Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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?”

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?