Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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

As a library leader, one of the things you have to get used to is the feeling that nobody really knows (let alone understands, let alone appreciates) how much work you do. Sure, most of the people you lead will have a general sense that you’re very busy (and some will make the obligatory observations about how many meetings you have to attend and how much email you process), but I’ve noticed that every library seems to harbor a significant minority of staff and faculty (some of them pretty vocal) who believe that administrators don’t really do much at all — that when they’re not out having fancy dinners with donors, they mostly sit in their lavish offices thinking up ways to make life more difficult for the librarians and staff who do the real work.

I realize that sounds like an unfair stereotype of thinking about leaders, but I’ve been surprised by how frequently I come across evidence that it’s pretty typical. For example, some years ago I was startled to hear through the grapevine about one librarian in the organization where I worked, who had recently had the chance to serve as an interim associate dean, and came away from that experience saying to colleagues “Holy cow, I had no idea how much work it is to be a library administrator.” This was a person with longstanding experience in a large academic library, including experience as a department chair. When I heard that story I remember thinking to myself “If that person so radically underestimated the amount of work administrators do, what must everyone else in the library think of us?”.

But let’s pull back a minute from the Plight of the Underappreciated Administrator and consider the dynamics that lead to a lack of appreciation for someone’s — anyone’s — work in the library.

The fact is that none of us really understands the work of another, or the challenges that come with it. Even if someone in the library is currently in a position that I myself used to hold — like head of acquisitions or chief collection development officer — I can’t assume that I really understand all the current realities of that job, let alone the specific challenges that arise from another individual’s particular blend of strengths and weaknesses. Too many of us, whether leaders or not, jump way too easily to conclusions about how hard others are working and how much they’re producing, and those conclusions are very often wrong.

What this means is that being underappreciated and misunderstood is a nearly universal affliction, and by no means one suffered only (or even mostly) by people in leadership positions. And to me, that suggests two important things for leaders to keep in mind. One is a coping strategy, and the other is a mitigation strategy:

Coping: Get used to the fact that your work will be frequently misunderstood and almost universally underappreciated. Accept that this is simply one of the downsides of being in a leadership position, and allow it to deepen your empathy for others in your organization whose work is also misunderstood and underappreciated.

Mitigation: With a greater sensitivity to the fact that others in your organization tend to be misunderstood and underappreciated, ask yourself what you can do both to increase your own understanding of the work others do in the library you lead, and to help others understand each other’s work better. In some cases cross-training might be a good idea, or some limited job shadowing. You also might find that some of your organization’s job documentation needs to be more openly shared, or that the more difficult work of culture change is needed.

Where both of the above strategies are concerned, setting a strong example will go a long way. When you show others that you have a thick skin regarding being underappreciated (laughing it off, shifting the focus to others, etc.), you’re showing that you accept and understand that doing so is just part of the job. When you actively demonstrate your interest in the work of others and conspicuously try to understand it better, you’re teaching an important principle of leadership — and believe it or not, people will take note (even if they don’t say anything).

The bottom line is that none of us is fully understood or appreciated. As a library leader, you’re in a good position to help change that, at least in your organization, in meaningful even if small ways.

Love is not a concept that comes up a lot here at Vision & Balance, and with good reason. It’s a touchy and complex and very personal subject – and one potentially fraught with peril for library leaders and managers. We all understand that there are important ways in which love between employees (especially leaders and subordinates) should not be expressed, and enough said about that.

But it’s been on my mind a lot recently, and I think it’s actually an important – even vital – subject for us to address. So let’s take a deep breath and give it a shot.

I subscribe fully to the idea that you can’t be an effective leader if you don’t care about the people you lead. I’ll go further, actually, and say that you can’t be an effective leader if you don’t actually love the people you lead.

Now, to be clear: I’m not saying you have to like all of them; a library is (usually) a large and (invariably) diverse organization, and not everyone is going to rub you the right way. Some of them will actually drive you crazy, as you will them. But I still think you can and, ultimately, must love them – both individually and collectively.

What does that actually mean? Here are three thoughts:

Care about whether they’re happy in their work. If you love your people, it will matter to you whether they find their work enjoyable and are comfortable in your library. You may not be able to provide everyone in your library their ideal work environment, or tailor their job duties to fit all their preferences – but it matters very much to them whether their happiness in the workplace matters to you. And they’ll know whether or not you care, not so much because they either do or don’t get what they want, but rather because of the ways you interact with them. It’s tough to fake genuine caring, and most people can sniff out fakeness in that regard very quickly.

Be genuinely interested in their general welfare. Similarly, if you love your people you will care how they’re doing generally. Obviously, this shouldn’t mean asking intrusive questions about their personal lives or trying to become every employee’s fishing or shopping buddy – but there’s nothing wrong with poking your head into the office of someone who just got back from sick leave and seeing how they’re doing, or offering encouragement to someone who is working on a graduate degree, or expressing excitement to someone who’s about to have a baby. (If you have an administrative assistant, he or she can be a big help in keeping you abreast of what’s happening in people’s lives.) Conversely: if there’s someone in your organization whose misfortune gives you pleasure, take a step back and examine yourself.

Be invested in their professional success and fulfillment. It’s hard – maybe impossible – to be a good leader if you genuinely don’t care whether your people are successful in their jobs and are achieving their professional goals. You might be able to be a good factory owner without caring about those things, or a good stockbroker. But if your job is leading people, then their professional fulfillment is going to have to matter to you. Again, you won’t be able to provide every person in your organization the career path they want – but you can care whether or not they’re moving in the direction they want to, and support and help them as they try to define and carve out that path.

You may have noticed that the verbs I’ve used above – “care” and “be” – represent things that you can’t fake. Or, to be more accurate: it’s possible to fake them (of course you can pretend to care about their workplace happiness when you really don’t, or to be interested in their general welfare when you aren’t), but faking them won’t make you a good leader. Mediocre leaders can fake those things, to some degree; good leaders really feel them and act effectively on those feelings.

Now: does any of us love our people perfectly? Of course not. Loving one’s people will be an aspirational goal for some, and loving one’s people perfectly will be an aspirational goal for all. In this as in many other areas of life, there’s something to be said for the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy. In other words, deep down in your heart you may not actually be invested in the professional success and fulfillment of your people, or at least of all of them. But what you can do is ask yourself “If I really were invested in Gary’s professional success and fulfillment, what would I do?” – and then try to do that thing. Keep doing that long enough, and you may find something magical happening: you start actually caring about what you had been only pretending to care about. It’s a bit like kindness: if you pretend to be a kind person for long enough, eventually you find yourself actually becoming… a kind person.

Now, here’s one obvious caveat: as a leader, you can’t make the mistake of thinking that genuinely loving your people means always making them happy, still less giving them everything they want. For one thing, you don’t have the resources or capacity to give them everything they want; for another, sometimes two people in the library want mutually exclusive things and there’s simply no way to avoid disappointing one of them. But when you do have to disappoint someone in your organization, there’s a very big difference between saying “The answer is no; deal with it” and saying “The answer is no, and I realize this is a big disappointment. Let’s talk about what we might be able to do to mitigate that disappointment.” In some cases, there will be little or nothing you actually can do – but the “deal with it” response is an expression of dismissal, while the “let’s talk more” response is an expression of love.

I realize this post may have seemed a bit squishy and maybe made you a little uncomfortable. But leadership is a social function as well as an administrative one; you’re not just managing budgets and spaces – you’re leading people. In that context, there’s no two ways around it: love matters.

Takeaways and Action Items

• It matters whether you love your people. If you don’t, you’ll be a less effective leader.
• As a leader, the love that matters is the love you really feel – but to a significant degree, that love can be learned and acquired.
• Look around your organization and ask yourself: whom do I love already, and whom do I need to love better? What would loving them better look like in both my thinking and my behavior?