Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

Earlier this year I offered three posts on the topic of library policy management: the first addressed both the importance of written policies and the tendency of libraries to create too many; the second described what I call a “healthy policy regime”; the third warned about ways in which policies can be hijacked.

In this, the fourth installment in what will likely turn out to be an open-ended series of posts on this theme, I want to talk about the danger of letting policy creation and rescission be driven by strong personalities. This can happen in at least two ways, from at least two directions:

First, in the direction of policy creation: people with strong personalities can drive the creation of inappropriate policies.

Second, from the direction of policy rescission: people with strong personalities can push the organization to stop observing policies, or to create inappropriate policy exceptions or interpretations.

Both of these things tend to happen when leaders are willing to take a leader’s pay but not willing to do a leader’s work – which, often and very importantly, includes being strong and principled when faced with pressure from difficult and strong-willed employees. They also tend to happen when the library does not, in fact, have a healthy policy regime – or, in other words, does not have a clear and robust system in place for creating and rescinding policies (or a good “policy of policies,” if you will).

What does this kind of situation look like? Here are a few hypothetical scenarios:

• A librarian comes to you and says “We need to put some limits on what people are allowed to microwave in the lunchroom. There’s one guy who keeps microwaving fish and it’s disgusting.” You know this librarian to be someone who really struggles to take “no” for an answer and who, unless you accede to his request, is probably going to keep bringing the idea up endlessly until you give in – and will probably go around the library looking for people he can enlist in his crusade.
• A staff employee comes to you and says “Phyllis is driving me crazy. She keeps sending my expense reports back whenever there’s the slightest error, even just a typo. Can’t we simplify our expense reports so that she has less opportunity to throw her weight around and make our lives miserable?” You’ve heard other complaints about Phyllis and her zeal for enforcing the minutiae of expense reporting, so you know this is an issue for others in the library as well.
• Three librarians come to your office with a demand that the library’s standard working hours be changed in order to better accommodate the needs of employees with small children. These three librarians have come to you with similar demands in the past, and have always managed to make your life miserable when they didn’t get what they wanted. As the director, you have the authority to change library hours as you see fit, so you’re seriously tempted to just give them a “win” on this issue.

Let’s look at each of these scenarios in turn, and analyze them from the perspective of personality and policy.

In the first scenario, the person with the strong personality is the one who is bringing you the policy proposal: he wants you to create a policy saying what can and can’t be put in the lunchroom microwave. Because you’ve dealt with him in the past and know his patterns, it would be tempting to just give him what he wants and have signs put up in the lunchroom saying “Stinky foods are not allowed in the microwaves.” This would get your difficult employee out of your office and short-circuit the crusade that would surely follow if you rebuffed him (for now, anyway). However, because you’ve bypassed the normal procedure for creating library policy, this approach will lead to problems. For one thing, whose definition of “stinky food” will prevail? (What if the fish-eater doesn’t know or agree that her food is stinky?) For another thing, what if there are more people in the library who want the freedom to microwave whatever they want than there are people who object to that freedom? If you follow a normal policy formation protocol, these important questions (and others) would be addressed and dealt with as part of the process, before the policy was enacted. However, the end result might not satisfy your difficult employee.

Policies must be based on clear and fair principles, consistently applied – not on the leader’s desire to avoid conflict with difficult people.

So what would be the better response to your importunate librarian? Something along the lines of “I can see the value of a policy limiting what can and can’t be put in the lunchroom microwaves. How about if you draft a policy that would set some parameters, and send it up the line through your supervisor so that we can consider it in a future leadership meeting, to which we’ll invite you so you can explain the context for the proposal?”. With this response, you’re not saying no – but you’re also not letting your desire to avoid confrontation with the difficult employee drive you to create a policy that may or may not make sense.

In the second scenario, the strong personality is not the person asking for a change in policy (in this case, the information required in an expense report); instead, it’s Phyllis who may have become overzealous in enforcing the policy. In this case, the temptation will be to thwart the overzealous employee by unilaterally changing the expense form. But this would be a mistake, because you haven’t established that there’s anything wrong with the expense form itself. Instead, it’s very possible that the form needs to remain the same, and that Phyllis needs to be counseled on her behavior. Of course, it’s also possible that Phyllis is handling the situation in exactly the right way, and that the person who is complaining about her is actually the one who needs to change – perhaps by paying more attention to the seemingly small but actually very important details of his expense reporting.

Whichever the case, the wise leader will not let herself be goaded into a premature policy decision by the behavior of an employee with a strong personality. Instead, she will do some due diligence, which will include learning more about what Phyllis is actually doing as well as analyzing the expense form to make sure that everything it requires is really necessary. (Or, even better, delegate these tasks to the relevant manager.) Then, if it seems like changes are necessary, the normal policy-adjustment protocol can be put into action.

In the third scenario, the leader is tempted to make a policy change for the primary purpose of giving three people who rarely get what they want a “win” – and, let’s be honest, also to get them off the leader’s back. But these are both terrible reasons to change a library policy that affects everyone, patrons and employees alike. Changing the library’s hours will affect when patrons can use the library; it will have implications for the staffing of service desks; it will disproportionately impact employees with longer commutes; etc. All policy changes have knock-on effects and unintended consequences – this is why we follow careful practices and procedures when considering policy changes. If the three people who want this change are upset by the leader’s insistence that their demand follow the normal policy protocol, and if they subsequently make his life miserable, the best response is not to give in to their demands – it’s to hold them accountable for their behavior.

Across these scenarios, the consistent factor is principle: policies need to be based on principles that are applied consistently and fairly, and need to be enacted and rescinded according to procedures that are followed consistently and fairly.

Allowing personalities to drive organizational change ends up causing grief for everyone – ultimately, including those the leader is trying to mollify by giving in.

Takeaways and Action Items

• The library’s policies and organizational structure need to be shaped by the fair and consistent application of principles, not by the preferences of strong-willed individuals.
• Policies should be both enacted and rescinded as a result of procedures that are clear and that are applied consistently. Ensuring this is the leader’s job.
• Practice responding to someone who comes to you with a demand for a new policy, or for the change or rescission an existing one. Imagine that this person is very upset and is threatening to make your life miserable if you don’t accede. How will you respond? What will you say, and what questions will you ask?

As a library leader, chances are good that you do at least some of your work outside of normal office hours. You’re probably checking email in the evening after dinner, or when you first get up in the morning, and responding to at least some of it in real time rather than waiting until you get back to the office. Or maybe you’re traveling to a faraway conference or a consulting gig and reading your email at a time that represents normal working hours where you are but is in the middle of the night for your employees back home. Or maybe inspiration strikes you as you’re going to bed and you jump up and write a message to your team while the inspiration is still strong.

In these moments, you’re sending more than just the messages you write. The content of one of those emails represents your explicit message. But you’re also sending implicit messages – yes, plural – and those messages may actually be more important and more impactful than the explicit messages you’re sending. And the more you rely on implicit rather than explicit messaging, the more confusion and stress you’re going to cause for your employees.

Here’s an example of what I mean.

Suppose you check your email after dinner on Tuesday evening and see a note from a university administrator that was sent just before you left the office, asking you to put together some personnel data and send them to her by Friday. You forward the message to your HR manager, asking him to have the data to you by Thursday so you can review it together before forwarding it to the administrator.

What messages have you sent with this email?

The obvious, explicit message is the request for data with a deadline. But intentionally or not, you may have also sent some implicit messages, including:

• “I work all hours of the day and evening.”
• “I expect you to keep an eye on your email all hours of the day and evening.”
• “I expect you to respond to email whenever I send it, regardless of the time.”

Now, to be clear: you likely had no intention of sending any of the above messages. You were just looking at your email and you followed up when you saw the message from the administrator, thus getting the request off of your to-do list and the ball into someone else’s court so you could rest easy that night. But all of us send implicit messages unintentionally all the time, and as library leaders we need to be unusually careful about the messages we send unintentionally. The people we lead are always watching us for clues as to what we expect of them, and while some – not many – will speak up and ask for clarification when they want it, most will err on the side of caution and assume you want more from them than might actually be the case. (“Hey, I got an email from you at 9:00 pm the other night. I just want to make sure I understand what your expectations are with regard to my working hours,” said hardly any employee ever.)

The good news, of course, is that it’s relatively easy to avoid imposing this kind of ambiguity and stress on your employees: all you need to do is be clear and up-front about what your expectations actually are.

For example, we’ve probably all seen email messages from library leaders that include, under their signatures, a note that says something like this:

I work flexible hours and you may receive messages or responses from me at odd times. Please don’t feel pressure to respond until you are at work.

That can work very well, especially when it accompanies your routine email communications.

With my leadership team, I’ve gone a step further. When I first began in my current position, I sent them all the following message:

I hate unwritten rules and unspoken expectations; I don’t think they’re fair. I’ve always felt that if something is expected of you, it should be expressed clearly so that you have a fighting chance of meeting the expectation. In that spirit, here are a few things I want to make clear to everyone: 

1. You may receive email from me at any hour of the day or night, simply because that’s the way I like to work. But I want to make sure it’s clear to everyone that just because you get an email from me at 10:00 pm on a Saturday, that doesn’t mean that I expect you to be monitoring your email after hours and on weekends – it probably just means that a thought or idea or concern occurred to me at an odd time and I’d rather act on that thought right away than try to remember it and communicate it later. With rare exceptions (see next item), any email communication you receive from me after hours will not need a response until the regular workday.
2. In light of the above, I’d like to give you all my cell number (801-xxx-xxxx) and ask each of you to provide me with yours. This will allow me to contact you after hours in the event of an emergency or genuinely urgent need. If you entrust me with your number, I promise that I will only use it outside of work hours when truly necessary. This, rather than via email, is how I’ll get ahold of you in the event of an unusual need outside of business hours (though my communication may say “Please see the email I just sent you”). You should feel free to contact me that way as well, if you need to talk to me urgently. When calling or texting me, you don’t need to apologize or justify yourself; I will assume that you’re reaching out because you need me and I will always respond cheerfully. If I can’t respond immediately, you’ll get a text response that says “May I call you back in a few minutes?”

This approach has worked really well for us – it gives me the assurance that I can get ahold of my team in the unlikely event of a real emergency, and it gives them the assurance that unless they get a text from me, they’re under no pressure to monitor their email outside of regular work hours.

Of course, some employees do need to be on call in the evenings and on weekends, depending on the nature of their jobs. But good leaders will make sure that everyone who works for them fully understands what those expectations are.

Takeaways and Action Items

• You are always sending implicit messages about what you expect of your employees. The more aware you are of those implicit messages, the better positioned you are to ensure that those expectations are reasonable.
• The more you can make those implicit messages explicit, the happier your employees will be.
• Examine your own email behavior. What messages are you sending, intentionally or unintentionally, to your employees with that behavior? Do you need to adjust it, or make your expectations more explicit?

Many years ago, I was invited to give an online presentation. These were the days before Zoom, when it was more common for webinars to be broadcast almost like TV shows. In fact, the organization that had organized this particular webinar had an actual TV studio, complete with a living-room like set and multiple cameras, from which its programs emanated. As odd as it may sound in 2025, I was actually flown to another state to deliver a web-based presentation.

Anyway, when I arrived at the studio they showed me around and explained how everything was going to work, and then I was ushered into a room where a professional makeup artist was waiting to perform the unenviable (and ultimately fruitless) task of trying to make me look good on camera. When she was done (or, more likely, had given up) I was left to myself to wait for showtime.

As I waited, I wandered around the studio a bit, a paper collar sticking up from under my shirt to protect it from the still-fresh makeup that had been applied to my face and neck. As I turned the corner around the edge of the set, a technician came scurrying around the same corner from the other direction and we almost collided. I apologized for being underfoot, and he looked a bit scandalized. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re the talent. It’s my job to stay out of your way.” For a brief moment I wondered if he was giving me a hard time, but it was immediately clear that he was being completely sincere.

I’ve thought about this interaction many, many times in the years since. Because up until that day, I had always privately flattered myself that in the extremely unlikely event that I ever became rich and famous, I was much too grounded and centered and basically decent to ever turn into one of those screeching, clueless, demanding rock stars that you see and hear about – the ones who become so addicted to their privilege, and have so come to believe that their privilege is a natural outgrowth of who they really are, that they can no longer stand not to have everything they want, the moment they want it.

Good leaders don’t pretend that they aren’t in leadership positions – but they also don’t let themselves fall prey to vanity and hype

What I realized, in the moment that the studio technician said to me “Oh no, you’re the talent – it’s my job to stay out of your way,” was that if I were treated like that all day, every day, it would be an embarrassingly short time before I turned into a complete monster.

Now: why am I sharing this experience in a newsletter about library leadership – a job category that offers (believe me) very little in the way of fawning sycophancy or even significant job perks (though heaven knows there are some)?

I’m sharing it because as you rise in an organizational hierarchy, you gain increasing amounts of organizational privilege – and even if people aren’t bringing you drinks or fluffing your pillows or constantly telling you how marvelous you are, they are nevertheless treating you differently than they would if you were not in a position of power over them. When you’ve risen to a leadership position you may have noticed that your jokes became just a bit funnier, or that when you spoke up and voiced an opinion in a meeting, the conversation tended to peter out, or that you got more compliments on the quality of your work and your management style (or even your clothes) than you used to.

If you think back on your career, chances are good that you can remember dealing with some difficult leaders who were difficult, in significant part, because they had experienced this kind of organizational privilege and had inhaled rather than resisted it. They let themselves come to believe that they deserved to be treated the way people were treating them because they had power over them. The more organizational power you gain, the more important it becomes to avoid letting yourself slip into that way of thinking.

Now, to be clear: “resisting” this treatment doesn’t mean being ungracious about it or adopting an air of false modesty (which can be really irritating in its own way) or declining to make decisions. Good leaders don’t pretend that they’re not in leadership positions. And we should also be clear that the phrase “check your privilege” can itself be abused by those who are looking for a way to avoid dealing with issues or used as an attack against leaders they don’t like – good leaders also don’t let themselves be pushed around by those they’re supposed to be leading. But you do need to be self-aware, and you need to do the hard work of maintaining that self-awareness over time.

What does that look like? Here are a few specific tips that my experience has suggested can be helpful:

Don’t be the first to express an opinion. In a meeting or an email discussion, let others express their opinions before you speak up, because once you weigh in there will be some who then become reluctant to say something different. Don’t fool yourself: when you’re in a leadership position, yours is not just one more voice in the general scrum of ideas. It’s a voice that comes freighted with extra organizational weight, no matter how hard you try to make space for others’.

Go to other people’s offices rather than summoning them to yours. This may sound like a very minor thing, but when you’re in leadership, small gestures can have an outsized impact. Asking someone to come to your office is a power move (and there may be times when you do so for exactly that reason). Going to someone else’s office conveys humility. And getting in the habit of seeking people out rather than summoning them can help inoculate you against internalizing an undue sense of privilege.

Don’t keep people waiting if you can possibly avoid it. Closely related to the point above is the principle that you can always tell who has the most power in an organization by looking at who is able to keep whom waiting. Don’t let yourself accidentally convey a lack of consideration for others’ time just because you can get away with it. If you must keep someone waiting, apologize – make it clear that you were not engaging in a power move.

Be gracious in receiving compliments, but be very careful not to take credit for others’ work. When you’re in a leadership position you’ll get a lot of compliments as well as a lot of criticism. When someone compliments you, don’t argue; thank them for their kindness and let the conversation move on (asking them something about their own work is one gracious way to shift the subject). But when someone compliments you on something about the library that actually arose from the work of others, make sure you tell them whose work they’re really complimenting. The more you praise your people behind their backs, the better. When you praise them to their faces they may not believe you, but when they hear from someone else that you praised them when they weren’t around they’re more likely to believe the praise was real and sincere.

In last Tuesday’s post, titled “Two and a Half Cheers for Meetings,” I discussed the obvious fact that meetings are an essential feature of work in academic libraries, but also the possibly less-obvious fact that meetings come at a different cost for different people – and that library leaders need to be aware of that fact and keep in mind that the same meetings that solve problems for them may create problems for others.

This leads to an obvious question: what can library leaders do to help ensure that the meetings they call and run are more effective, efficient, and maybe even enjoyable for all who attend them?

As promised, here are five ideas based on my own experience.

First, don’t call an in-person meeting unless an in-person meeting is necessary. In my library I chair two leadership groups: Executive Administrative Council (which consists of myself and my associate university librarians, with my assistant as an ex officio member) and Administrative Council (which consists of the Executive Administrative Council as well as the library’s controller, HR manager, and elected representatives of the library staff and faculty). Both of these groups meet weekly. But we also conduct quite a bit of work via email. When an issue arises that requires a vote but that I believe will be uncontroversial and need little discussion, we send the item out to the group by email and request one of two responses: either a yea-or-nay vote (which is delivered via closed electronic ballot), or a request for further discussion. If anyone makes that request, then we discuss via email; if the discussion becomes extended or complex, then we may suspend the vote and the email discussion add the item to an upcoming in-person meeting agenda. This approach allows us to spend more time in our in-person meetings focusing on genuinely knotty issues and less of that time on straightforward matters that are easily resolved. The principle here is that in-person meeting time is a precious and limited resource and should be spent carefully – both to respect the bandwidth of the meeting attendees and to ensure that we have enough time in our meetings to address the issues that really need face-to-face discussion.

Second, make sure those who need to be in the meeting are there – and those who don’t need to be are not. I realize this may sound like a very obvious point, and it is. And yet all of us have had the experience of sitting in a meeting the agendas of which consisted mostly or entirely of items outside our sphere of stewardship or to which we were not in a position to bring useful insight. We have probably also all had the experience of trying to discuss an important issue in a meeting from which the main steward of that issue was absent, with the result that the discussion was inconclusive and possibly even a waste of time. Of course, no meeting can consist entirely of discussion items that are equally relevant to every member – but in order for any meeting to serve its intended function, it’s essential that all genuine stakeholders in the issues under discussion be present; and it’s also important not to take up the time of those who are not stakeholders if it can be avoided. One easy strategy to help with this principle is to front-load items on the agenda that require the presence of those who aren’t normally part of the meeting. So, for example, if you need to invite your facilities manager to a general budget meeting, put the relevant agenda item at the beginning of the meeting so that the facilities manager can be released from the meeting once that item is finished.

Third, distribute the agenda ahead of time. Again, this may seem like an obvious point, and it is. But again, all of us have had the experience of showing up for a meeting, seeing its agenda for the first time upon our arrival, and wishing we’d had the opportunity to prepare better. Some leaders take this approach thoughtlessly or through poor time management (“Oops, that meeting is in 15 minutes and I need to put an agenda together”). Others – fewer, I think – hide agendas until meeting time as a power move. In either case, the result is going to be less effective meetings and more time wasted.

Fourth, be an Agenda Nazi. I discussed the importance of managing agendas firmly and carefully in a previous post and won’t repeat all of those points here, but will simply reiterate how essential it is to manage the time allocated to individual agenda items wisely and consciously so as to ensure that the items at the end of the agenda aren’t given short shrift simply by virtue of their place on the list.

Fifth, don’t break into small groups. My last suggestion is one that, I confess, reflects my own personal preferences and my strong tendency towards introversion. But the more I talk with colleagues about meetings and meeting management, the stronger my perception that this is a very widely-held pet peeve. Hardly anyone seems to welcome that moment when the conference session or meeting leader says “OK, here’s a topic. For the next ten minutes I want you to form groups of three or four, discuss it, and then prepare to report back to the whole group.” Meeting leaders love this gambit: it allows them to offload a lot of the work of running the meeting onto everyone else. And I’ll stipulate that small-group discussion can, in some cases, be very effective and generate good ideas. (Some people actually seem to… enjoy it.) But it can also be very expensive in terms of goodwill among the group as a whole and, in my view, rarely returns good value for that cost in goodwill. Personally, I may or may not have quietly slipped out of large meetings and found a quiet place to do other work when it became clear that there were going to be small-group breakouts, and I know I’m not alone in possibly having done that. Or not done it.

The above is by no means an exhaustive list of ways to make your meetings better, but I hope at least one or two of these tips will be things that you find helpful.

This is another installment in my ongoing series of “Two and a Half Cheers” posts, in which I discuss something that I feel deserves more general respect in our profession – even while recognizing and acknowledging that people may have good reasons for denigrating it.

Today’s topic is meetings.

I’ve come to believe that one of the many ways people in the library profession can be sorted into two broad categories is on the dimension of affection for meetings. To put it more reductively, I think there are two kinds of librarians: those who love meetings, and those who hate them.

Personally, I really used to hate them. I generally felt like meetings were a distraction from my real work, and kind of resented being required to sit through what were often repetitive and circular discussions of issues that didn’t even have much to do with me.

The way I feel about meetings gradually changed as I rose through the organizational ranks and became a manager, then an administrator, and then a dean or director. The greater my scope of stewardship in the library, the more I found that meetings were becoming an essential tool for doing my work rather than a distraction from my work. And when you think about it, that makes sense: if you manage five people in a department, then getting some or all of those people together to address issues is going to be very helpful to you in getting stuff done; if you oversee three departments, you won’t be able to do it effectively without calling regular meetings of representatives from those departments; etc.

Meetings are often essential, but library leaders need to remember that meetings come at a different cost for different people.

As a library director, I find that there are certain meetings I actually really look forward to every week or month – because I know that those meetings will be productive (for me) and interesting (for me). Of course, others who have to attend them may feel differently, because those meetings may not solve problems for them in the same way they do for me. In fact, the very things that make those meetings problem-solvers for me might make them problem-causers for the people I work with.

This is something library leaders need to keep in mind: meetings come at a different cost for different people in your organization. Some leaders just like to call meetings because they like them – they enjoy being with other people, and they work best when they’re in a group, conversing and discussing. But for many people (and especially for many people who have chosen to work in libraries), this is decidedly not the ideal way to work; they function better by themselves, thinking quietly. And it’s not just a matter of personality differences and preferences; if your primary job (and what you get evaluated on) is cataloging a certain number of books each week or taking care of patrons who come to your service desk, then being in an hour-long meeting about the library’s code of conduct or serving on the search committee for a new subject librarian really does take you away from your primary duties in a way that isn’t the case for the library administrator who called the meeting.

So even when the meeting is necessary, it’s important to bear in mind that it affects the individuals who attend in different ways.

This raises an important question: as a library leader, what can you do to help ensure that the meetings you do call are as effective, efficient, and (to the degree possible) enjoyable as they can be for those who attend? In my next post I’ll offer a few ideas in answer to that.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Meetings are often essential. However, they’re not always essential.
• Every person in a meeting is paying a different price for being there.
• How do you think about meetings in your organization? Are there any that exist just because they’ve always existed? Are there times when you call a meeting just because you’d rather not have to write a long email?

I’m visiting a grandbaby this week (and also doing something else, what was it… oh, right, attending the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting – say hi if you’re there!), so this week there will only be a Thursday post, for paying subscribers.

See you next Tuesday!

We’ve all seen leaders brought low by hubris. One problem is that we’re all susceptible to it; another is that it can manifest itself in so many different ways. For one leader, it’s the mistaken belief that being in charge of the library means that she’s the best librarian in the organization, or that by virtue of her position she necessarily understands everyone else’s job. For another, it might manifest as a belief that he’s always right, or that being the director makes him the smartest person in the library.

Leaders who suffer from that kind of hubris tend not to succeed in the long run. They may rise quickly (especially if they really are very smart and are skilled politicians), but eventually they will end up offending too many people, burning too many bridges, and making too many myopic mistakes, and their hubris will catch up with them. Then they find themselves dismissed or pushed out of their positions – at which point, all too often, they will blame everyone but themselves.

Hubris can also manifest itself much more subtly, though, and although the twin examples I’m going to talk about today tend not to be as destructive as others, they can still cause you a lot of trouble if you aren’t self-aware about them.

The twin hubristic mistakes I’m referring to are believing you’re unique and believing you’re typical. Let’s unpack those for a minute, and then consider their implications for library leadership.

The Mistake of Believing You’re Unique

In reality, of course, each of us is technically unique; there is no one else exactly like any of us. However, in each of our attributes – age, intelligence, experience, social background, tastes, aptitudes, etc. – we are all parts of large, similar groups. And even in the distribution of our attributes, we’re still part of pretty large groups: as a white, 5’9”, brown-eyed, 60-year-old library professional from the United States, I’m a member of a pretty good-sized cohort.

This is all pretty obvious. What does it mean for me as a library leader?

For all of us – and especially those of us who have grown up in a culture that constantly encourages us to focus on our uniqueness – it can be very tempting to assume that our technical uniqueness gives us a perspective on the world that no one else shares, an understanding of the world around us that is ours and ours alone, and therefore a kind of expertise that no one else really shares. Again: this may be true in very narrow, specific domains (it’s entirely possible that you’re the only person in your library who can name ten reggae producers from the 1970s, for example), but it’s not usually true in broader, more practical arenas. In many ways, you’re much more like those around you than you might think, and it can be very important to bear that in mind as a leader. When you’re not in a leadership position, an overweening belief in one’s uniqueness can be annoying to others; when you are in a leadership position, it can really get in the way of your effectiveness and that of those you lead. 

Imagine, for example (and I realize that many readers may not have to imagine, but can call upon their lived experience with past leaders) a library director who lectures everyone on what libraries were like in the early 1990s – despite the fact that he’s surrounded by people who were there too. Or, more destructively, one who insists that she’s the only one qualified to perform tasks that could (and should) be delegated to others in the library. This kind of thinking not only makes you difficult to work with – it can also make it difficult for the people you lead to grow and develop or even to accomplish their assigned tasks.

The Mistake of Believing You’re Typical

The mirror-image problem of the one above is the hubristic belief that everyone else is just like you. Do you hate your library’s search interface? Then obviously, everyone must hate it. Do you prefer early-morning to late-afternoon meetings? Obviously, that’s because early-morning meetings are objectively better – surely everyone would agree with that. You hate meetings that incorporate small-group discussion, because… well, okay. Actually everyone does hate those. But you get my point: just as each of us is technically unique but still very much like others in important and meaningful ways, each of us is also very much like others but still unusual in our particular quirks, desires, talents, and tastes. It may be that I hate my library’s search interface because it’s objectively bad; it may also be that the interface works very well for the majority of people but doesn’t appeal to me because I have an unusual way of going about seeking information. 

What does this imply for me as a library leader?

One of the great dangers of being in a leadership position is that people tend to let you have your way. They will act like they agree with you when they really don’t; they will back down from an argument not because they think you’re right, but because they don’t want to offend you by pressing their point; they will organize events and processes around your personal preferences and inclinations. If you’re not very careful, you can begin to conclude that everyone around you thinks the way you do – and the longer you’re in a position of power, the greater the danger of succumbing to this particular kind of hubris. And then, before you know it, you’re acting entitled and arrogant without even realizing it, and undermining your team’s trust in you and their confidence in your perceptivity and insight. 

In my experience, leaders who fail very often do so by losing their people’s trust and confidence, and they don’t see it coming because they don’t realize they were doing anything wrong. Believing you’re unique and believing you’re typical are two mindset errors that can easily lead to that outcome. 

Takeaways and Action Items

• Each of us is technically unique, but in many functional ways we’re also very much like those around us.
• Each of us has much in common with those around us, but none of us is entirely typical – we can’t assume that our orientations, skills, and perspectives are anything close to universal.
• Spend a day paying close attention to your interactions with others, especially in a problem-solving context. Do you tend to approach problems and situations in a way that acknowledges your similarity to others without assuming your views are universally shared? Do you need to work harder to get that balance right?

With apologies for a post title that sounds like an attempt at a low-rent Zen paradox, I wanted to share this week something that has been on my mind a lot recently in the context of campus politics 

First of all, it should be clear at this point that navigating campus politics is a big part of the job of an academic library leader. Politics is not an unfortunate byproduct of campus life that arises from our failure to conduct academic business in an optimal way, nor is it even a necessary evil that arises from the interaction of human beings in an academic setting. Politics is the job. As leaders in academic libraries, our charge is to manage competing demands on limited resources and negotiate what are often conflicting desires between various stakeholders. We do this internally in our libraries, but also – especially if we’re library directors – as participants in such negotiations between campus entities. That’s politics.

When we complain about “campus politics,” what we’re usually complaining about are people who are (or seem to us to be) operating in bad faith, and about systems that are set up badly. And of course, it’s true that sometimes we do have to deal with people who are dishonest or who are pursuing individual or parochial concerns at the expense of the common good; and very often, our systems are set up in suboptimal ways. And it can be tempting to think that those manifestations of dishonesty and poor design represent “campus politics,” whereas when people are operating in good faith and systems are working as they should, that is somehow a manifestation of something other than campus politics.

But the danger of thinking this way is that it can lead us to underestimate the degree to which politics really does represent the substance of our work – not a distraction from our work or an ancillary demand that wouldn’t exist if everyone would just straighten up and fly right.

Campus politics is not a distraction from our work in academic library. Campus politics is the work.

For example, think about the last time you worked with managers or front-line employees in your library to resolve a conflict about workflows or priorities. That’s politics.

Think about the last time you worked with your leadership team to allocate budgets between departments and programs. That’s politics.

Attending a meeting of campus deans to discuss institution-wide issues? Politics.

Meeting regularly with the provost or vice president to whom you report? Politics.

Representing the university and the library to external donors? Politics, politics, politics.

As leaders in academic libraries, the substance of virtually everything we do is politics, and that’s not a bad thing. Our goal shouldn’t be to minimize politics; our goal should be to operate in good faith, to advance the strategic goals of our libraries and host institutions effectively, to serve our patrons and support the research enterprise superbly, and to provide healthy, nurturing professional environments for our employees. Being good campus politicians is not just essential to those endeavors – it’s intrinsic to them.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Instead of thinking of campus politics as a necessary evil, think of campus politics as the air we breathe in our work as leaders.
• Look at your calendar from last week. Was there any item on your schedule that couldn’t reasonably be characterized as “politics”?
• Ask yourself: what relationships, both inside the library and across campus, do I need to strengthen so that the library’s political position will be enhanced? 

One of the overwhelming things about being a manager or leader in an academic library is that the scope of things about which you really need to know something is vastly wider than your capacity for knowing things. It’s easy to feel like you’re constantly playing intellectual whack-a-mole: you realize that you need to understand network authentication better in order to keep your systems secure, and while you’re learning about that you start hearing about something called “generative AI” that may or may not have significant implications for the future of library services. New publishing models are constantly bubbling up, and with them requests for various kinds of funding support from your library – how should you respond? Better get informed, as quickly as you can, about the ever-shifting economics of scholarly publishing. And while all of this is going on, you’re also trying to deal with personnel issues, budget crises big and small, and “managing up” with your university administration.

And now, in the midst of all this, you have me telling you that there’s a bunch of stuff you need to be reading. Great.

But here’s the thing: leading in a library means more than just keeping an eye on what’s happening in the library, or even within the walls of your host institution. It also means keeping informed about what’s going on in the wider world of academia and of education policy. The good news is that you don’t need to dedicate hours of your day to boning up on these things – you can keep an eye on developments just by checking in on some key publications on a daily basis, watching for headlines that catch your attention and reading more deeply as you deem appropriate. Many of these publications will be happy to let you join an email list whereby you get a notification each morning of what’s being published that day, which makes it even easier.

Here are four such publications that I follow regularly (or pretty regularly), none of which has an explicit library focus:

The Chronicle of Higher Education. This is the New York Times of the American college and university scene, a weekly print and daily online publication that covers higher education issues with remarkable promptness and thoroughness and an admirable breadth of ideological diversity. You’ll get a nice mix of fact-based reporting and opinion, and there’s a good chance that you have a campus-wide site license already. As a library leader you need to know what your campus administration is concerned about, and the Chronicle is about as good a window on that as you could ask for. (Academe Today is the essential daily newsletter.)

Inside Higher Ed. For a somewhat more UK-centric overview, consider Inside Higher Ed, which is quite similar in orientation to the Chronicle but with more attention paid to developments in the UK (where it is published) and Europe. This can be a particularly worthwhile resource for library leaders with significant international involvements or at institutions that maintain a presence in Europe and the UK. (Inside Higher Ed offers both daily and weekly email newsletters, including titles focused on admissions and student success issues.)

The Scholarly Kitchen. This is the official blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, and it offers daily posts on issues related to scholarly publishing, libraries, and scholarly communication generally. Given the intimate relationship between libraries, publishers, funders, and policymakers, I find the Kitchen an essential check-in every morning. (You can sign up for notifications whenever a new piece is posted. Full disclosure: I am one of the “chefs” who write regularly for the Scholarly Kitchen, but I am not paid and have no financial interest in promoting it.)

The Free Press. This might seem like an odd inclusion, but I’ve found the Free Press to offer unique and valuable insights on the intersection of American politics and higher education. Recent relevant articles include “How Qatar Bought America” and “China’s Spies at Stanford,” and while the Free Press has caused much consternation among many in the academic community by casting a gimlet eye on the generally progressive social/political culture of academia, in my view they do a pretty good job of telling the truth regardless of whose bull gets gored in the process. I don’t always agree with them either, but I find the Free Press a particularly valuable general-news outlet for people who want a different perspective on the higher-education scene.

A few months ago I was reading an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the “friend deficit” among campus leaders. (By the way, the Chronicle is a must-read for library deans and directors. More on this in Thursday’s article)

I was struck by a couple of things in this piece. For one, I was startled to learn that there’s a significant “friend gap” among higher-ed leaders; I hadn’t noticed one myself, but quickly realized that I might be an outlier in this regard – partly because I’m unusually fortunate in my leadership and management team, partly because I have rich and rewarding social networks outside of the profession, and partly because I’m unusually introverted and may not be as sensitive to a “friend gap” as my more extroverted colleagues would be.

Anyway, the article offers what strikes me as very sound counsel for avoiding loneliness at the top, including:

• “Be friendly but don’t insist on friendship” (you should always be warm, open, and helpful, but beware of making your staff uncomfortable by playing the “be my friend” card)
• “Build at least some friendships that aren’t about talking shop” (these may be either inside or outside your organization; for example, I have a couple of people in my library with whom I talk regularly about shared musical interests)
• “Devote time to friendships with no higher-ed connection” (we all have such friendships – but how much time do we carve out for them?)
• “Make friends in high places… far away” (cultivate friendships with leaders in positions similar to yours at other institutions)
• “Don’t assume that professional conflict will end your friendship” (just because you’re at odds with someone over a budget or managerial or strategic issue does not mean your personal relationship has to rupture)

I would add a few more items to the above list:

• Build a leadership team you can trust. It makes a huge, huge difference to your emotional health if you have deep confidence and trust in the people who report directly to you. Building such a team can take time, of course – you don’t control whom you inherit when you come into a leadership position. But in many cases there are also ways to build and nurture trust with those already on your team. We’ll probably discuss this further in the future.
• Involve lots of people in your decision-making, especially in times of organizational change. Working side by side with good people through a difficult process can build long-lasting bonds of trust and mutual esteem. You’ll find that this experience also broadens and deepens the pool of candidates for future leadership, including potential members of your own leadership team.
• Be (appropriately) open about your challenges and frustrations. This can be a delicate balance; you don’t want to overshare or give your people the impression that it’s their job to reassure you or buck you up. But don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself when you screw up, to express disappointment when one of your initiatives doesn’t work out, or to let people know that you’re facing a difficult health situation or a major life transition. On the one hand, you need to project confidence and competence; on the other hand, everyone screws up sometimes, and a leader who models a healthy ability to acknowledge screw-ups and move on will be a blessing to those who look to her as an example. Finding that balance is one of the great (and rewarding) challenges of leadership – and it leads to greater trust between you and your team, and thus less loneliness at the top.

Takeaways and Action Items

• If you feel lonely in your position, ask yourself some diagnostic questions: how much do I trust my team? Where are my most important relationships? At what times or in what situations do I find myself feeling lonely?
• Be friend to the people you lead; but don’t make them feel pressured into being your friend.
• If you often find yourself feeling lonely in your job, look around and see if someone else in your organization is struggling. Ask yourself: what could I do to improve how that person feels working here? Then watch what happens when you extend yourself on that person’s behalf.