Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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.

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.