Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

One of the most common mistakes that leaders tend to make is rooted in some of our best human impulses. It is the mistake of stepping in and preventing the people we lead from experiencing the natural consequences of their mistakes.

Let me explain by way of an example – and not a hypothetical one. Indeed, this is one that many library administrators and managers have experienced directly.

A librarian – let’s call him Gary – is interested in presenting a paper at a conference in Berlin, Germany. He prepares and submits a proposal, which is accepted. He then informs his supervisor – we’ll call her Sarah – that he has had a paper accepted to the Berlin conference and that he will need travel support and someone to cover his regular workload during the week that he’ll be away.

For the sake of this example, let’s assume that the library where Gary works has clear policies and procedures in place for requesting travel support, and that these policies make clear that before submitting a presentation proposal to a conference, librarians must ensure that the necessary funding is available and that they can be spared from their regular duties during that time. (And yes, I realize that too many libraries don’t have clear policies in place for such cases; that’s a topic for another post. Or maybe a series of them.)

In this situation, Gary has made a significant mistake that has put him and the library in a difficult situation: he has made a commitment he was not authorized to make, and fulfilling that commitment will impact both the library’s budget and the colleagues who will have to do his work while he’s gone. However, failing to fulfill that commitment will be embarrassing both to him and to the library he represents.

This puts Sarah in a tough position, and she now has a difficult choice to make: will she allow Gary to experience the natural consequences of his mistake, or will she step in and prevent him from experiencing them? And what might be the knock-on effects of each of those approaches?

Let’s consider the second approach (interfering with the natural consequences) first. Sarah brings Gary into her office and says, angrily, “Gary, you never told me that you were going to submit a proposal for this conference. Now your paper has been accepted and we’re really stuck, because I don’t have enough money left in the travel budget to cover your travel costs. But I can’t afford to embarrass the library by making you withdraw, so I’m going to have to find the money someplace else. You’d better not do this again or next time you’ll be in really big trouble.”

Sarah is making several mistakes here, and I’m sure they’re pretty obvious:

• She’s using her anger as a punishment, hoping that the desire to avoid her anger in the future will stop Gary from doing the same thing again .
• She’s absorbing the consequences of his action herself (by taking on the responsibility for figuring out how to make his trip possible).
• She’s teaching him that the way to get around library policies is to ignore them, and that the cost of doing so is just a brief unpleasant conversation.

Now let’s consider the first approach (allowing Gary to experience the natural consequences of his actions). Sarah brings Gary into her office and says, calmly, “Wow, I didn’t realize you were submitting a proposal for this conference. We have a problem: there isn’t enough money left in our annual travel budget to support your travel and attendance. If you had followed our policy, I could have told you that before you submitted your proposal. As it stands, we’re now between a rock and a hard place: I can’t afford to send you to the conference, but if you withdraw after having your paper accepted it will make both you and the library look bad. What do you think might be a good solution to this problem?”

In this scenario, notice that Sarah is not assuming responsibility for solving the problem that Gary has caused; instead, she asks him to offer a solution. Nor is she threatening or yelling at him; there’s no need for her to impose artificial consequences (like a tongue-lashing) on him, because she’s going to simply let him feel the natural consequences of what he did.

What are Gary’s options in this scenario? I can think of a couple. The simplest would be for him to withdraw from the conference and apologize to the organizers. This would be painful both for him and for the library (and putting the library in a bad light in this way should come up in his subsequent annual review). Another option would be for him to honor his commitment, at his own expense. This would preserve both his reputation and the library’s, but would cost him quite a bit of money – and it may or may not be an expense he is actually in a position to bear. (If not, that leaves him the first option.)

Once Gary has proposed a reasonable solution and Sarah has accepted it, what will Gary have learned? Several things, including:

• He can count on his boss to be fair and consistent in following library policy (something that may not have worked in his favor in this case, but will likely work in his favor at some point in the future).
• Sarah will control her frustration when he makes mistakes, and deal with him professionally and fairly.
• When he creates a problem by disregarding library policy, he will be required to take responsibility for doing so and will be expected to come up with a solution to the problem he has created.

As a leader, ask yourself: which of these lessons would you like your employees to learn? In which of these ways would you like them to see you as a leader?

The problem, of course, is that in many ways it’s a lot easier to absorb consequences yourself than to insist that others deal with them. The “dang it, you’ve really messed up and now I have to clean up your mess” conversation is, paradoxically enough, usually a much easier conversation to have than “you made a mistake here; let me know how you intend to resolve it.”

But as leaders, our job is not to figure out how to avoid difficult conversations. Our job is to help our libraries be as effective as possible in serving our patrons and our institutions, and to help our employees grow and develop as professionals. The cost of doing so, sometimes, is difficult conversations.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Getting between your employees and the natural consequences of their actions may make life easier for you (and them) in the short run, but will cause everyone misery in the long run.
• Good leaders don’t leave their employees alone to figure out how to clean up their messes, but they do insist that their employees clean up the messes they make.
• When was the last time you yielded to the temptation to take away the consequences of an employee’s actions? What will you do differently the next time you’re faced with a similar situation?

One of the perennial complaints we hear in higher education is about what seems like a growing tendency among university administrators to think of students (and then to insist that we think of students) as “customers” – people who are entitled to basically whatever they want, and to whose every whim and preference we should cater.

Of course, what makes this issue complicated is that in some important ways, students really are customers: they’re paying tuition (in some cases a very large amount of tuition) and they’re often paying the university for housing and food as well, and there are certain things they should be able to expect in return.

For example: in return for their tuition payments, students should be able to expect that they’ll be taught competently the curricula for which they sign up. If a class is advertised as being about 19th-century English literature, that’s what should be taught in the class. And the class should be taught by an instructor who is well prepared, who shows up (and shows up on time), who can speak clearly in the university’s language of instruction, who grades consistently and fairly, etc. In the provision of these things, it makes sense that we think of students as “customers.”

However, the fact that students are paying tuition clearly does not entitle them to particular grades, or to coursework that is undemanding, or to a style of teaching that they find entirely congenial and in harmony with their personal preferences. If a university pushes faculty to treat students as “customers” in these senses, that would be inappropriate.

The academic library faces similar complexities. In some ways, it seems obvious that students (and other patrons) can appropriately be thought of as “customers” of the library’s products and services and should be treated as such: we should be thinking about which services and information resources they need in order to do their academic work, and we should cater intentionally to those needs. They should expect that they will be treated with respect and kindness by everyone who works in the library. They should be able to expect that the library’s service points, collections, and facilities are organized and provided with their needs in mind, rather than for the convenience of library employees. It makes sense for us to bear in mind that students are paying to use the library, whereas we are being paid to work in the library.

On the other hand, the fact that students are paying tuition and fees, and the fact that we are being paid to serve them, does not mean that students are entitled to everything that might be offered to them by a commercial establishment that relies on their ongoing business for its sustainability. The fact that we have an equal obligation to serve all students puts a natural limit on the amount of time we can spend with any individual student and on the degree to which we can customize our services to meet the needs of any subset of the student body; the fact that our facilities are used by an entire campus means that we can’t always give an individual student (or faculty member) the kind of access that he or she always wants. And the fact that we support an educational enterprise puts some limits on the ways in which we help students – a student may, for example, want a librarian to do work for him that the librarian feels is inappropriate, and appeals to the virtue of “customer service” will likely fall on deaf ears in such a case, as they should.

So how do we decide when and how we’ll regard students as “customers” and when we won’t? I suggest the following principles:

• Every student has the same status. Every student patron is (and is not) a customer in exactly the same way as all others. We may provide different services or different levels of service depending on need, but all students with a particular need are treated the same way, regardless of who they are.
• The library must know (and be able to explain coherently) what is included and what’s extra. In other words, the library needs to have a coherent set of policies that govern what students can expect to be provided and what is an “extra.” Do they get a certain number of free pages of printing per year, or does the library impose a fee for every copy or page? Are rooms reservable without charge? All of these policies must be clearly documented and administered consistently, and the policies must be easily accessible by patrons.
• The library’s collections, spaces, and services should be organized with the needs of patrons foremost in mind. This may sound obvious, but it’s not as obvious as it should be. We don’t select information resources based on which publishers we like and which ones we don’t, but rather based on the curricular and research needs of our patrons. We don’t organize library spaces in order to preserve our preferred workflows, but in order to make the library as useful as possible to patrons. We set service hours in accordance with the needs of our patrons, not necessarily to meet the convenience of employees, etc.
• Every patron must be treated with respect and kindness. This should go without saying, but sadly, it can’t: whether you like the idea of a “customer mindset” or not, there is no excuse for treating library patrons – especially students – with condescension, impatience, or rudeness. Now, to be clear: this does not mean that we give every student whatever they want, and it does not mean that we beat around the bush when policies needs to be explained or enforced. Nor does it mean that we cater to every student’s desires or demands. It does mean that we offer every student the full benefit of our professional skill and preparation, and do so with patience and kindness.

One of the great dangers of leadership is the fact that the more power you have (or are believed to have), the better people will treat you. This phenomenon may take multiple forms, including:

• Shutting up. One of the great frustrations of being in a leadership position is that it can make it hard to engage in frank and open discussion. Why? Because as soon as you express an opinion – or as soon as people feel like they can tell what your opinion is – discussion can shut down as people decide “Well, if that’s what our leader thinks, I guess there’s no point in continuing the conversation.” As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, for this reason I try really hard to hold back on expressing my opinion on an issue until others have had a chance to express theirs. (I am far from perfect at doing this, however.)
• Insincere capitulation. A related problem is when people pretend to agree with you, even when they really don’t. Not only does this mean they pass up the opportunity to influence things in a direction they would prefer; it also means that you don’t get an accurate sense of what your people really think.

• Offering gifts or favors. Most people refrain from blatantly offering favors to their leaders, because they have an intuitive sense that doing so is both icky and inappropriate. But not everyone is blessed with that intuitive sense, and when you’re in a leadership position you will almost certainly, at some point, be faced with the necessity of kindly and graciously refusing an inappropriate gift or favor from a subordinate.
• Telling you what you want to hear. Poor leaders make it clear (either explicitly or implicitly) to those they lead that they do not want bad news. The classic line “Bring me solutions, not problems,” is one slightly less toxic expression of that tendency, but many of us have had experiences with leaders who punished anyone who brought them news they didn’t want to hear. Such punishment is usually more subtle than overt, but make no mistake: if you penalize the people you lead for giving you bad news, even in subtle ways, they will learn that lesson quickly and you will soon be hamstrung in your role as a leader.
• Flattery. This one is obvious. The more power you have (or are believed to have), the more likely it is that you’ll get compliments on your inimitable leadership style, your integrity, your charisma, your taste in clothes, etc. When deciding to what degree you’ll take such comments at face value, always ask yourself “How much power do I have over this person?,” and adjust accordingly.
• Funnier jokes. Related to flattery, but somewhat different, is the degree to which you’ll find that people laugh more at your jokes once you’ve ascended to a position of power. Trust me: you didn’t get funnier. What’s changed is that people have a greater incentive to make you think they appreciate your sense of humor.

So why is all of the above a problem? At one level, one could see all of these phenomena as legitimate perks of power: you worked hard to get where you are! You deserve gifts and flattery!

But obviously, to think that way would be disastrous – both morally and pragmatically. Morally, it will canker your soul; reveling in privilege turns one into a monster. And pragmatically, it will radically undermine your effectiveness as a leader. Leaders can’t function without the respect of those they lead, and the people you lead will lose all respect for you if they see you treating flattery as your due, or using your position to impose your will on them.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Not letting power go to your head is a constant struggle when you actually have power (or even when people just treat you as if you have power).
• The struggle is constant, but it’s essential to stay engaged. Don’t let down your guard.
• Think back to the last time someone you lead paid you a compliment. How did you respond? If you had been in the other person’s shoes, how would you have interpreted your response? Should it have been different, and if so, how – and why?

Last fall I wrote a post in which I argued for the importance of defaulting to openness and transparency, citing three reasons for such a stance:

1. People really do need to know more than you might think they do. Remember that you don’t fully understand the work of the other people in your organization, including those who report up to you. (You may think you fully understand their work, but you don’t.)
2. Whenever you show yourself to be an information sharer rather than an information hoarder, you gain trust. Then, when you have to keep information indoors later, people are more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt.
3. Your library will run better when its employees are better informed.

However, I also acknowledged that “defaulting to openness does not mean always telling everyone everything.” We all understand that in leadership roles, we’ll often be privy to sensitive personnel, financial, administrative, or other information that can’t be widely shared – or, at least, can’t be widely shared yet. Usually such information is easy to identify: you attend a meeting of academic deans in which a program still in development is discussed prior to its public rollout; you become aware that a library employee may have committed an offense that will lead to disciplinary action; you’re in discussions with a donor who is considering (but has not yet decided on) making a large gift to the library; etc.

But one of the challenges of leadership is that you often have to make judgment calls about what to share broadly within the library, and it’s not obvious what the right decision would be. An employee is out for an extended period because of a family tragedy that he does not wish to have widely discussed – obviously, his colleagues need to know that he’s going to be out, but how much should they be told about the reasons? Or an employee has been accused of financial malfeasance and is on leave while an investigation takes place – is it possible to tell her colleagues anything more than “she’s on leave and it’s not yet clear when she’ll return”?

While there is no decision-making template available to give you step-by-step instructions in every such situation, there are principles you can apply that will help. They include these three:

• Start with institutional policy. Depending on the situation you’re facing, there may well be a “policy fence” around your options – in other words, helpful constraints created for you by university policies. In sensitive situations, it may be wise to start by counseling with whichever campus administrator you report to, and either looking at relevant policy documents together or checking in with whichever other administrator is over finances, personnel, or whatever other area of campus management is relevant to the situation. (Or both.)
• Identify genuine stakeholders (as opposed to “interested parties”). In a post earlier this year I shared the four categories of “interested party” we’ve defined in our library to help us figure out who should have how much say in decision-making. The same principles apply when thinking about who should be informed and who should not be regarding sensitive issues and situations in the library. If, for example, a member of your finance team is under investigation, that may be something the finance manager or controller needs to know (on the other hand, institutional policy might forbid telling them) – but it’s almost certainly not something that the head of collection development needs to know.
• Work closely with HR. If you’re dealing with a sensitive situation in which it’s not clear what you can or should share broadly with your employees, chances are very good that the sensitivity arises from the involvement of personnel. Even delicate financial situations are usually delicate, at least in part, because of the people involved. And of course, your HR manager is also in a good place to help you map out the implications of sharing or not sharing information for those outside of the immediate situation. So as you begin strategizing about whether and how to communicate with your people, it’s always wise to do so in collaboration with your HR manager (and, sometimes, with HR administration outside the library).

None of the principles listed above is likely to surprise someone with experience in library management – however, as all of us can attest, just because they’re obvious doesn’t mean they’re always observed. Good leadership consists, among other things, in keeping principles like these in mind and following them consistently.

Takeaways and Action Items

• You can’t tell everyone everything all the time, and some of the toughest decisions a leader has to make are those that have to do with whom to inform and whom to leave in the dark.
• The first line of appeal is institutional policy: does it offer helpful constraints that forestall certain options? (Probably not, but it might.)
• Think back on a time that you had to make a tough decision about whom to red into a sensitive situation. How did you make that decision? Did it work out well for all involved? If not, what mistakes did you make, and do you have a clear sense of how to avoid them next time?

Most of us are familiar with the important distinction between necessary and sufficient. For example, air is necessary to human life: without it, you’ll quickly die. However, air is not sufficient to sustain human life: if all you have is air, you’ll also die (though much more slowly than if you didn’t have air). 

Let’s think about this principle as it applies to organizational decision-making. In this context, we could talk about the difference between essential questions (those that address necessity) and dispositive questions (those that address sufficiency).

An essential question is one that can eliminate options, but does not provide sufficient information to make a decision between the options that remain. For example: if I have four applicants for a position, and one of them does not meet the basic qualifications for the job, I can eliminate that candidate. (Because meeting the basic qualifications is essential.) However, meeting the basic qualifications is not dispositive: there are multiple candidates who meet those qualifications, so I have to apply other criteria in order to choose one of them.

A dispositive question is one that leads to a decision between available options. For example: among the three candidates for the job who meet the basic qualifications, I have to ask myself “Which of these is the best possible choice?”. That’s a dispositive question, because it leads me to opt for one candidate and eliminate the others.

One of the most fundamental examples of an essential question would be “Is X a good thing to do?” (This is an essential question because the answer must be “yes” in order for the question to advance to the next stage of analysis. If we decide that X is not a good thing to do, then we don’t need to keep talking about X. However, deciding that X would be a good thing to do isn’t enough to tell us whether we should do it, because our resource limitations mean we can’t do all the good things.)

Once the goodness of X has been established by the essential question, then it leads to a dispositive one. For example: “Does this good thing represent the best possible use of our limited resources in light of other demands?” (This question is dispositive because if – and only if – the answer to the question is “yes,” the resource steward will proceed with the allocation of resources. If the steward decides “no,” that doesn’t mean that X wasn’t good, nor does it mean that the steward doesn’t understand that X is good, nor does it mean that the steward wouldn’t have made the allocation if there had been more resources available. It means that we had no choice but to select a single option from among multiple good ones.)

This might sound like a stultifyingly complicated way of thinking, but in fact the process I’ve described is how all organizations make resource allocation decisions when they’re behaving in a more or less rational way. They don’t necessarily use the terminology I’ve described (“Phil, let’s move on from the essential question to the dispositive question about which venue we should select for our company retreat”), but their decision-making process follows the logic I’ve outlined, first determining which courses of action are desirable and then trying to choose the best (most cost-effective, most mission-aligned, etc.) of the remaining options. 

When organizations are not making resource allocation choices rationally, they make them in any number of other ways. For example:

• First come, first served: They allocate resources based on essential questions (like “Is this a good project?”) as they arise, until they run out of resources. This approach makes life easier for leaders, because they don’t have to make tough decisions based on relative merits; they only have to make the much easier decision about “goodness” – and then, when you run out of resources, they don’t have to make any tough decisions at all and can blame the lack of resources when worthy ideas are rejected. Unfortunately, this approach also means that projects are funded not according to their place in the institution’s strategic priorities, but according to the timing of their emergence, which is not a rational or mission-centered criterion.
• Personality: They allocate resources to the projects that are advocated for by people with the strongest personalities. Strength: this approach makes life easier for the decision-maker – at least, until it disadvantages another person with a strong personality. Weakness: it puts the decision-maker’s social comfort ahead of institutional priorities.
• Ideology of sub-institutional decision-makers: They allocate resources based on the ideological beliefs of people in stewardship positions. Now, one might say that ideology is just one way of determining priority, which is true, and in that sense it may just be another word for “priorities” – but what matters is whether the determinant ideology is that of the institution (and therefore expressed in its institutional priorities) or that of an individual with direct control over allocation decisions (and therefore may or may not represent institutional priorities). So, for example: if a manager makes assignments within his department based not on the library’s stated mission and priorities, but rather based on his own opinions about what the library should be doing, that would be problematic.

Takeaways and Action Items

• In all decision-making situations, it’s vital to keep in mind the difference between necessary/essential and sufficient/dispositive questions.
• Most proposals and options that meet the “essential” criteria will fail to meet the “sufficient” criteria.
• Analyze the decision-making processes in your library. What criteria do you apply when deciding how to allocate scarce resources such as budget, space, and staff time? Are those allocation decisions made in a rational way that reflects institutional mission and priorities?

For this entry in my ongoing “Two and a Half Cheers” series of posts, I’d like to take a look at the apology.

No one likes apologizing. When you do so, you’re acknowledging not only that you made a mistake, but that you made a mistake that directly impacted someone else in a negative way and that you need to own up to it and express regret. But we all know that as difficult as it can be, apologizing is sometimes essential, particularly for leaders – it’s not only how you express regret when you hurt someone and signal your desire to do better, but it also shows that you’re not going to hide your mistakes behind authority and power. Leaders can get away with bad behavior that other people can’t, and when you apologize for making a mistake you’re demonstrating that you aren’t going to take advantage of that privilege. Doing so builds trust among those you lead.

So why not three cheers for apologizing, given how important it can be, especially for leaders?

Because like so many important leadership characteristics and practices, the apology can be misused. I’ve noticed a number of ways in which this can happen. Here are three examples:

The Manipulative Apology. This is an apology designed not to express sincere regret, but rather to force the other person to say that what the apologizer did was okay. Sometimes leaders and managers are on the receiving end of manipulative apologies, when the people they manage want constant reassurance and seek it by apologizing for things that don’t require an apology. But sometimes leaders engage in this practice themselves, when they want to manipulate those they lead into reassuring them. (A good leader accepts compliments gracefully, but doesn’t depend on the people he or she leads for validation. We’ll talk more in a future post about the importance of accepting that much of what you do will not be noticed or appreciated.)

The Insincere Apology. Remember when you were a kid, and your mom or dad forced you to say “I’m sorry” even in situations where you were confident you weren’t at fault? Remember the vibe that attended your apologies in those situations? And have you noticed that the same vibe sometimes attends apologies by professional adults in the workplace? Now, to be clear: insincere apologies aren’t always the worst thing in the world. Sometimes you grit your teeth and say “I’m sorry” not because you think the situation was entirely your fault, but because that’s the lowest-cost way forward. That’s not always healthy, but it’s not always unhealthy either. But as a leader, you need to be very careful about insincerity at all times. Your people can smell insincerity and hypocrisy, especially in their leaders, and few things will more effectively undermine a leader’s authority than when the people she leads stop being confident that they can trust her to be honest. If you don’t feel you can apologize sincerely, it’s better to express something other than apology. “It’s really unfortunate that this situation unfolded the way it did; let’s talk about what we can do to move forward in a productive way,” for example, or perhaps “None of us showed our best selves during yesterday’s meeting. I’d like to do what I can to help ensure that the vibe in our meetings is more constructive going forward.”

The Non-apology. We’ve all been on the receiving end of these, from people who want to sound like they’re apologizing but are actually blaming you. The classic example is “I’m sorry you feel like I was unfair to you” or “I’m sorry you misunderstood my email.” This gambit is usually – but maybe not always – a consciously dishonest strategy designed to manipulate rather than express genuine regret for something the person actually did wrong. There isn’t much you can do to prevent others from doing this, but as a leader you can be vigilant in avoiding doing it yourself.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Apologizing in an honest and non-manipulative way is an essential skill of leadership.
• However, apologies that are not honest often do more harm than good.
• When was the last time you did something as a leader for which you felt the need to apologize? How did you handle that situation? Did you do it in a way that you feel was best for your organization and its people? Do you wish you had done it differently?

Hi, all —

I’m on a combination of overseas business travel and family vacation during the week of 14 July, so Vision & Balance is taking a brief break. I’ll be back in your inboxes on 21 July. Stay cool (and balanced) out there!

A common critique of the scholarly humanities is that it’s a system under which a very small number of tenured and tenure-track faculty turn out a large number of new PhDs every year, thus creating a constantly growing number of aspiring humanistic academics for whom there are no academic jobs available – or, at least, no tenure-track professorial jobs.

But this isn’t just a problem in academia – I think it’s a problem with American culture generally when it comes to leadership. I have long been uncomfortable with the assumption, which seems pervasive to me, that everyone should aspire to higher and higher positions of leadership – that this represents “growth,” and in fact the only meaningful manifestation of growth. That assumption is baked into statements of educational mission that proclaim the organization’s goal to turn all of its students into leaders, and into cultural rhetoric that treats leadership as the assumed goal of all self- and professional development.

Obviously, if everyone becomes a “leader” then they’ll run out of people to lead. Of course, people can lead in different ways and not everyone who has the qualities of a leader is going to use those qualities in a formal professional role as a manager or administrator. But if everyone who graduates from a university does so with the expectation that he or she is going to be a professional leader, there will be a lot of disappointed people in the workforce.

One possible response to this reality might be to say “Well, we need to create more leadership opportunities.” And maybe we do – but we’ll never create enough formal, professional leadership opportunities to accommodate everyone who wants them (or even everyone who is qualified to hold them).

What if, instead, we were to take a step back and say “Not everyone needs to aspire to leadership; it’s okay to be happy as a follower, if that’s where you’re most comfortable”?

Let’s step back from the macro question, though, and focus more on the issue of library leadership. What I want to suggest today is that just because you work in a library, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to aspire to being a library administrator or director. If that role sounds interesting and exciting to you, then great – by all means, pursue it. But if it doesn’t, don’t feel guilty. Most people who work in libraries won’t ever direct a library. And there’s no reason for them to feel like they should.

If you’ve been thinking about pursuing library leadership, but you’re not positive it’s the right thing for you, I would suggest asking yourself some questions that might help you get a better sense of whether library leadership really would be a good fit. These include:

• How much do I like meetings? We tend to assume that everyone hates meetings, but that’s actually not true. Everyone hates bad meetings, of course, but meetings themselves are not unpleasant for everyone. In fact, there are lots of people who find meetings invigorating and energizing, who love the opportunity to talk through problems and challenges in person with colleagues, and who think better through conversation than through quiet individual reflection. If that describes you, then you’re likely to enjoy one of the major features of library leadership, which is participating in (and usually leading) meetings. Which brings us to the next question:
• How much do I like running meetings? This is a very different issue: even for people who enjoy meetings, always being the one in charge of the meeting can be exhausting. If you hate running meetings, you will hate being a library leader.
• How much do I like fundraising? If you’re the leader of an academic library, chances are good that a significant chunk of your time will be spent raising funds to supplement your library’s budget. This means lots of time spent cultivating relationships with rich people – holding receptions, going out to dinner, managing advisory groups, etc. This kind of work is some people’s personal definition of heaven; for others, it’s a perfect hell. If you fall into the latter category, library leadership may not be for you.
• Am I okay with people being mad at me? One of the tough realities of leadership is that if you’re a leader, someone will almost certainly be mad at you at all times. Not necessarily because you’re doing things wrong (though of course you might be), but simply because two people in an organization will sometimes want mutually exclusive things and only one of them can win, and it will be your job as leader to pick the winner. Often, of course, you can resolve disputes with compromise or restructuring – but not always. And it’s also true that whenever you do the right thing as a leader, some people will agree with it and be happy, and others will disagree and be angry, even if it’s indisputably the right thing. Good leaders don’t enjoy making people angry – but they have to be able to accept people being angry. That can be really, really hard, and there’s no shame in saying it’s not for you.
• Can I have hard conversations? One of the worst things about being a leader is having to tell people things they really, really don’t want to hear. Things like “it’s not working out and we’re going to have to let you go,” or “I know you worked really hard on this project, but it’s become clear that we need to give it to someone else” or “you are going to have to find a way to work constructively with your colleague or else you’ll have to start looking for another position.” Being a good leader means not just being able and willing to say those things, but also being able to say them in a way that is kind and empathetic and firm and consistent. Not everyone wants to do that. Not everyone should want to do it.
• Can I control my emotions? Being an effective leader requires the ability to not get visibly upset even when someone is yelling at you or when someone is accusing you unfairly or when something disastrous has happened and everyone is looking at you to see what they should do next. To be clear: I’m not saying that leaders shouldn’t show emotion; I’m saying that leaders have to be able to control themselves, even when feeling extreme emotion. Among other things, this means being able to refrain from responding in kind when someone else is yelling or accusing; it means being able to swallow the sarcastic or cutting response to someone who is making deeply ill-informed criticisms of you or your organization, and instead respond calmly and respectfully; it means being able to think clearly when your heart is pounding and sweat is breaking out on your forehead. To some degree these skills can be learned, but, like music and art and public speaking, they come more naturally to some people than to others.
• Can I keep my mouth shut? Keeping your mouth shut is one of the most important skills of leadership – both in the context of self-control (see above) and also in the context of confidentiality. I’ll be very blunt here: if you can’t keep a secret, you can’t be a library leader. In a leadership role you’ll become privy to highly sensitive and confidential information that simply can’t be shared, or that can only be shared in a very limited way. Some of it will be institutional information that you can’t share with your library team; some of it will be personnel information that you can’t share with anyone except your human resources manager; some of it will be sensitive financial information or intellectual property.

The above is not an exhaustive list of the questions you should ask yourself when deciding whether or not to pursue leadership positions in libraries, but it hits some of the most important issues. Next week I’ll share some thoughts on characteristics and orientations that make a great leader.

First of all, thanks so much for being a part of this ongoing experiment. I started Vision & Balance last September, unsure whether there would be enough interest to sustain it and with a bit of trepidation as to whether I’d be able to come up with two meaningful posts per week on the topic of leadership and management in academic libraries. And yet here we are – it seems to be going pretty well.

However, I’ve fallen out of love with the Ghost newsletter platform and have decided to make some changes.

First of all, I’m planning to migrate V&B from Ghost to a blog platform in September. This will provide a more flexible and open space for comments and interaction between me and you.

Second, I’m going to move away from the subscription model and instead make the newsletter free to all. So for those of you who have been subscribing on either a monthly or an annual basis: please don’t renew after August; it won’t be necessary. (I’m trying to figure out how to make that change immediately in Ghost so that renewal is disabled, but one of my complaints about that platform is how difficult they make it to see how to make such changes.)

Over the next month or so I’ll be migrating the existing library of V&B posts over to a blog so that when I make the transition in September, everything will be there waiting for us.

So stay tuned! There will be more information soon. In the meantime, I plan to continue my twice-weekly posting schedule, so watch for a new article this Thursday.

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly – a risk I take twice every week here at Vision & Balance – I want to warn all of us away from a common abdication of responsibility that masquerades as intellectual humility among leaders: the tired formulation “I have no answers, only questions.” Every time I hear or read it, you can hear me muttering to himself like an old man with neighborhood kids on his lawn.

Let me start out, though, by acknowledging some obvious and important truths:

• No leader (or follower, or anyone else) has all the answers.
• No one should be embarrassed about not having answers, at least at the beginning of a problem-solving process.
• Questions are incredibly important, and it’s usually essential to start with questions.
• Some questions have no answers, or at least no single universally correct answer.

Having acknowledged these important points, why am I then criticizing the position “I have no answers, only questions”?

Because library leaders have to do more than ask questions, or encourage others to ask questions. The library is a service organization that exists to solve problems and accomplish tasks for its patrons and its sponsoring institution. Leaders who wish to do those things effectively, and in a way that nurtures and empowers library employees, will approach question-asking as a means to an end, not an end in itself, and will take responsibility for ensuring that questions lead to answers that result in problem-solving and employee nurturance.

In other words, a wise leader’s posture might be better summarized as “We have questions. Let’s work together to find good answers and apply them.”

The work of library leadership does not require you always to be right. But it does require you to do more than ask questions.

But what do you do when there isn’t a single clear “right” answer, or when there’s disagreement within the leadership team or the organization as a whole as to what the best solution is?

These are the situations in which leaders earn their leader salaries – not necessarily by being the one to make the hard call (though that will sometimes be necessary), but by doing the hard work of cooperative analysis and, in some cases, doing the very painful work of deciding who will win and who will lose (an issue discussed previously here and here).

What’s clear, though, is that an academic library leader’s work consists not only of asking good questions and keeping an open mind, but also of working through those questions and arriving at answers that move his or her library forward in support of the people and the institution the library serves. The answers will not always – will, in fact, very rarely – be perfect, and they won’t even always be right. They will sometimes be appropriate at one time but become less so as circumstances change. There’s nothing wrong with that; the work of leadership does not require you always to be right. But it does require you to do more than ask questions.