When she asks for his counsel, he responds with a litany of reasons why the library needs to continue checking in journal issues. Much (though not all) of what her manager shares are arguments that were anticipated and addressed in the article she read, and she’s ready with responses, but the responses do nothing to assuage his concern; he’s just as opposed at the end of the conversation as he was before she started explaining her reasoning, in part because he brought up some issues for which she did not have ready responses. She ends the meeting by asking him to give it some more thought, and promising to meet again in a few days to discuss the matter further.

The associate dean goes away from the conversation convinced that her manager is not interested in listening to reason; he simply fears change and will oppose it no matter the merits of the case.

The manage goes away from the conversation convinced that the leader is not interested in hearing any arguments that don’t support a conclusion she reached long before talking to anyone with direct understanding of the processes she wants to change.

Who is right?

Obviously, in a similar real-world scenario both sides – both of whom are in positions of leadership – could be at least partially right. But today we’ll focus on how the associate dean can most fruitfully and wisely respond to the manager’s concerns. Dismissing them as mere reaction would be a significant mistake; she would not be wise to assume that the principles she learned from an article on eliminating check-in were fully sufficient to analyze and dictate change in a department in which she does not work. Nor would it be wise to assume that the manager’s response arises from an aversion to change generally; he might hate change and be reacting on that basis, but he also might genuinely see problems with her proposed course of action that she does not see. 

A wiser approach would be to take the time necessary to not only to go through all the reasons she has for believing that eliminating check-in would create a net benefit to the library and its constituency, but also to listen carefully both to the manager’s responses to those arguments and to the objections he raises that she had not considered previously. If she listens carefully, respectfully, and thoughtfully, she may still come away from the conversation convinced that eliminating check-in is the right thing to do. She may also come away convinced that it’s actually a bad idea, or at least a bad idea in the current moment. She may also – and this is perhaps the most likely outcome – conclude that further discussion and analysis are needed before making a final decision.

Why are leaders tempted to dismiss resistance to change as a fear of change? Three reasons:

1. This response locates the problem in someone other than the leader, and in a case of conflict it’s always tempting to assume that it’s the other person who has the problem.
2. It locates the problem in something other than the leader’s plan, and creates a justification for pushing forward with the plan despite the resistance. 
3. By attributing resistance to “fear,” the leader is able to treat the resistance as irrational without having to analyze critically the source(s) of the resistance.

There’s a fundamental principle at work here: reality exists outside of our individual preferences, expectations, and agendas, and reality – eventually – always wins. Any habit of mind that allows us to avoid or procrastinate the encounter with external reality is likely to serve us (and our organizations) badly. Dismissing resistance to change as fear of change itself may or may not reflect reality – and the reality matters very much.

Takeaways and Action Items

• It’s never smart to assume you know what motivates other people. Always err on the side of asking questions and listening carefully before proceeding on the assumption that you do.
• Resistance is always irritating. Irritation is almost never a worthwhile basis for responding to people, or for decision-making. The next time you are faced with an irritating reaction from someone you work with, what steps will you take in your own mind to look past the irritation and make a wise next move?
• What changes would you like to see in your organization? What reactions do you expect from your colleagues? What steps will you take to analyze those reactions and let them inform your decisions?

One of the biggest challenges for a library leader is trying to figure out when to be transparent, and how transparent to be. 

Sometimes, of course, it’s an easy call. Confidential personnel issues, preliminary information about upcoming university changes, non-public financial data, etc., usually come in a context that makes clear the information is privileged or confidential. But sometimes it’s more of a judgment call: a department manager is planning to retire with relatively short notice and wants to keep the information quiet, but you need to plan for his succession; you’re going to have to make some budget reallocations and don’t want to cause an organization-wide panic; a person is being disciplined and there are some people who need to know and others who don’t. In situations like these, it won’t always be 100% clear whether and when you need to err on the side of openness or of confidentiality. 

While I can’t offer a conceptual tool or rubric that will always lead you to the right answer for every situation, I can offer a general rule of thumb that I’ve found to work very well:

Default to openness and transparency.

In other words, whenever you can share information openly with your organization, do so. Err on the side of openness. Tell people more than you think they need to know. Don’t keep information indoors unless you’re confident you can clearly and convincingly answer the question “Why couldn’t that information have been shared?”.

Err on the side of openness. Tell people more than you think they need to know.

There are a few reasons to do this:

1. People really do need to know more than you might think they do. Remember that you don’t fully understand the work of the other people in your organization, including those who report up to you. (You may think you fully understand their work, but you don’t.)
2. Whenever you show yourself to be an information sharer rather than an information hoarder, you gain trust. Then, when you have to keep information indoors later, people are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
3. Your library will run better when its employees are better informed.

Now again, I need to emphasize that defaulting to openness does not mean always telling everyone everything. It means deciding that you’ll share information unless there’s a good reason not to. In many cases, there will be good reasons to keep information indoors, either permanently or for a period of time or from certain people. But defaulting to openness means that your standard approach is to ask yourself “Why shouldn’t I share this information?” rather than “Why should I share it?”.

I can’t overstate the degree to which adopting this practice has helped me as a leader – and, more importantly, has helped the people I lead.

Today I want to loop back to an issue I mentioned in an earlier piece: the problem that arises when a library leader finds herself in a state of principled opposition to the position of either the library (if she’s a middle manager) or the university (if she’s the library director).

Let’s return to the hypothetical example I used earlier: a library director is under pressure from staff to offer remote work options. However, university policy is clear that remote work is only allowed under highly exceptional circumstances, none of which applies to anyone who works in the library. When the library director communicates this back to her staff, the reaction is strongly negative, with some employees saying she should simply disregard the campus policy on the basis that it’s wrongheaded and out of date, and others arguing that even if breaking campus policy is a bad idea, simply saying “sorry, campus policy won’t permit it” is an insufficient response – she shouldn’t just be telling them what the policy is, but actively advocating on their behalf for the policy to change to what they believe it should be.

This scenario will be familiar to anyone who has served in a leadership or management position in a library. Invariably, at some point you’re going to find yourself in a situation in which your obligation to advocate downwards on behalf of leaders above you conflicts with your obligation to advocate upwards on behalf of the people you manage.

Our last three articles talked about the importance of keeping the library aligned with its host institution’s priorities and strategic directions, as a matter of both sound strategy and institutional ethics. But what about when the conflict a library leader experiences arises not from misalignment between her staff and the host institution, but between herself and her host institution (whether that’s the library or the university)? In other words, what if she finds herself genuinely in opposition to the institution’s priorities or directions, and wants both to follow her conscience and fulfill her obligation as a leader to be supportive of her employing institution?

Intellectual humility is an important principle for anyone, but it is an essential characteristic for those who are in a power position that allows them to impose their views on others.

In considering this difficult question, it’s important to keep perspective in mind. Not all disagreements between a leader and her institution are equally significant. If you’re a department manager in a library that charges overdue fees, and you believe that doing so is a bad idea, that may not represent a principle important enough to lead you to wonder whether you can continue in good conscience to work in that library. (Though I suppose it may.) However, if your library had a practice of allowing political groups with which you profoundly disagree to reserve and use its public gathering space, and if your expressed concerns about that practice have led to no policy change, then you might have a tougher decision to make: can you continue working for an organization that provides a space for such groups? If so, what form should your opposition to that policy take? Should you register your objection, or keep it to yourself, or refuse to abide by the policy (either explicitly or quietly)?

Or suppose that you’re the library director whose staff want to be able to work remotely, and you believe strongly that the campus policy should change to make remote work an option. What should you do with that disagreement? And to what degree should you communicate the fact of your disagreement to your staff (thereby demonstrating your solidarity with them but also demonstrating your lack of solidarity with your shared employer)? 

While it’s not possible to prescribe the correct approach for every situation (and there is sadly no way I could prescribe a single correct response to the remote-work scenario), there are a few principles that I believe can and should be applied regardless of the situational details:

• Speak freely up; speak carefully down. A manager in a library, or a library director at a college or university, needs to be able to speak frankly and openly with her supervisor. Such exchanges should always be mutually respectful, of course, but there should always exist a relationship between the manager and the administrator that allows for candid and open discussion of differences and concerns. When speaking about areas of institutional conflict with those she herself supervises, however, the manager or director needs to be more circumspect, explaining the issue clearly while also avoiding any language or framing that might communicate a more fundamental lack of support for the institution and its priorities. 
• Be clear on what is and is not a fundamental issue for you. In negotiations, we talk about “walking points” – issues on which we can’t compromise, and that if not resolved to our satisfaction will result in us walking away from the negotiating table and abandoning the deal. In a way, our employment is a matter of ongoing negotiation between us and our employers – there is always the possibility that a disagreement will arise that can’t be resolved to our mutual satisfaction. This may result in the employee being fired, or in the employee resigning. As managers and leaders, we need to always be clear on what principles are “walking points” for us. What areas of institutional disagreement can we tolerate and work through, and what issues would lead us no longer to be able to stay?
• Acknowledge and respect differences of perspective and opinion. The more fundamental an issue is for you, the harder it will be to recognize and acknowledge that others may see it differently, and perhaps with equal justification. Intellectual humility is an important principle for anyone, but it is an essential characteristic for those who are in a power position that allows them to impose their views on others.

None of these principles will magically resolve situations of conflict between the leader and her institution. But they can provide important guidance in navigating such conflicts in both a productive and an ethical manner.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Make a list of policies at your institution that your staff don’t like. For each one, ask yourself: Can I explain why this policy exists, and can I defend it honestly and coherently? If the answer to that question is no, consider discussing the list with the person to whom you report.
• Are there any policies at your employer with which you fundamentally disagree? Ask yourself what the prospects are for changing them. If the prospects for change are dim, how are you dealing with that?
• Try to explain an institutional policy with which you disagree in a way that communicates neither support for that policy nor objection to it. Can you do it?

In Part 1 of this series, we briefly discussed a simple visual matrix designed to help us stay focused on the boundaries that define both what’s practically feasible and what’s allowed in our organizations.

In Part 2, we compared management and leadership positions in the library to the meniscus in the human knee – a cartilaginous structure that is designed to accommodate pressure from above and pressure from below, by keeping the leg in alignment.

In this third and final installment in the series, we’ll talk a little more about the importance of alignment in library leadership, and why maintaining it is such an essential part of the library leader’s job – and what alignment has to do with political capital, the overarching theme of this series of articles. 

A middle manager in a library needs to make sure that he keeps himself in alignment with his organization’s administration. Both understanding and advancing the library’s priorities is an essential part of any management assignment, whether the person in question is managing three student employees or a multidepartmental library division. If you chair a department, you both represent the library’s leadership to your team, and your team to the library’s leadership. And most of the time, this results in more-or-less constant (but minor) adjustments of perspective as you do your best to stand in the shoes of your staff when representing their needs and desires upward to administration and to do the same for the administration when representing their priorities and direction downward to your staff. The goal is to represent both parties, in both directions, accurately and in good faith.

But in any library, there will be moments when the administration insists on a direction or an initiative that the manager’s staff opposes, and when the discussion ends and the manager has to make a choice: undermine the administration’s decision, or convey to his staff that they are expected to carry out the initiative and will be held accountable for doing so.

In this moment, the manager has three choices:

1.        Undermine the library’s leadership

2.        Support the leadership and work to bring his staff along

3.        Step down as a manager

Items #2 and #3 represent ethical options. Item #1 does not.

Why? Because accepting a salary to work for an institution creates an obligation to help the institution pursue its priorities and strategic directions – and (except in very unusual organizations) the manager’s role is to contribute to the shaping of those priorities and directions, but not ultimately to determine them. That responsibility rests with the library’s administration – which, itself, has an ethical obligation to do so as carefully and wisely as possible, taking into account the needs and desires and input of management and staff. But it’s very rare that those final decisions make all management and staff equally happy, and someone will almost always oppose them. If, after such a decision is made, a manager genuinely cannot in good conscience work to move the organization in the direction set by its administrators, then declining to continue as a manager is a perfectly ethical course of action (though of course one would hope that it doesn’t have to come to that). Deciding to stay in place and undermine the administration’s decision is not an ethical course of action, because it goes against one’s express duties as a manager.

In other words: ultimately, for a manager, “alignment” means keeping one’s area of stewardship in alignment with the institution for which he works.

Obviously these same principles apply in the same way to library directors. They sit in a “meniscus” position between the library as a whole and the college or university administration to which they report; they advocate upward on behalf of their staff and their organization, and they advocate downward on behalf of the institutional administration. And ultimately, their ethical obligation is to keep the library aligned with the needs and strategic directions of the host institution. But this is important not only from an ethical standpoint, but also from a strategic one: the more clearly and consistently a library director demonstrates her alignment with institutional priorities, and shows that her library is working effectively to move the institution in the direction of those priorities, the more political capital she will amass on behalf of the library – political capital that can be spent later on behalf of the library’s needs and the needs of its staff.

I realize that some readers may be bristling a bit at my assertion that a leader’s job is to advance the larger institution’s priorities. What if the leader believes the institution’s priorities are misplaced, or improperly focused, or morally lacking? In that case, can it really be true that the leader’s only ethical obligation is to quit? I admit that this issue is maybe a bit more complex than I’ve indicated above. Let’s talk more about it in Thursday’s subscribers-only article: “What Is the Place of ‘Loyal Opposition’ in an Academic Organization?.” 

Takeaways and Action Items

• An essential part of your job as a manager or leader is to advance (not undermine) the priorities of the organization for which you work.
• Conspicuously aligning your department, division, or library with the strategic directions of your organizational host will add to your “bank account” of political capital.
• Take a few moments to consider whether, in the past, you’ve found yourself in a position where you had to take a principled stand either against or in favor of an administrative direction. What principles guided you in taking that position? How did it work for you and your organization? In retrospect, is there anything you should have done differently?

A former vice president at my current university had a wise and insightful analogy that she used when referring to leaders in management positions: she said that such roles can be characterized as “meniscus positions” because, like the meniscus in the knee, they are subject to both downward pressure from above and upward pressure from below – and, as with the physical meniscus, the key to avoiding pain and maintaining integrity is to stay aligned.

What are these pressures, and what does “alignment” mean in this context? Let’s look at the first question first.

Every library leader has probably experienced the frustration that can come from feeling whipsawed between an administration that wants one thing (and believes it’s the leader’s job to represent the administration’s position to staff) and a staff that wants something different (and believes it’s the leader’s job to advocate on behalf of staff to the administration). This dynamic can arise both within the library organization and between the library and the university leadership. When the administration’s position and the staff’s position are in conflict, what is the leader’s obligation? 

In Part 1 of this multi-part discussion, I put forward a hypothetical situation: a library department wants to start offering remote work options to its staff, and the library administration invests significant time and energy in discussing the possibility – but then realizes that remote work isn’t allowed as a matter of institutional policy, and therefore isn’t an option for library employees. 

 Now let’s imagine what happens next.

The word is sent back to the library department that their remote work policy proposal has been rejected, because it contravenes university policy. The administration expects that this will end the discussion – after all, the library doesn’t have power to change university policy and doesn’t have authority to enact internal policies that go against it. But instead of simply dropping the issue, the department chair comes back to the administration and argues that the library should be acting as a campus leader in this regard – should be, at the very least, advocating for a policy change on behalf of the library’s employees, and maybe even should be engaging in some judicious institutional civil disobedience by simply allowing remote work. In the latter scenario, either the library’s action would fly under the institution’s radar (in which case, the manager feels, no harm done) or it would be noticed and would bring the issue to a head and hopefully result in institutional change.

This puts the library leadership in the position of having to make a very important and potentially difficult decision regarding political capital. And in order to think about this dilemma effectively, I need to clarify what I mean by “political capital.”

Political capital is, admittedly, a bit hard to define precisely. I would characterize it as a complex of things: goodwill between people who have an organizational relationship; obligation that arises from past exchanges of resources; and expectations that shape interactions between people and organizational units. The ebb and flow of political capital within an organization is shaped significantly by dependencies that bind individuals and units together and can also create friction between them. 

I also realize that the term “political capital” doesn’t sound good. It sounds cold and calculating and capitalist and cynical. I get that.

But here’s the thing: political capital is real, it is involved in every organizational interaction, and dealing with it is not optional. If you’re in a leadership position, you have only two choices: manage political capital in a conscious, strategic, and honest way, or accept the consequences of not managing it. 

In fact, managing political capital – both internally and externally – is one of the most fundamentally important roles of a library leader. A library director, for example, needs to think about it this way: virtually every interaction the director has with campus administration either banks political capital or draws on an existing fund of political capital. Examples of actions that will tend to add to the library’s fund of political capital might include:

• Undertaking (and successfully completing) a project on behalf of university administration
• Providing a service that makes a major university donor happy
• Allowing an important campus program or service to take up residence in the library, whether temporarily or permanently
• Publicly expressing support for a university priority or initiative

Actions that tend to draw down the library’s fund of political capital might include:

• Asking for a budget increase
• Saying “no” to any request from campus administration
• Proposing a change to campus policy
• Publicly objecting to official institutional positions or contradicting institutional statements

Now, a couple of things are very important to note here.

First, asking for virtually anything results in a drawdown of political capital, even if the request is unsuccessful. Simply asking for money, or proposing a change to campus policy, costs political capital.

Second, the library leader’s job is not to avoid drawing down political capital. The library leader’s job is to make those withdrawals wisely and strategically. Just because a course of action will involve an expenditure of political capital does not mean it’s an unwise course of action.

So let’s return to our scenario with the remote work proposal.

The director is now facing pressure from below to propose a policy change to the administration above; the existing policy creates pressure from above against such a change – and the director has to decide whether to resist the pressure from below (“Sorry, I’m not going to propose this policy change to administration”) or resist the pressure from above by pushing upward against it on behalf of the library staff.

What makes the calculus complex in this case is that the library director has a “bank account” of political capital not only with the university administration, but also with the library staff. To push for an institutional policy change (whether successfully or not) would draw down the balance of the former, while banking political capital with the latter – and vice versa. 

A selfish and ineffective leader will consider these funds of political capital in primarily personal terms: “Will it make my life easier if I bank political capital with the administration, or with my staff?”. A wiser leader will think in terms of the needs of the organization she serves and the staff she manages and will marshal the library’s political capital accordingly. Depending on circumstances, these considerations may lead to different strategic approaches. For example, the director may:

• calculate that the library’s existing fund of political capital is very deep at the moment, and that raising this issue on behalf of the staff is more likely to create a net benefit for both the library and the university than declining to do so;
• look back on recent months and see that there have been difficult moments that drew down the fund of institutional political capital, and respond to the internal manager that while this may be an issue worth raising in the future, it’s not a good idea now;
• look back on recent months and see that there have been difficult moments that drew down the fund of political capital with her staff, and decide that this is a particularly good moment to rebuild morale by advocating upwards on their behalf.

Of course, the director might also determine that regardless of what could possibly be done at the institutional level, remote work is just not a good idea in the context of the library organization, and respond accordingly to the manager. This response would result in an expenditure of internal political capital – but it may also be the right thing to do.

Because again: the library leader’s job is not to avoid any expense of political capital – it’s to make sure that political capital is both banked and expended wisely and strategically. 

Next week, in Part 3 of this series, we’ll dive a bit deeper into the issue of “alignment.”

Takeaways and Action Items

• If you’re in a leadership position, you have only two choices: manage political capital in a conscious, strategic, and honest way, or accept the consequences of not managing it.
• Every action you take as a library leader either banks or draws down your funds of political capital with both your host institution and the employees of library in which you lead.
• Take a few moments and consider what political capital looks like in your particular situation. Where is your “bank account” of political capital the strongest, and where might it need to be deepened? What can you do to deepen it where necessary – and does its depth in other areas offer you strategic options that you haven’t considered?

As library leaders, we’re constantly faced with decisions that require an understanding of the boundaries that separate what’s possible from what isn’t – that define both what’s feasible and what’s allowed. (There’s merit, of course, in thinking about when and how one should try to transgress both of those boundaries, but we’ll address that idea in a later post.) 

Here’s one of the most useful mental constructs I’ve found for thinking about the particular boundaries that define what is and isn’t allowed.

My staff have all gotten very used to – well, okay, maybe a little tired of – hearing me invoke the idea of “big circles and little circles.” In this model, concentric circles signify the scope of possible action. Understanding the parameters of these circles helps us avoid wasting time and energy debating options that aren’t actually on the table.

The construct is pretty simple, and for most of us it represents a principle that is intuitively obvious. Here’s how it looks:

What’s represented in this diagram is the simple fact that an institution’s practices are constrained by the law; a library’s practices are constrained by policies of the host institution; and individual library employees and organizational units are constrained by library policy. Each circle can move around within the next circle in the hierarchy, but doesn’t have authority to move outside the bounds of that next circle. In other words, while the library has significant room to make and adjust its own policies, it doesn’t have the power to enact policies that go against university policy – and doing so runs the risk of sanction.

So, for example:

Suppose a library department wants to extend a remote work option to its employees. The work of the department is such that doing it from home is reasonably practical, and there are lots of ways in which offering remote work would make life easier for the employees. The department head, finding that there is not currently a library policy regarding remote work, forwards a proposal to the library administration for consideration. 

The library administration considers the pros and cons of the remote work proposal. The leadership group can see both significant upsides and real potential downsides to the proposal. Debate over letting the department offer remote work unfolds over the course of two meetings and several days of group email exchanges – issues of workplace equity, procedural efficiency, and patron service are all discussed, as are considerations of employee morale and the complex impacts that the department’s proposal could have in all of those areas. The conversation becomes not only time-consuming but also a bit heated. Feelings are strong on both the pro and con sides, and because the issues are complex, it becomes clear that there isn’t going to be a way forward that makes everyone happy. 

Then one member of the administration puts her hand up and says “Wait. Is there a university policy regarding remote work?”. The group assigns someone to search the institutional policy library – and this person learns that, in fact, the university does not permit remote work except in unusual circumstances, which are tightly defined and do not include the circumstances at play in the library. With this, the group realizes that it could have spent its time and energy over the past few days on other issues rather than arguing the merits of a proposal that was outside the boundaries of the library’s authority to enact.

The principles at play here are, I suspect, pretty obvious to all readers: recognizing that libraries are subject to the policies of their host institutions isn’t exactly a deep insight into organizational dynamics. And yet I also suspect that any reader who has had experience as a manager or administrator is also thinking back to all the times that he or she had to discuss this very principle with one or more employees who wanted the library to enact a practice that contravened institutional policy, and who felt the library should “lead out” in this regard – or, at least, that the library leadership should advocate on behalf of their employees for a policy change to accommodate the proposed practice. And, of course, those employees may have been right.

To consider the more complicated dynamics of this situation, we have to think about the library leadership’s campus role in what we might call a “meniscus function.” And this brings us firmly into the realm of political capital, and its management.

We’ll dive more deeply into this topic in Thursday’s subscribers-only post.

I realize the title of this inaugural article might come across as a bit… I don’t know… vinegary? But I hope that by its end, the vibe you get will be more encouraging than that – so please read on.

I’m convinced that one of the most fundamental lessons a leader can learn – one that should be learned as early as possible, ideally prior to taking on one’s first leadership position – is that a big part of a leader’s job is to redirect the limelight away from him- or herself and towards the people s/he leads.

This is difficult, I admit. Let’s just acknowledge something right up front: the people most likely advance through the leadership ranks may not always be those who naturally shy away from the spotlight, and who hate being the center of attention. But even if you don’t feel a constant craving for attention and affirmation, there’s a good chance that you still don’t really mind those things – and I think it’s safe to say that giving credit to others and shifting positive attention to other members of one’s team may not come completely naturally to anyone.

Nothing is quite as demoralizing to an organization as a leader who acts as if the organization is an extension of his own ego. Don’t be that boss.

But here’s the thing: nothing is quite as demoralizing to an organization as a leader who acts as if the organization is an extension of his own ego. Having a boss who constantly needs affirmation is exhausting. Having a boss who hogs the spotlight is embarrassing. Having a boss who takes credit for the accomplishments of others is infuriating. Don’t be that boss.

Now, it’s easy to say that leadership is “not about you.” But what does that mean in practice? If you have a boss who really understands that it’s “not about her,” what does her leadership look like?

I was blessed to report for seven years to a library dean who exemplified this understanding, and who modeled its application beautifully. Here are several important things she did and didn’t do:

• She never bragged about her own accomplishments. I can’t think of a single time that she drew attention to her own achievements or took credit for the library’s successes – despite the fact that her achievements were significant and the library’s successes were many, and despite the fact that her leadership was a major contributor to those successes. 
• She never missed an opportunity to brag about other people’s accomplishments. Whenever someone noted the library’s outstanding physical facilities, collections, services, or reputation, she found ways to point out how the work and talents of others in the organization had made those things outstanding. And she actively sought out opportunities to praise members of her team – in specific ways that showed both her awareness and her understanding of their work – to people outside the library.
• She gave her team opportunities to share their accomplishments with each other. In monthly all-staff meetings, the last agenda item was always an open invitation for people to tell her, publicly, about the cool things they were working on or unusual achievements in their units. She would walk out into the audience to stand close by those who were talking, and expressed her appreciation sincerely. There was a double genius to this approach: for one thing, we all got to see her express appreciation to our colleagues in a public forum, which is always healthy. For another, this practice helped create a culture of openness about accomplishment within the organization, which was valuable in itself – and, also importantly, it raised our awareness of the great things that others in the library were accomplishing.

In connection with that last bullet point, there’s an insight from the realm of child development that I think has particular relevance to leadership: praising your child for something specific can be very helpful and positive, but he’s more likely to believe your praise when he overhears you praising him to someone else. Why? In part, because your child knows that you have a vested interest in making him feel good about himself. (He may even have noticed that you tend to exaggerate his virtues a little bit, especially when talking to him.) However, your child will generally assume that you tell the truth to other adults. If he hears you telling another adult that he’s a talented artist or really helpful with his siblings, he’s more likely to take it as a real and meaningful assessment of his qualities than if you just tell him those things directly.

In an organizational context, that principle works too: we take praise for our work more seriously when we overhear it being communicated to others. So finding opportunities to praise our team members in the presence of other team members can be especially powerful.

Now, I don’t claim for a moment to be as good at these things as my former boss is. But during the years I reported to her, I gained a deep appreciation for the importance of directing the spotlight of attention and appreciation away from myself and towards those I lead. I’m always trying to do that more consistently, and I’m always looking for better ways to do it.

Takeaways and Action Items

1.        The next time someone praises your library, respond by telling them about someone in the library other than you who does things to make it praiseworthy.

2.        The more you draw attention to the good work of others, the more it will reflect well on you as a leader. 

3.        Look for programmatic and structural ways to draw public attention to the work of under-recognized people in your library. 

4. Praise your people to others – sometimes in your people’s presence, and sometimes behind their backs.

This is a twice-weekly newsletter devoted to management and leadership in academic libraries, drawing on things I’ve learned over the course of a 30-year career – sometimes by making mistakes, sometimes by doing things that worked really well, and always by carefully watching the examples (both good and bad) of other managers and leaders. If you’re a supervisor, a manager, or an administrator in an academic library, Vision & Balance offers you the chance to learn things the easy way that I’ve learned the hard way.

The newsletter’s title and subtitle incorporate four important concepts:

Vision. To lead, you need to know where you want your organization to go – whether it’s a small work unit of two or three people, a department, a division, or a whole library. Determining your desired direction and figuring out how to move accordingly are essential elements of leadership. So are understanding the unique possibilities and limitations of doing so in the context of an academic library – which leads to the need for balance. 

Balance. Supervision, management, and leadership require difficult choices about how resources will be allocated and how competing needs will be negotiated. Maintaining a productive and appropriate balance between competing needs in a context of limited resources is one of the most fundamental duties of library leadership, at any organizational level.

Leading. In the context of this newsletter, “leading” refers to the work of both leadership and management: managing in the library entails leading and leading in the library entails management. While we’ll observe distinctions between the work of higher-level leadership and that of more operational management in the course of our discussions here, the words “leadership” and “leading” will often be used as umbrella terms for leadership, management, and supervision.

Academic libraries. This newsletter’s author, Rick Anderson, has over 30 years’ experience working in and around academic libraries, as a service provider, a manager, an administrator, and a dean or director. While Vision & Balance will regularly address issues common to many different kinds of libraries, the focus will be on his more specific area of expertise: issues of particular relevance to academic libraries.

Vision & Balance is published twice weekly: a briefer entry on Tuesdays (freely available to the public) and a longer entry on Thursdays (for paying subscribers).