Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

In my last post I addressed the essential quality of consistency for academic library leaders. Someone looking at the title of today’s post might reasonably ask: “Isn’t reliability just a synonym for consistency (and, for that matter, dependability)?” And the answer is: “Almost, but not quite.” Certainly a leader who is reliable will be consistent (and dependable), but a leader who is consistent may or may not be reliable in the ways that matter most.

Confused yet? I might be too, but I don’t think I am. Let me try to unpack this distinction and explain why I think it matters — and why reliability deserves its own, separate discussion.

Consistency is, most basically, the quality of doing the same things in the same way over time. For library leaders, consistency is manifested — in a good way — when they apply rules and policies the same way to everyone, when they don’t let their shifting moods guide their decision-making, etc. But the fact is that consistent leaders can be bad leaders, and their consistency can contribute to their failings if what they are consistent at doing are bad things, or good things in the wrong way.

Consistency, in other words, is essentially value-neutral. A leader can be consistently unfair or consistently fair; a leader can be consistently volatile, or consistently calm and measured. My post on the importance of consistency focused on the salutary manifestations of consistency among leaders, but consistency doesn’t have to be positive.

It seems to me that reliability, on the other hand, carries more of a normative vibe: a leader who can be relied upon is more than just a leader whose behavior can be predicted.

Library employees absolutely crave leaders who are reliable. Managers need to know that, for example, when they carry out a directive from library leadership and someone in their managerial downline gets upset and goes over their head to the library’s leadership, the leadership will back them up rather than cave to the pressure of an unhappy employee. Managers who don’t have that confidence in the library’s leader will not only be very reluctant to carry out policies and directives that they expect will be unpopular, but they will also constantly feel trapped between the library’s expressed, formal rules and the unexpressed, real-world rules that undermine them.

And it’s not just managers. Let’s consider another situation: imagine a library staff employee who works at a service desk, and has made a patron angry by enforcing a rule that says you can’t renew a book more than three times when other patrons are waiting to check it out. If the patron threatens to bring his complaint to the library director, that staffer needs to be able to count on her leader to back her up. If she has reason to believe that the director will buckle under an onslaught of vituperative complaint from the patron, she won’t have the confidence to enforce the rule. Worse, she won’t know which rules she can confidently apply and which ones she can’t.

Now, this does bring up an important caveat. As a library leader, there may in reality be times when you genuinely do need to override a library employee’s decision. How do you do that without undermining their sense of you as someone they can count on?

I’ll propose two answers to that question:

First, it comes down to principle. Earlier this year I discussed the issue of making exceptions, and proposed a question that should always be asked when you or your team are contemplating making an exception to a rule or policy: What clear and fair principle would we be applying in a consistent way if we were to decide to grant this exception? If you find yourself feeling the need to override the decision of someone in your library, a slight variation on that question would be helpful: What clear and fair principle am I applying in a consistent way in deciding to override my employee’s decision or action? If you can answer that question, you’re ready to have a fruitful and constructive conversation with the employee whose decision you overrode. Of course, they may or may not accept your explanation, which leads to the second answer:

You will never be able to make everyone feel like they can rely on you. The reality is that some people will feel like you’re unreliable because your decisions don’t go their way, or because your priorities aren’t their priorities. This is one of those areas of leadership in which it’s essential to manage a pretty difficult balance: you need to care what your people feel, but you can’t let your decision-making be driven by how they feel.

Figuring out that balance is the work of a lifetime.

In the second installment in this series, I talked about the need for academic leadership to have confidence in the library leader’s full alignment with the institutional mission, pointing out the paradox that the more confidence the institution has in the library’s alignment, the more freedom the library is likely to have for independent movement — whereas the less confidence campus administrators have in the library’s alignment, the tighter the oversight the administration is likely to impose.

For this entry, I want to talk about a more internal issue: consistency. It’s important to understand that for library leaders, applying the principle of consistency doesn’t mean always doing the same thing — it means applying sound organizational principles in a consistent way.

Think about experiences you’ve had in libraries led by managers or administrators who were inconsistent in their application of organizational principles. This can take any number of forms. For example, a leader might:

• say that hiring and promotion decisions are always made according to the merits of the applicants (that’s a principle), but then give clear preference to people they like or who fit particular non-job-specific criteria;
• apply policies more loosely for members of the library administration than for other managers or line employees;
• set travel criteria designed to distribute funds fairly across the library, but routinely make exceptions for favored employees or for those who make a fuss;
• apply policies and guidelines differently based on his or her mood.

Chances are good that as you read through that brief list of hypothetical situations, you nodded grimly to yourself — many, probably most, of us have had leaders at one time or another who demonstrated this kind of inconsistency. Think about how that affected you as an employee, and also about how it led you to think about your leader. It was frustrating for you, certainly, and for others in the organization – after all, even if a leader’s inconsistency benefits you today, you can’t assume it won’t hurt you tomorrow. In the short run, some employees may be delighted by a particular manifestation of leaderly inconsistency, but even they know that in the long run it’s going to make life harder. 

But those being led are not the only ones who ultimately end up being affected negatively by the inconsistency of a leader. The leader him- or herself will suffer as well, because he or she will lose credibility, and therefore effectiveness. To put it briefly and bluntly, people won’t follow someone they can’t trust. They may submit to specific directives, and they may refrain from criticizing the leader to his or her face, but it will be very difficult to get them on board with proposed changes in strategy or vision, or even to get them consistently to follow policy, if they don’t have reason to believe that the strategy is going to persist or that the policies are real. Employees don’t trust leaders because it’s their job to trust them; employees trust leaders who demonstrate trustworthiness. The leader’s moral authority depends, fundamentally, on demonstrating a consistent commitment to principled leadership.

So what does that look like in practice? Let’s take the negative examples I listed above and try turning them into positive ones. A consistent leader will:

• be very careful not to let either irritation or delight affect the way he or she applies policies to individuals or library units;
• apply hiring and promotion criteria to all job or promotion candidates in a dispassionate way, according to clear and established criteria, resisting the temptation to put a thumb on the scale because of personal preferences or relationships;
• follow all library policies and ensure that his or her leadership team does the same (recognizing that in some cases, a policy might actually be different for administrators than it is for line employees);
• take care to ensure that budgets are distributed across the library in ways that reflect both clearly expressed library priorities and established allocation criteria, never giving preference to an individual or unit for reasons not provided for in policy.

Library leaders who demonstrate consistency in these and other ways will find that it pays huge dividends in their organization. Not everyone will like the decisions the leader makes (and no one will like all the decisions a leader makes), and not everyone will even like the leader on a personal level. But leaders who are consistent will find that their people do trust them — and for a library leader, having people’s trust is more important than having their affection.

Next week we’ll tackle the characteristic of reliability — which is closely related to consistency, but is different in some important ways.

In my last post I introduced a five-part series on the crucial quality of dependability for academic library leaders, promising to explore it in four different dimensions. The first of those four that I want to address is the dimension of institutional alignment (about which I’ve written a couple of times already, and will almost certainly will do so again in the future because it’s so fundamentally important).

Usually when we think about leaders being dependable, we think in bottom-up terms — about whether the people being led can have confidence in their leader. That’s an essential dimension of dependability, and in fact that dimension will be the focus of three of these four discussions. But for this first one, we’re looking at dependability from the top down: in other words, the degree to which those to whom the library leader reports can have confidence in him or her.

In order for an academic library leader to be effective — in order not only to keep the library in the institution’s good graces, but also to advocate effectively upwards on behalf of the library team — the college or university administration has to know several things about him or her, including that s/he:

• both understands and supports the larger institutional mission,
• is fostering understanding of and support for that mission within the library’s faculty and/or staff,
• is communicating institutional messages clearly and supportively to the faculty/staff, and
• is using allocated resources in a manner that reflects both understanding of and support for the mission.

There’s a bit of a paradox at work here: the more confidence the institutional administration has in the library leader’s consistent, dependable mission alignment, the more freedom and autonomy the library will have to pursue its own agenda; conversely, the less confidence the administration has in the library leader’s alignment, the more granular oversight it is liable to impose on the library’s day-to-day work — and the greater the risk that the library will eventually lose support (including funding and possibly worse).

Now, I want to be clear: this kind of dependability does not — or should not — entail brain-dead acquiescence to every administrative idea or initiative. Academic library leaders are, typically, also campus leaders, and have a voice in the running of the college or university as a whole. Often, this takes the form of membership in a council of deans or similar leadership cohort. In that role the library leader is expected to speak up and contribute, including raising a voice of concern or critical analysis as needed. But obviously, there is a very big difference between expressing a voice of concern over a proposed program or project and undermining the mission of the institution. The former is part of the library leader’s job; the latter is exactly the opposite of the library leader’s job.

I should also point out that being mission-aligned does not mean never being frustrated with particular administrative actions or postures, or defending actions that you don’t believe you can defend in good faith. Good leaders are authentic, and sometimes they have to say to their people “Look, I can see why you’re frustrated by this new policy. I raised concerns about it myself. But many different perspectives from around campus were taken into account, and now the decision has been made. It’s now our job to move forward and support it.”

Of course, there could arise campus initiatives, policies, or programs that the library leader feels he or she genuinely can’t support in good faith. That puts the leader in a genuinely difficult position. Depending on the importance of the issue involved, and the degree to which it goes to a genuine moral conflict between the individual and the institution, the leader may find him- or herself in a situation where a choice has to be made between undermining the institution and staying true to the individual’s moral compass. Luckily, such choices arise relatively rarely in the context of library work — but they can arise, and each leader needs to know where that line is, and what he or he would do when forced to confront it. There may arise a case in which the leader feels that his or her only morally acceptable path is to resign.

But that’s a grim place at which to end this post. The next ones will address more positive scenarios.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the quality of dependability, about various ways it does and doesn’t manifest itself in library leaders, why it’s important, and how leaders can demonstrate it. I’ve decided to produce five(!) posts on this topic, starting with this overview, and then proceeding to examine four particular manifestations of dependability, each getting its own post.

Let’s start by thinking about what it means to be dependable, and why dependability is so important for leaders.

I realize that this may seem like an obvious, even tautological point, one that hardly needs to be belabored in even a single blog post – let alone five. Does anyone really believe that dependability isn’t essential to effective leadership? 

Actually, yes. There are leaders who are so driven by fear of conflict that they allow their personal conflict-avoidance to whipsaw them between competing demands. These leaders often make the mistake of believing that if they can just mollify whoever happens to be in front of them at a given moment, they will be able to make everyone in the library love them. In fact, of course, by trying to appease whoever they happen to be speaking with, they actually end up making everyone in the organization miserable.

Dependability is an absolutely core principle of library leadership.

There are also leaders who actively (though not necessarily consciously) cultivate their undependability as a strategy for keeping the people they lead off-balance. If library employees can’t assume that policies will be followed consistently and fairly, but instead have to monitor the whims of the library’s leader (and do whatever they can to cater to his or her preferences, prejudices, and momentary desires), this puts the leader in an exceptional position of power. It also, of course, contributes to chaos and frustration in the organization – but for some leaders, that feels like a relatively small price to pay for the pleasure of watching the people they lead treat them like an emperor.

And then there are leaders who recognize and pay lip service to the principle of dependability, but simply aren’t willing to do the hard work that being dependable entails. Being dependable means more than just being willing to have difficult conversations. Sometimes it means staying up late at night to complete a promised deliverable; sometimes it means turning down an attractive invitation in order to fulfill a prior commitment made to attend a library event; sometimes it means fulfilling a promise made hastily that turned out to be a bigger commitment than expected. 

My discussion of this issue will be based on my belief – borne partly of my personal understanding of right and wrong, and partly of my experience both as a library leader and as someone who has worked under many library leaders – that dependability is an absolutely core principle of library leadership. Leaders who are not dependable are, invariably, ineffective leaders. That doesn’t mean that they never get things done; ineffective leaders can actually be very good at accomplishing tasks that don’t require good leadership. It does mean that they fail to effectively lead their people – and that the things they do accomplish almost invariably come at an outsized cost in morale and other, more tangible resources. 

My next four posts will explore the following four interconnected but distinct manifestations of dependability:

• Institutional alignment
• Consistency
• Reliability
• Backbone

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

If you’ve recently become the dean or director of an academic library, you may now find yourself in an unusual and unexpected position. Like many (though not all) of us, you may have suddenly become a university official, with both the benefits and the restrictions that come with that status.

For example, one benefit I enjoy in my role as university librarian at Brigham Young University, and therefore a university official, is the right to park in any space on campus — except handicap spots and those designated “service vehicles only.” (I’m also pretty sure I’m not allowed to park in the president’s designated spot, though I haven’t tested that theory yet.)

However, by becoming a university official I also gave up some rights — notably, the right to “participate in activities on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate for public office, publicly endorse partisan political candidates, donate money to or for the benefit of partisan political candidates, or hold partisan political office at the city, county, state, or national level.”

The basic reason for the policy restriction, in the United States at least, is to protect the university’s tax-exempt status. Once an institution begins involving itself in partisan politics, it loses that status, and public statements of a partisan political nature by university officials will likely be seen as evidence that the university is doing just that. (There are some exceptions, of course, but the basic principle remains.)

Of course, not all political statements are partisan. University officials’ expressions of support for principles like freedom of speech, or for sexual equality, or for expanded (or more limited) immigration rights, may or may not breach university policy, but are not likely to endanger the university’s tax-exempt status. There’s another reason for library deans and directors to avoid making partisan political statements, though, and that is the fact that when library leaders takes a public position on a social or political issue, they send a message to the people they lead. I discussed this at more length in an earlier post (“For Library Directors: Leading the Library After an Election“), but I’ll briefly recap the three main points of that piece here:

First, the people you lead are more ideologically diverse than you think. Those whose views differ from what seems to be the mainstream or majoritarian view in your organization will mostly keep their heads down in the interest of self-preservation. Mistaking apparent unanimity of viewpoint for actual unanimity of viewpoint can, if you’re not careful, lead you to say things that tell those with heterodox views that they do not belong in your organization.

Political statements made by people with more power entail consequences that don’t attend similar statements by those with less power.

Second, you are the leader of everyone in your library, not only those with whom you agree socially or politically. Chances are good that you and the majority of employees in your library have a similar perspective on many (if not most) social and political issues. But you are also the leader of those whose perspective you don’t share. You don’t always have to hide your own views, and you certainly don’t have to apologize for them, but you do need to think about how you will communicate to those you disagree with that they will not be penalized for having views or beliefs different from yours.

Third, what you say (and don’t say) makes a big difference. Sometimes, the wisest course actually will be simply to refrain from saying something you believe, because your expressions of personal opinion carry a lot more weight in your organization than those of the people you lead. That may not be fair and it may not be egalitarian, but it’s still true and it’s a reality you ignore at the risk of your effectiveness as a leader.

The bottom line is that political statements made by people with more power entail consequences that don’t attend similar statements by those with less power. Library leaders have power in their organizations, and with that power comes a moral obligation to wield it carefully.

Those who have been reading Vision & Balance for the last year will know that I occasionally post on the theme of “Two an a Half Cheers” — a slight variation on the “two cheers” idea, which usually denotes the discussion of a topic or issue that is unpopular or generally denigrated, but that perhaps deserves just a little more credit than it usually gets. By saying “two and a half cheers” I’m suggesting that while this particular topic or issue may pose challenges or complications, it actually deserves a lot more credit than the conventional wisdom suggests. Previous posts in this series have considered the “scarcity mindset,” meetings, bean-counting, thinking of patrons as “customers,” and other issues.

Today I’d like to look at the concept of “publish or perish.”

Over the past decade or to it seems to me that the library profession has been overrun with easy applause lines — phrases and concepts that are regularly invoked in meetings and essays for the twin purposes of signaling the presenter’s or author’s virtue and generating easy approbation, and thereby, all too often, short-circuiting critical thought. The reflexive condemnation of “publish or perish culture” seems to me to be one such easy applause line. “Publish or perish” is regularly invoked as either the primary cause or a significant contributing factor to just about everything currently wrong with scholarly communication.

And yet, I suspect most of us in academia would agree that publishing one’s work should be expected of researchers and scholars. We aren’t employed by our institutions just so that we can teach students and generate new knowledge for ourselves, but also so that we can create new knowledge and send it out into the world. There is, I believe, a strong argument to be made that those who fail (or refuse) to publish really should “perish,” where “perish” means “not be retained as academics.” And I don’t believe most of the people who decry “publish or perish” culture would actually disagree.

So if we do believe in “publish or perish,” why do we complain about it so much?

I think the problem is that while a few people in academia really do believe that “publish or perish” expectations are themselves unreasonable in principle, many more believe that the “publish or perish” mindset has metastasized in ways that are both unreasonable and unhelpful, leading to both unfair pressure on young tenure-track academics and a global explosion in publications of marginally valid or useful research, exacerbated by new publishing models that themselves create huge financial incentives for journals to publish as many articles as they can. These are, in my view, valid points — but the way to address them is to deal with them clearly and directly rather than using rhetoric that condemns the reasonable expectation that scholars publish their work.

What does all of this have to do with leadership in academic libraries? A lot, I believe, for at least two reasons.

First of all, academic librarians are, in many cases (especially in the U.S.) members of the college or university faculty who are expected to publish scholarly and creative work in order to keep their jobs. Leaders charged with helping them along the tenure track must help them think clearly and cogently about publication demands, and we also have some influence in setting publication expectations.

Second, library leaders have influence over their libraries’ collecting strategies and overall orientation to the scholarly communication ecosystem, which is being shaped by attitudes, policies, and rhetoric around issues including “publish or perish” culture. Attempts to change the structure of scholarly publishing are having and will continue to have wide-ranging effects, some positive and some negative, some intended and some unintended. Library leaders are in a position to help shape and refine these attitudes, policies, and rhetoric, and would be wise to use their influence to help ensure a greater degree of analytical rigor and strategic insight to those conversations.

Of course, all of this begins at home, in the libraries we lead.

Are there any other ideas, concepts, practices, or philosophies that you think don’t get enough respect in our profession, and deserve a couple of cheers? Let me know in the comments.

Some years ago I read an article in which the author recounted working with a particularly gifted leader, and cited one incident in particular that demonstrated the leader’s wisdom.

A member of the management team had made a mistake of some kind — a pretty significant one, that had cost the organization $2 million. The mistake led to a lot of disruption, of course, and for a while the organization’s leadership was occupied with running around trying to contain and clean up the damage. The person telling the story recounted that as the dust was settling, he took the CEO aside and asked “You’re going to fire him, aren’t you?”. The CEO looked at him with genuine surprise and responded “Fire him? Are you kidding? I just invested $2 million in his education!”.

I’ve thought about this story — and cited it in presentations and meetings — many times since reading it, because I think it vividly illustrates a centrally important quality of leadership: not only the kindness and tolerance that are essential to effective leadership, but also the ability to look beyond the mistakes made by people in the organization and see strategic opportunity.

Of course, in a situation like the one described above, such a stance only demonstrates good leadership if at least two conditions apply:

First, the mistake was made in good faith. If an employee makes an honest mistake that arises from ignorance or a lack of skill, both the employee and the library organization are likely to benefit from a tolerant and gentle response from library leadership. This is true, in part, because everyone (very much including library leaders) makes mistakes and a draconian response to one person’s mistake will only encourage others in the organization to hide their errors rather than own up to them. It’s also true because a culture of punishing mistakes rather than treating them as learning opportunities is likely to discourage everyone in the library and make it less likely that they’ll think and work creatively, taking appropriate risks. Leaders should also bear in mind that the people they lead are watching their performance and judging it, either tacitly or openly, and that the organization’s collective assessment of its leaders’ performance has a significant impact on how well the library functions. Leaders who want grace from their employees have to be willing to extend grace to them.

Of course, not all errors are made in good faith. Sometimes they arise from a willful disregard for policy or best practice, or, worse, genuine dishonesty. A mistake made in bad faith will usually need to be treated differently from an honest one, which leads us to the second condition:

The mistake represents an error of judgment or skill rather than a breach of law or ethics. Everyone makes mistakes, but not everyone intentionally acts in bad faith. To put it baldly: there’s a very important difference between losing $2 million due to a careless error and intentionally misappropriating $2 million. If one of your employees has broken the law or committed a significant breach of professional ethics, your options as a leader are much more constrained — not only is it important to send a message to the organization that such breaches will not be tolerated, but you will likely be under legal or professional obligations yourself and will not have the option of showing tolerance and mercy in ways you might otherwise wish to. If you find yourself in such a situation, it’s imperative that you begin working with your HR team immediately, and possibly also with your host institution’s office of general counsel, to make sure that you do everything required of you by law and policy and that you not accidentally do anything prohibited by law or policy. And speaking of policy, here it’s important to point out that a breach of policy does not necessarily represent a breach of law or ethics (though of course it could be all three). Honest, good-faith mistakes will often represent breaches of policy, but they do not typically represent illegal or unethical behavior.

The bottom line is that grace and charity are essential qualities of good leadership — partly because they’re just good human qualities that lead to a healthy work environment, and partly because they’re an important element of sound organizational strategy. But grace and charity have to be expressed differently in the context of good-faith errors than in the context of intentionally dishonest or bad-faith errors.

I once had the displeasure of working in a library whose leader seemed to believe that being the library director meant being the best librarian in the building, across all specialties and subdisciplines. Whenever this director heard someone else in the library being praised for his or her expertise and accomplishments, this person’s response was usually something designed to redirect the praise back to the director, with predictable effects on staff morale.

A wise and effective library leader doesn’t worry about always being seen as the smartest person in the room, and both recognizes and (this is essential) publicly acknowledges the expertise of others on staff and the superior knowledge that each of them has regarding his or her area of specialty.

Believe it or not, that’s the easy part.

The harder part is figuring out what, in fact, you are particularly good at and what you struggle with. To some degree this can actually be pretty easy: if you struggle with procrastination, you probably know that; if you’re good at speaking publicly but not great at writing effective email messages, you probably figured that out long before coming to a leadership position.

But it can be genuinely hard to see our skills and deficits in certain areas, and our failures to understand ourselves in this regard can really get in the way of our effectiveness as library leaders. Leaders who lack self-awareness tend not to have happy staff, and staff who are chronically frustrated by their leaders are not likely to serve patrons and sponsoring institutions well.

So how can you gain awareness of your more hidden strengths and weaknesses when you’re in a leadership position? Here are three suggestions:

• Pay attention to yourself. This sounds obvious, but we don’t tend to do it well. Consciously take an inventory of both your feelings and your effectiveness as you carry out individual leadership tasks. Which ones do you find most frustrating, and which ones tend to give you that pleasant “in the zone” feeling as you carry them out? Do you see small patterns of failure in your own deliverables (like arriving at meetings late, or finding errors in your writing after you’ve submitted documents, or recurring feelings of regret after staff meetings or presentations)? These patterns and feelings provide hints about your strengths and weaknesses as a leader and as a professional more generally. These hints can lead you to seek feedback from others, which leads to my second suggestion:
• Pay attention to feedback from others. If you are listening carefully, you’ll get important and useful hints about your strengths and weaknesses from those around you. Now, actually getting useful feedback can be a challenge when you’re in a leadership position (see “The Higher You Rise in the Hierarchy, the Funnier Your Jokes Get. That’s a Problem“), so you’ll have to listen carefully, and you may have to go out of your way to encourage honest input from those below you in the organizational downline. (Good news: at least a small handful of your employees will be only too happy to provide it.) And you’ll also need to exercise good critical judgment in taking the feedback onboard — not all of it will be reasonable or well-informed. But as you look for patterns in the feedback, you’ll see them, and they’ll help you understand your strengths and weaknesses better.
• Try some formal tools. There are many psychological and training instruments out there designed to help people learn more about their own strengths and weaknesses. A currently popular one is CliftonStrengths, but there are also venerable tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Enneagram that are designed to help you understand your own personality better. None of these tools is perfect and none will tell you everything you need to know about yourself, but all can provide important and useful self-insight. If you’re in an academic library, chances are good that your host institution offers training using these or other tools and would be happy to send someone to your library to administer them to your leadership team or even your whole staff.

The bottom line is that you didn’t get to your leadership position by being good at everything; no one is. But the better you understand what you are and are not good at — and the better you are at addressing your weak areas with humility and honesty, the more effective you’ll become, and the happier the people who you work for you will be.

I’ll never forget that meeting. Earlier in my career, I was attending some kind of gathering for mid-level campus leaders, led by someone at the VP level. Not only can I not remember the name of that person, I can’t even remember the topic of the meeting. What I do remember is that at some point, the person leading the meeting asked a question about setting priorities, and I offered an answer based on the assumption that students are always our top priority. The VP gave me a bit of a funny look and said “Well, no — students are important, but research is our top priority.”

I was (as I should have been) embarrassed. Although not the library dean, I was serving in a leadership position in the library, and I really should have understood that on the all-important “Which comes first, students or research?” question, this particular institution’s answer was “research.” But for some reason, it had never really occurred to me that students might not be the #1 priority for any college or university. Maybe it’s because no college or university is ever going to come out and say, in a public document, “You know what? Students are great and we’re grateful to have them here, but really, our primary focus is research and that’s what our faculty understand we expect of them first and foremost.” But still, if I’d been doing my job better I would have had a better understanding of my institution’s strategic orientation.

The reality is that every university has to decide for itself whether students or research are the top priority. Now, I realize that some readers are going to chafe at that assertion. “Come on,” you might reasonably respond, “why can’t the university value both equally? Does a focus on one really have to mean neglect of the other?”. And of course the answer to the latter question is no — the fact that your institution focuses primarily on research doesn’t mean that you have to neglect your students, and that fact that someone else’s institution focuses primarily on teaching doesn’t mean that its faculty doesn’t do research.

When the library has to make tough choices about resource allocation, the needs and priorities of the library’s institutional sponsor should always be clearly discernible in the outcomes of those choices.

But this is the lesson for leaders: just because you can do both doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter which is your top priority. You have to know what your priorities are, because there will be times when you do have to make tough choices between them. Being a research-first university doesn’t mean you don’t care about your students, and being a students-first university doesn’t mean you don’t care about research — but when you really are faced with a choice between spending $1 million on a dorm renovation and spending that $1 million on lab renovations, you’d better be clear on which of those things represents the most mission-aligned option.

What does this have to do with academic libraries? Everything.

First of all, wise library leaders are always keenly aware of their host institution’s priorities and looking for ways that the library can move those priorities forward.

Second, the library’s own mission and strategic goals should always reflect those of the library’s host institution. When the library has to make tough choices about resource allocation — which is pretty much all the time — the needs and priorities of the library’s institutional sponsor should always be clearly discernible in the outcome of those choices.

Third, within the library itself the leadership needs to be thinking not only about what the library’s priorities are, but also about how those priorities will be expressed through the library’s programming, policies, and culture. Leaders need to be prepared to express those priorities publicly, repeatedly, and in multiple formats — and should try not to feel too frustrated about how many times such expressions are needed. No matter how many times you talk about those priorities, someone in the library will express surprise and believe they’re hearing them for the first time. Just roll with it. Be grateful that they’ve heard.

So this moment would be a great opportunity to ask yourself: which does my host institution set as its highest priority — students, or research? How do I know that? Do my library’s policies, practices, programming, and culture reflect that order of priorities? And if not, what needs to change?

Hi, everyone —

By now you’ve hopefully noticed that Vision & Balance has moved to its new home on the WordPress platform. It’s now also fully free (though not, I suppose, technically open access) rather than half-free/half-fee.

I’ll maintain at least a weekly posting schedule, and will try to maintain my usual twice-weekly posting schedule. But one thing I hope will be different: comments are now enabled and are unmoderated, so anyone who wishes to contribute to the conversation is welcome to do so. I’ll keep comments open and unmoderated for as long as the conversation remains constructive — which I hope and imagine will be an indefinite stretch of time.

I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have supported Vision & Balance up until now, making it a worthwhile (for me, anyway) effort and a great opportunity to air thoughts on leadership in academic libraries.

Now let’s turn it into a conversation.

Rick