Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

I fully realize that this entry in my eight-part series on what library leaders have to do is going to be a bit controversial — maybe the most controversial of the eight. So I’m going to explain as carefully as I can what I mean, while recognizing that it still may not be enough to ward off the controversy.

I’m familiar with the managerial philosophy that says “Take care of your employees, and they’ll take care of your customers.” And to be clear, by no means am I saying that library leaders shouldn’t take care of our employees — of course we should. Taking care of them is fundamental to our role as library leaders, and I’ll go further and say I agree that if we fail to take care of our people, it’s almost certainly going to hurt our ability to take care of our patrons. So by no means am I saying “taking care of your people isn’t important.”

What I am saying is that there will come times when, despite your best efforts to take care of your people, you will be faced with a choice between making your patrons happy and making your staff happy. And when that’s the unavoidable choice, your patrons need to come first.

For example, imagine that your library closes at 11:00 pm, and that your patrons, en masse, have asked you to stay open until midnight. Your employees don’t want to stay open that late. You and your leadership team do all necessary due diligence and come to the conclusion that it really would provide a significant benefit to your patrons to stay open later, that the additional cost can easily be borne, and that the only meaningful impediment to doing so is the feelings of the staff. In this case, you are genuinely stuck with a choice between making your staff happy and making your patrons happy. And in that case, your patrons should win.

Or imagine a situation in which patrons are faced with an unnecessarily complex and confusing online book-request system that was created by a team within your library, and the complaints are piling up. Again, you do all necessary due diligence, and you determine that the system can be changed in ways that will inconvenience staff in the short run and will require adjustment of workflows with which they’ve become very comfortable over the years — but that will benefit patrons significantly. In that case, the patrons should win.

Maybe all of this seems obvious. After all, we who work in the library are being paid to be there for the purpose of helping patrons; our patrons, on the other hand, are paying (even if indirectly) for the services we provide, so obviously we should expect to be the ones who adapt to them, not vice versa. So “the patron’s happiness comes first” is baked into our expectations, right? Right?

Eh. Not always.

One aspect of library culture that can complicate this relationship is the educational nature of our mission. Consciousness of our educational mission can work against our desire to make life easier for patrons — in fact, some of our people (not most, but some) will respond negatively to just about any suggestion that we make life easier for library users, arguing that it’s “not our job to spoon-feed patrons” and that “they need to learn for themselves how to use these resources and services.” Most of those who feel that way are operating in good faith — they genuinely don’t want to undermine the library’s educational function. They want to teach a student to fish rather than just give the student a fish, and obviously, that’s not a bad thing. But a few (not many, but a few) just may not want to do the work necessary to make life easier for patrons, and hide behind the educational-mission argument to camouflage their laziness. And also, sometimes you just need to give the patron a dang fish. Every interaction with the library’s services should not have to be an educational experience.

Another thing that can get in the way of putting patrons first is that as a library leader, you don’t have to deal all day, every day with an unhappy patron. An unhappy patron might make your life miserable for a few minutes, but then they usually go away. Not so an unhappy employee — so as a leader, there’s always the temptation to sacrifice patron morale to staff morale and thus make your own life happier in the organization.

The problem, of course, is that as a leader your job is not to figure out how to make your life easier in your library. Your job is to figure out how best to help your library fulfill its mission. And its mission isn’t to make life easier for you (and your employees); it’s to take the sweat and time of you and your employees and turn that labor into good outcomes for the library’s patrons and host institution.

Again: is this principle pretty obvious? Yes.

Is helping people understand, remember, and apply this principle nevertheless a significant part of what a library leader has to do, repeatedly, day in and day out? Also yes.

The third entry in my “Eight Things Every Library Leader Needs to Do” series is not so much a thing we need to do as a reality we need to accept.

Let me explain where I’m coming from on this.

It’s a common and completely natural human tendency for library leaders to assume that when we’re making decisions – especially high-stakes ones that have serious implications for our organizations and services – our goal is to make decisions that lead to good outcomes and avoid decisions that will lead to bad outcomes. And of course that really is our goal. Problems arise, though, when we have unreasonable expectations about the degree to which problems and unforeseen outcomes are avoidable no matter how careful and well-informed our decision-making.

What separates a good decision from a bad one is not that good decisions prevent undesired and unintended outcomes; it’s that good decisions get us closer to our desired outcomes and result in fewer (and less severe) undesired consequences than bad decisions do. And they position us better to address the undesired outcomes that do arise.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine that you and your leadership team are looking for a way to better recognize outstanding service on the part of library staff. One of your team members raises a hand and says: “At the last library I worked at, we had an award system in place whereby a staff member could nominate another staff member who had done something outstanding. If leadership agreed, the nominee would get a small plaque and a cash award.”

As the library’s leader, you will likely have two immediate responses to a suggestion like that:

1. “I like the idea of instituting some kind of formal recognition for outstanding staff performance.”
2. “If we decide to institute this program, we’ll need to make sure we do it in a way that ensures the award criteria are appropriate and are applied fairly and consistently.”

Following both of those lines of thought, you may then start on a course of due diligence, maybe pulling together a small task force of people to draft a policy-and-procedure structure to help ensure that this award program will accomplish the desired goals (motivating staff, encouraging them to see the best in each other’s work, offering concrete rewards for outstanding performance, etc.) while avoiding creating bad outcomes (discouraging some employees who feel the system is stacked against them, engendering cynicism among employees who sense favoritism baked into the process, etc.).

Here’s the thing, though: not only will your efforts fall short of preventing all the predictable negative outcomes, they will also fail to anticipate all possible negative outcomes. To the former point: you can make less likely, but you cannot prevent, people misinterpreting the purpose of your program or finding ways to manipulate it. To the latter point: no matter how perfectly you design the program, it will produce at least some outcomes that are not desired. Someone will see an award given to a colleague whom she blames (perhaps correctly) for serious problems in their department; someone else will feel unrecognized for work that is at least as good as that of someone who got the award; and so forth.

Careful, well-informed decision-making might make these and any other, similar bad outcomes less likely – but it will not prevent them, nor will you be able to anticipate and control for all possible bad outcomes. In other words, a good decision is not one that forestalls all possible bad outcomes, and bad outcomes do not necessarily show that a decision was the wrong one.

My purpose in pointing this out is not to make you, the reader, feel discouraged about the value of careful decision-making. It’s to reassure you, when negative outcomes emerge despite your best efforts, that the problem is probably not you. The problem is the complexity of human organizations and the vagaries of the human heart. Your due diligence does make a difference – if you weren’t engaging in it, your outcomes would be much worse. My message here (believe it or not) is intended to be encouraging: negative outcomes do not necessarily reflect a failure of strategy or preparation on your part.

One of the many difficult balancing acts that library leaders must perform is that of, on the one hand, being careful to do one’s due diligence before making decisions, and also, on the other hand, not getting too discouraged or freaked out when due diligence doesn’t fully prevent bad outcomes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are many ways to be an ineffective leader. One of the most destructive is to ignore the wishes, input, and feelings of the people you lead, and simply push forward your own personal agenda by brute force. Most (though not all) library leaders recognize intuitively that this is no way to lead.

Unfortunately, though, some leaders who recognize that brute force is no way to lead assume that a better way is to try to achieve consensus within the organization before moving forward with a decision or initiative. This is actually foolish, and can be equally destructive.

Why? Isn’t it a good thing to seek broad input and take everyone’s perspective into account before making organizational decision?

The short answer is yes: seeking broad input and taking it into account is not only good, but often essential.

The longer, and more correct, answer is that while seeking broad input is good and important, the input you get (no matter how broad and no matter how carefully gathered and considered) is unlikely, by itself, to lead you to the best decision.

There are two reasons for this.

First, you’ll never achieve real consensus in a large and complex organization – there are just too many competing views, needs, and perspectives. A strategy or policy that makes sense to the collections team will pose serious problems for the catalogers; a service posture desired by the team staffing a reference desk will create frustration for the circulation manager. And you’ll never get everyone to agree on what the library’s service hours should be, or which spaces should be quiet and which ones collaborative.

So if achieving true consensus isn’t an option, maybe an effective leader should instead gather broad input and get a sense of the organization’s majority view and desires, letting the majority view guide the decision. But this leads to the second problem:

The majority view will not necessarily be the correct view. This may seem like a controversial statement, but bear with me. To illustrate, let’s take a political example: in 2020, Joe Biden was elected president of the United States by a majority of American voters. In 2024, Donald Trump was elected president by a majority of American voters. Even without knowing what your political views are, I can be pretty certain that you regard at least one of those elections to have reflected an incorrect view held by the majority of American voters. Similarly, majoritarian views within an organization are important to elicit and know, but you can’t safely assume that they will always point your organization in the right direction. 

In other words, your job as a leader is not simply to carry out the wishes of your organization; that’s not leadership. Your job is to ensure that your organization is serving those it exists to serve as effectively as possible. This means not only listening to and taking seriously the wishes of the people who work for you – it also, very often, means guiding them in directions that some or even many of them may not fully agree with. Exercising the judgment necessary to decide when to give your organization its way and when to push against it is one of the most difficult, but also one of the most essential, tasks of library leadership.

The other day we discussed the vital importance of communicating too much.

Next in the eight-part series of Things Every Library Leader Has to Do is another essential one: document, document, document.

When we talk about the importance of documentation, most often we’re talking about it in the context of progressive discipline: you have an employee who is consistently failing to perform, or who is actively causing problems for the organization, or who is making life miserable for everyone else. Finally the employee’s supervisor has had enough, and comes to you saying “Today was the final straw. We have to fire Steve.”

Only you go back to the employee’s annual reviews for the past five years, and lo and behold — all of them say that he’s a star.

You bring these to the supervisor’s attention, and he says “OK, he performs his job tasks fine, but he’s abusive to everyone around him. No one will serve on a committee with him; people call in sick on the day of department meetings so they won’t have to be in the same room with him; every patron he interacts with goes away in tears.”

“Has any of this been documented?”, you ask the supervisor, who visibly deflates in front of you. “No,” he says.

The problem here is obvious: if you haven’t documented bad behavior or poor performance, it’s really hard to fire or even sanction someone for bad behavior or poor performance. They can submit a grievance on the basis that their sanction was based on hearsay, and they’ll probably win. Then you have an even bigger problem.

But anyone who has been a supervisor or manager knows all of this. The question is: what other things do you need to make sure you document, as a leader? Let me offer three big ones:

• Policies. Again, this may seem obvious, but you might be surprised how many libraries fail consistently to apply a rigorous and systematic approach to policy formation and management, instead relying on tradition and word of mouth to communicate the rules of the organization. This will create huge problems for you, for reasons I’ve outlined previously in these pages.
• Conversations. Not all conversations, obviously — in fact, as a library leader you will have some conversations that it would be very unwise to document, as the documentation could become discoverable in the event of a legal action. But in some cases, it’s essential to document conversations, and there are two particularly good ways of doing that: first, email. I’m always happy to entertain questions or comments from people who pop by my office, but if our conversation looks like it’s going to turn substantive and/or will need to involve others I usually ask them to send me an email that I can use to pull others into the discussion. This also allows me to keep an automatic record of what we discussed and decided — which, for me at least, is essential because my memory is incredibly unreliable. Email has saved my life more times than I can relate, because it has allowed me to go back later and retrace the steps of an essential conversation. Second, contemporaneous notes. If you’ve had a difficult meeting with someone, write a summary of the meeting immediately after it ends. Date and file your summary, and keep it safe. In the event of a negative action in the future, contemporaneous notes carry a lot of evidentiary weight — and they also serve as an annex of your own memory.
• Action items. Virtually every time you meet with your leadership team, members of the group will come away with assignments of some kind. Keep careful track of those assignments and follow up on them at the next meeting. “Review of Action Items” is the first agenda item for each of my leadership meetings. We make clear that “Pending” or “Still in process” are both fully legitimate responses when asked whether an action item has been completed — the important thing is to keep track of them and know when they’ve been accomplished.

What’s another major area of essential documentation for leaders, based on your experience? Share in the comments.

As some readers may have noticed, the basic sales pitch for this newsletter has always been “this is your chance to learn the easy way a bunch of things I learned the hard way.”

In that spirit, over the next few weeks I’m going to share eight very specific things that I’ve learned the hard way over the course of my career as an academic library leader. Some take the form of brief aphorisms, some describe a particular organizational posture, some may sound kind of like philosophical observations. I hope all of them will be useful.

My original plan was to share four of them today, and four more in my next post. But by the time I had said everything that I felt needed to be said about Point #1, I realized that each point will likely need its own post. So let’s start that way and see how it goes.

Point #1: Err on the Side of Too Much Communication

Effective communication is essential for library leaders. Blah blah blah, everyone knows that. However, not every leader who understands that principle intellectually has actually internalized it, and among those who have internalized it, not all have operationalized it. I won’t go so far as to say that you can’t communicate too much — you absolutely can, and by doing so you can drive your staff completely insane. However, in my experience it’s very rare for a library leader to make the mistake of communicating too much. Instead, most err on the side of communicating too little, by which I mean both too infrequently and in insufficient depth.

Let me share a quick example.

Earlier in my career, I served on the leadership team of a research library dean who was feeling frustrated that people in the library didn’t seem to understand an important element of the dean’s vision.

“You can’t just assume they’re understanding your vision,” we said to this person. “You’re going to have to say it explicitly.”

“But I have said it explicitly!,” the dean objected.

The rest of us looked at each other, then at the dean, and said “Yes, but you’re going to have to say it over and over, more times than you think should be necessary. You can’t assume that just because you’ve said it, everyone has fully understood or even heard it.”

I’ve seen this principle borne out over and over again over the course of my subsequent career: in particular, I’ve regularly had the experience of saying something to my team or to an individual in the library or to a department or division and had people respond as if hearing it for the first time — despite the fact that I had said that thing (it seemed to me, at least) over and over and over already.

This isn’t anyone’s fault; it’s just how human brains work. We not only listen selectively, but we hear selectively, according to patterns of perception that are not always systematic or rational. If you want everyone in your organization to hear something, you’re going to have to say it over and over. Accept that early in your leadership career and you’ll be happier.

But that only addresses one dimension of erring on the side of communicating more. Other dimensions include:

• Say important things in both large groups and small ones, and to individuals
• Explicitly ask people to serve as vectors of communication for you: “Hey, I know you really get what we’re trying to do with professional development in this library. Whenever you can, would you try help others understand it too?”
• Communicate through multiple platforms and fora: share information in a public meeting, then share the same information in an organization-wide email, then put it in the library newsletter, then bring it up again in a relevant committee meeting.
• We’ll talk more about the importance of documentation in another post, but it bears saying here as well: Share information in places where it can be referenced later.
• Follow up to ensure understanding. (Just because they heard what you said doesn’t mean they know what you meant.)

What other principles have you found to be important when it comes to leadership and communication? Please share in the comments.

Vision & Balance is taking a fall break this week (October 21 & 23).

See you next Tuesday!

As regular readers know, a recurring feature of Vision & Balance is an occasional post on the theme “Two and a Half Cheers for…”. In these posts I discuss leadership and organizational practices and principles that are often denigrated but that, despite their possible downsides, perhaps deserve more respect than they get. Past installments have address issues like publish-or-perish culture, meetings, and the “scarcity mindset.”

This time I wanted to discuss a topic that probably doesn’t deserve a full two and a half cheers. But — hear me out — I think it may rise to the level of one and a half.

The topic today is micromanagement. And before I offer my thoroughly half-hearted cheer for that much-maligned approach to management, let me offer some full-throated caveats:

To be clear: micromanagement itself is not actually a good thing. Leaders and managers who are constantly breathing down their employees’ necks, who don’t give them a reasonable amount of space in which to figure out their work and determine the best ways to carry it out, who get elbow-deep in unit-level or even individual workflows, and want to review every purchasing decision are not being effective leaders, and are driving their employees crazy.

The thing is, “micromanagement” can be very much in the eye of the beholder, and just about everyone gets it wrong sometimes.

On the one hand, there are some employees for whom virtually any management feels like micromanagement. Sometimes they’re self-conscious and don’t like the feeling that their work is being watched. Sometimes they’re deeply invested in particular ways of doing things and treat any kind of supervisory guidance as the threat to their preferred workflows that, of course, it really can be (and sometimes absolutely should be). And sometimes — very occasionally — they just don’t fully understand that they’re employees of an organization rather than independent agents and can’t figure out why someone else thinks they can tell them what to do.

On the other hand, some leaders and managers are so afraid of being seen as micromanagers that they hang back and give their staff so much space that the staff are left really wishing they were managed more closely (or at least got more attention) from their leaders. Often these leaders have heard so many complaints about micromanagers and are so anxious about being disliked or bring seen as meddlers that they shy away from the real work of management.

My guess is that many people reading this post have had at least one experience of both a too-distant manager and a genuinely crazy-making micromanager.

And of course there’s at least one other fairly common scenario: leaders who use the avoidance of micromanagement as a convenient excuse to shirk their real duties as leaders. Not wanting to put in the hard work of understanding what their people do, or not being willing to risk conflict, they decline to do some of the most important work of leadership and rationalize it as being “big picture” leaders or having a “hands-off” management style.

So when it comes right down to it, maybe it’s not so much that micromanagement itself really deserves any cheers at all — it’s more that avoiding micromanagement can lead to problems just easily as micromanagement can.

This topic is a bit uncomfortable to write about — partly because it can sound like privileged whining (“Being a leader is so hard! People are so mean!”), and partly because it can be embarrassing to confess that, as a leader, one might actually be subject to bullying by the people one is supposed to be leading. But I’ve seen it happen too often to too many people for it to continue going unaddressed — despite the discomfort that might come with discussing it.

When I was new in a leadership position some years ago, my assistant at the time – who had previously worked in a similar position in a very different campus organization – made an interesting comment in passing. “I’ve been really surprised,” she said, “by the things people in the library are willing to say to their bosses.”
 
Why would she be surprised? Because the things she had witnessed being said to bosses by their subordinates would, in virtually any other workplace, have gotten them fired.

Why were those things not getting these library employees fired? There are several reasons, including:

• A pervasive campus culture that valorizes “speaking truth to power” (and tends to assume that anything critical said “to power” must be truth)
• The cultural difficulty of defending oneself when one is in a position of hierarchical authority
• The difficulty of firing anyone – especially faculty – in academia

But let’s be clear here: insubordination is not the same thing as bullying. Bullying from below is not: questioning a leader’s decisions (either publicly or privately), raising concerns (legitimate or not) about policy or practice, or otherwise delivering criticism in either an appropriate or an inappropriate way. Failures of civility or collegiality, while never okay, are not in themselves the same thing as bullying. Everyone loses their cool sometimes; bullying from below is more than that.

Here’s how I define bullying from below: any attempt to get one’s way through intimidation, threats, or simply making the leader’s life as miserable as possible. In extreme cases it can be disconnected from any strategic or purposeful goal and simply be an attempt to harm the leader, often because the leader has done something (or holds views) seen by the bully as objectionable. Purely malicious bullying of this latter type is relatively rare, though I have seen it happen; more common is strategic or instrumental bullying designed to achieve an organizational or personal objective.
 
So what does bullying from below look like in real life? Here are a few examples (you, my readers, will surely be able to contribute more if you’ve worked in libraries long enough):

• I have seen a leader who was unwilling to assert their authority over the budget because they had been so effectively browbeaten by a subordinate financial officer who was deeply invested in the way things had been done in the past and wanted to preserve their power over budget management.

• I once saw a librarian repeatedly attack a leader in various public forums and finally bring a formal complaint against the leader, subjecting them to a long process of investigation (that ultimately resulted in a finding against the librarian who brought the complaint).

• I have seen a leader’s personal property destructively vandalized by an unhappy line librarian.

• I’m aware of a situation in which an HR administrator had to be escorted to her car in the parking lot because she had been terrorized (screamed at, threatened) by a librarian in her organization.

• I once watched an executive-level university administrator subjected to repeated hostile questions from a librarian in a public forum — the librarian monopolizing meeting time by repeating variations on the same question over and over, and consistently interrupting the administrator when they tried to respond.

In none of those situations was the bully subjected to discipline.

I’d like to suggest that failing to respond fairly but firmly to bullying behavior — whether the bully is “punching down” or “punching up” — represents a failure of leadership. When a leader or manager becomes aware of such behavior, the best course of action is neither to ignore it nor to “bully back” (yelling at or browbeating or threatening the bully of the first instance) but rather to counsel immediately with the HR manager and determine next steps. What these steps are will, of course, vary by situation — but the response to bullying behavior must be, from the very beginning, carefully planned and carried out according to library and university policy.

Now, I anticipate a few possible objections to what I’ve written here. Let me channel those, and offer my responses:

Objection #1: Insisting on “civility” and “collegiality” benefits the privileged and is just a tool to preserve existing structures of power.

Response: Civility and collegiality (also sometimes called “professionalism”) should be a baseline expectation for all library employees, at all levels. No one should be treated with contempt, no one should be steamrolled, no one should be attacked. This expectation, this norm, protects people in subordinate positions at least as much as it does those in leadership positions, and should be applied consistently across the organization. Does this mean that the concept of “collegiality” can’t be weaponized by the more-powerful against the less-powerful? Of course it can. (This will be the topic of my next Two and a Half Cheers For… post.) But virtually all legitimate policies and expectations can, in theory, be weaponized by the powerful against the less-powerful. This does not make those policies or expectations less legitimate; it underscores the importance of ethical management and leadership.

Objection #2: Library leaders are paid relatively large salaries for a reason; one of them is because their jobs expose them to criticism. Instead of whining about “bullying,” they need to develop a thicker skin.

Response: There’s no question that a library leader needs to have a thick skin in order to thrive in his or her position. You need a thick skin because you’re going to be subject to a lot of criticism. “Criticism” and “bullying” are not the same thing. Having a thick skin does not mean overlooking unprofessional and inappropriate conduct.

Objection #3: Give me a break. Someone with less power can’t “bully” someone with more power.

Response: Power is contextual, and there are significant ways in which leaders are relatively powerless. For one thing, pushing back against a bully-from-below — or responding with anything other than quiet submission — can, sometimes, all too easily be seen (and characterized) as retaliation, or as an abuse of power. (Paradoxically, this puts the leader in a less powerful position — in this context — than the subordinate who can speak much more freely without fear of appearing abusive.) For another thing, not all power is organizational power. Someone who is willing to behave in an inappropriate and abusive way has power over someone who feels more constrained by social or professional norms, regardless of where they stand in the organizational hierarchy. Academic organizations, including libraries, tend not to deal very effectively with people who do not feel bound by norms of behavior, especially if those people have successfully gained tenure.

I’m sure there are questions or objections that I haven’t anticipated. Share them in the comments!

So far we’ve talked about why dependability itself is a crucial element of library leadership, and about three specific manifestations of dependability: institutional alignment (being consistently and conspicuously dedicated to supporting the mission and goals of the library’s sponsoring institution), consistency (applying principles in a consistent way across situations), and reliability (being someone upon whom both the campus administration and the people you lead can count on to do the right thing).

The last element of dependability I want to address is backbone. Here I’m defining backbone as both the capacity and the willingness to resist pressure to bend when bending would not be appropriate. Backbone is related to consistency and reliability in that backbone is the element of character that makes those qualities possible. In other words, when you are consistent and reliable as a leader, you are demonstrating that you have backbone. Because dealing with difficult people and situations is a big part of leadership, showing backbone as a leader means withstanding pressure from people with strong personalities, showing willingness to to have difficult conversations, and being willing and able to advance wise but unpopular initiatives.

To illustrate the importance and the application of backbone, let’s try a thought experiment.

Imagine that you are not in a leadership position. You’re a frontline library staff or faculty employee, and you have proposed a change in policy to your library director. This change would, in your view, make important and very salutary changes to the way your department does its work and serves patrons, and you have convinced your director that this is the case and secured her promise of support for the change. However, you know that one of your colleagues (someone notorious for his overbearing manner) opposes the change — and shortly after your conversation with the director, you see that colleague going into her office.

What thoughts are going through your head in that moment?

It depends very much on what kind of library director you have. If, in your experience, she has shown a consistent pattern of staying on a wise course even when people are trying to push her off of it, and if she has shown herself reliable in following through on commitments she has made to her employees, you’re probably feeling relatively calm and confident as you watch your colleague enter her office. If, on the other hand, your experience has been that your director would rather disappoint an employee who is not present than the person who happens to be in front of her at the moment , or that she is more easily swayed by passionate advocacy than by dispassionate analysis, or that she tends to be intimidated by people with strong personalities, then you’re probably watching with much more trepidation.

Now, the example I’ve used here is deliberately complicated — because while backbone is a virtue, like most virtues it can sometimes metastasize into a vice — in this case, the vice of inflexibility. Here, once again, is one of those dimensions in which leaders are required to strike a very difficult balance: you have to be strong, but you also have to be willing to recognize when you’re going in the wrong direction and change, even if it’s embarrassing or means disappointing someone. Doing so, rather than giving in to inertia or embarrassment, also demonstrates backbone — or, as we more commonly call it in this kind of situation, character.

The library director who has made a commitment to one employee without first doing all appropriate due diligence may later find herself talking to another employee who offers important countervailing information and conclude that she needs to change course. In this situation, she would demonstrate backbone by stepping back, making a concerted effort to get whatever additional information is needed, and then making a principled decision as to whether to continue forward or change course. In this case, backbone isn’t demonstrated by simply staying the course — it’s demonstrated by acknowledging the possibility that your original decision was hasty and less than fully informed, doing the work of becoming better informed, and then making what you believe to be the best decision on the merits rather than letting your course be determined by a desire not to offend or disappoint one party or the other.

However, when a director is confident that she’s made the right decision based on good information, and she is now faced with an employee (or patron) who passionately opposes that decision and is trying to get his way through intimidation or performative outrage rather than real argumentation, then standing up to that employee is the right way to show backbone.

Of course, this is only one example of how a good leader can show backbone, but it’s a relatively common one. Those who are new to library leadership may be surprised by how often people try to bully them — including people who report to them, and who might normally be expected to show deference.

Dealing with “bullying from below” will be the topic of my next post.