Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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.

In the latest installment of my ongoing discussion of important ideas and processes that are too often denigrated in our profession (and yet that do have downsides and complications – hence “two and a half” rather than “three” cheers), today I’m going to briefly talk about a phrase that has really come to grate on me in recent years: “scarcity mindset.”

We’ve all heard this term and may have used it ourselves. What does it mean? Depends whom you ask, but the phrase is generally used in a derogatory way to refer to a person’s tendency to think in terms of competition in a context of limited resources rather than cooperation and possibility in a context of abundance. I was actually surprised to see that there’s an entry for “scarcity mentality” on the WebMD website, though here it seems to be talking mostly about a pathological mental habit rather than about a more general understanding of the world (or a part of it). According to WebMD, “if you have a scarcity mindset, you are so obsessed with what you lack that you can’t seem to focus on anything else, no matter how hard you try,” whereas “with an abundance mindset, you can see opportunities and possibilities that you might miss with a scarcity mindset, when you’re fixated on one thing.”

Of course, any mental orientation or general understanding of the world can be taken to a pathological extreme. But what I’m offering “two and a half cheers” for today is not a rigid understanding of the world as a place in which you’ll never get enough of what you need, but rather a mental awareness of the fact that in virtually every professional (and certainly library) context resources are, in fact, always strictly limited – and, in many if not most of those contexts, essential resources are not just limited but scarce. Virtually no academic library has all the staff it wants or arguably needs; no library has a big enough collections budget or enough space for the all the materials it already owns. Every year the library asks for a bigger budget, because every year the cost of being a library grows; librarians constantly weed their collections in order to make room for new acquisitions, because virtually every library’s space is genuinely insufficient.

These may seem like uncontroversial observations, but anyone who has been in a leadership or management position, and therefore charged with managing limited resources, has probably been criticized for having a “scarcity mindset” by those who want to use the resources for their own projects and don’t like being told that the resources are already tied up in other, equally important uses – or, worse, that funds are actually available but need to be reserved strategically for other possible uses.

So what should you say when someone accuses you of having a “scarcity mindset”? Here are a few possible responses, all designed not to shut down conversation or make the other person feel dumb, but rather to prevent the conversation being shut down and to dig deeper into the real issues:

• “When you say ‘scarcity mindset’ in this context, what do you mean? Do you believe the resources in this case are more abundant than they seem to me?”
• “Can you tell me more about how you believe I should be thinking about the resources in this case?”
• “If you were in my position, how would you be thinking about the allocation of these resources? Do you think we need a different strategy?”
• By ‘scarcity mindset,’ do you mean that I’m misinformed about the nature of these resources, or do you think my priorities in managing them should be different?”

Many years ago I was reading a novel in which the main character purchases a ramshackle second home in the country with the intention of fixing it up and turning it into an escape from his first home in the city. As he’s inspecting the basement, he notices something alarming: an upright post that should be anchored to the floor and supporting a transverse beam in the basement ceiling (and thus helping to support the floor above). Instead, for some reason, the post doesn’t quite reach the floor and is hanging from the beam that it was meant to support – thus not only failing to perform its intended function, but actually contributing to the problem it was meant to solve.

This mental image – that of a beam holding up a post instead of being supported by the post – has come to my mind on many occasions during my work as a library manager and a leader, when I’ve encountered workflows and practices that were created in order to facilitate tasks that were of questionable value, or found that our library had created elaborate protocols in support of programs that were intended, themselves, to provide support to the library and its staff.

For example: have you ever worked in a library that held lots of professional

development events and programs in which few employees were very interested, and then enlisted staff to try to drum up attendance at those events and programs? In this scenario, the professional development programming is supposed to be the post holding up the beam of staff morale and development, but the staff end up expending morale and bandwidth in holding up the post of professional development programming. (The solution may be to improve the programming, or to do less of it, or to rethink the library’s professional developments completely and go back to the drawing board.)

Another hypothetical: suppose your library has used book approval plans for decades, expecting the subject librarians to review weekly the books sent in their disciplines and indicate which ones should be kept and which returned. But now suppose that since the plans were instituted back in the 1980s, the librarians have mostly turned to other selection practices and tools. However, because your head of collection development has always loved approval plans and is deeply invested in them as a program, he continues to insist that the subject librarians review the books and title notifications every week. In this scenario, the approval plan is supposed to be a post holding up the beam of efficient collection development and saving time for the subject librarians – but instead, the librarians are taking time away from their other collection development duties in order to support a program that doesn’t work well for them. (In this case, the solution may be to streamline the approval program or to do away with it altogether.)

As you look around your library, you may well find situations like these, in which processes that are intended to provide support to the organization are instead being supported by ill-considered or just outdated processes and workflows. Unfortunately, identifying these is the relatively easy part; the more difficult part is working with your staff to institute what could in some cases be radical but necessary changes to their workflows. For some thoughts on how to deal with such situations, see “Dealing with Resistant Staff: Some Principles and Some Practices.”

Takeaways and Action Items

• All library workflows and programs should demonstrably support a key library function.
• Don’t be afraid to cease or radically change a workflow or program that doesn’t.
• Look around your library: are there any longstanding practices that don’t have a clear purpose in relation to the library’s mission and priorities? Are there any workflows that seem designed to support areas or practices that are actually supposed to support those workflows? Talk to the relevant managers. Chances are good that they share your frustration but don’t think it’s possible to change them.

In this two-part post, I’m going to address two of the most common organizational problems I’ve encountered over the course of my career. The first one is what I call “killing a fly with a sledgehammer.” The second will be about “posts and beams.”

To understand and address the “flies and sledgehammers” problem, you need to have internalized the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Effectiveness is a measure of the degree to which your task has been accomplished: simply put, if your approach to the task resulted in its completion, then your approach was effective. Efficiency is a measure of how much expense (time, effort, money, etc.) went into your completion of the task. In other words, if you put more time, effort, money, etc. into completing the task than was actually needed, then your approach was inefficient – even if it was effective. Effectiveness tends to be a more or less binary measure: either the task is completed or it isn’t. Efficiency, however, is a spectrum measure: one’s approach to a task will be more or less efficient.

What does this have to do with leadership in libraries? Lots. In fact, thinking about (and making judgments on) questions of both effectiveness and efficiency is one of the most fundamental things you do as a leader, and you do it pretty much every day.

As a leader, you will have people coming to you constantly with proposals: proposals for new policies, new programs, new workflows, new hires, etc. You will also have them coming to you with proposals for the elimination or alteration of policies, programs, workflows, etc. And the questions you’ll need to ask yourself and your team as you consider these proposals will center, importantly, on questions of both effectiveness (“will this work?”) and efficiency (“will the benefit be worth the cost?”). In the library where I work, my team has probably gotten tired of me framing efficiency questions with these two metaphors:

“Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

and

“Are we killing a fly with a sledgehammer here?”

Sledgehammers kill flies very effectively, of course – but they require the investment of lots of strength, much more than is needed to kill a fly.

A few library-specific scenarios in which one would be wise to consider questions such as this include:

• Staffing distribution. Do you have the right number of librarians and library staff assigned to your various functional areas, or do you have too many working on deliverables for which there is little demand, or that do relatively little to further your mission?
• Workflows. Are you doing things in an inefficient way because someone with a strong personality insists that they be done that way? Do you have inefficient workflows that are a legacy of an earlier time, when technology was different? Are people simply doing things the way they’ve always been done rather than critically examining their workflows for possible efficiency gains? When was the last time you asked a division head to review the workflows in the departments she oversees, looking for practices that reflect a clear mismatch between “squeeze” and “juice”? (Note: it’s important that workflows be reviewed by someone at least one level above the department or unit, because chances are good that the department manager or unit head is invested in the existing workflows.)
• Job requirements. Do all of your jobs require, for example, applicants to hold a bachelor’s degree? If so, why? Is it possible that, at least in some areas, you’re throwing too much expertise at work that doesn’t require that much (or assuming that a bachelor’s degree confers more relevant expertise than it does)?
• Budget allocations. Most libraries have such limited budgets these days that budget efficiency is hardly an issue; they’re trying so hard to achieve baseline effectiveness with their scarce resources that waste is not really a problem. But particularly in academic libraries, there are always large or large-ish budgets that need to be monitored closely. We need to be careful not to get so hawkish about waste that we end up (ironically) investing disproportionate effort in ferreting out tiny problems, but leaders and managers should always be asking themselves whether library funds are being spent with as little waste as possible. Are we negotiating discounts effectively? Are we buying the right content and avoiding buying the wrong content? (Do we know how to distinguish between the two?) Are we saving money where we can on less-essential things in order to spend more on essential things? (Do we have a clear and shared understanding in the organization as to what things are more and less essential?)

As I discussed in an earlier post, we do need to be careful how we think about efficiency – it is not the be-all and end-all of library work. But it’s also too easy to reflexively dismiss it. Library leaders and managers are stewards of institutional resources, and have both a professional and an ethical obligation to take good care of them. This means, among many other things, not wasting them.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Whether our tasks get accomplished is a centrally important concern; almost as important is the question of how much of our institutional resources were invest in accomplishing them.
• Efficiency is not everything; but it’s a very important thing.
• Are there any policies, programs, or workflows in your library that you suspect reflect a bad ratio of “juice” to “squeeze”? How will you redress that imbalance? Who, on your leadership or management team, can you count on to help you get there?

Today is a national holiday in the US, so I’m away on a brief vacation. Enjoy, and see you next week!

I have a confession to make: I’ve always thought of myself as a fundamentally lazy person. I mean, not pathologically lazy; when our kids lived at home I always really tried to make sure I was carrying my weight in the childcare department (my wife was a stay-at-home mom, and my cardinal rule was: both of us have full-time jobs, and that means both of us continue working side-by-side until the kids are in bed), and I work hard at my job, and I’d rather be just a little too busy than be wondering what I should do with myself. I get up early and run three miles, six days a week. But now that our nest is empty, most evenings I’m very happy to sit on the couch for most of the evening, bingeing a British crime series with my wife. I love, love, love sleeping in on weekends. And almost as much as any of those things, I love letting someone else be in charge of a meeting. I love figuring out ways to get things done with less effort.

Maybe to put it another way: I love my work, but I don’t feel any particular desire to do more of it than I need to.

With all of that in mind, as I’ve risen through the ranks of leadership and my scope of stewardship has broadened, I’ve noticed something about myself: I am always – always – on my email. I don’t know how many times I check it per day; I don’t even know how to quantify my checking of email. Email is open on my desktop during all the hours I’m at work, and I check it first thing when I get home, multiple times during the evening, and then last thing before I go to sleep at night. I monitor email throughout the weekend and on holidays and when I’m on vacation. I don’t always reply during those periods (especially not during weekends and holidays, when I need to be careful about sending the wrong message to my staff), but I still always feel the need to know what’s in my inbox, if only to reassure myself that there’s nothing in there that will blow up on me later.

My wife is a very patient person and doesn’t usually get on my case about this. However, once while we were on vacation I said something off-hand about not being a workaholic, and she kind of raised her eyebrow and said, “Are you sure about that?”. It really struck me that she said that – and it made me try to take a step back and observe my own behavior from her vantage point. And sure enough: when I did that, I could see how my behavior would look to someone else like that of a workaholic, someone who just can’t ever detach from their work.

But how could I simultaneously be a workaholic and someone who is fundamentally lazy? And what does any of this have to do with you, dear reader?

After giving this issue a fair amount of thought over the years, here are a few conclusions I’ve come to:

1. “Workaholism” doesn’t have a precise definition. For many kinds of addiction, the rule of thumb is “If the thing to which you think you might be addicted is negatively affecting one or more of your major life functions, you may have a problem.” I think that’s a pretty useful and rational principle. So instead of asking yourself “Am I a workaholic?,” maybe ask yourself “Do I find myself wishing I could work less so that I could do more _____ [fill in the blank: mountain-climbing, playing with my kids, talking to my spouse, reading non-work-related books, community service, etc.]?” If the answer is yes, then ask yourself what the top three non-work things are that you wish you were doing more of, and start with the top one. How much would you have to cut back on work in order to do that thing? Start there.
2. Your work-life balance is not just about you. If you’re single and live alone, and if you absolutely love your job, then maybe working 12-14 hours a day really does represent a good work-life balance for you. If working that much is what brings you joy, I’m not sure it’s anyone else’s place to say you’re wrong. But chances are good that you do have relationships outside of work that matter to you, and your approach to work is going to have an impact on the other people in those relationship. If you have a spouse and/or children, the potential impact on them is obvious. But how often to do you see or talk to your parents or siblings? How often do you say to friends “Sorry, I can’t go out with you tonight – too much work to do”? How often do you turn down opportunities to provide service to others because of work pressures? Even if your higher-than-usual dedication to (and genuine enjoyment of) your job makes you happy, is it taking a toll on the happiness of others you care about? If so, how much does that matter to you?
3. What example are you setting for your staff? I’ll never forget an experience I had about thirteen years ago. I was serving as the interim dean of a library at a major research institution, and enjoying the experience. I particularly enjoyed the relationship I had developed with the provost, who was very supportive and a joy to work with. Once during this period, while I was on vacation with my family, I woke up in the middle of the night and found myself unable to get back to sleep. After a while I got out of bed, grabbed my laptop, made my way to another room where I wouldn’t disturb anyone, and checked my email. I don’t remember what the issue was that grabbed my attention, but it led me to write a message to the provost. I sent the message off, closed my computer, and went back to bed. The next day the provost called me, and really gave me a dressing-down. “I don’t EVER want to see an email from you at 2:00 am again,” he said. And he was absolutely right. Imagine if I had sent that message to someone who reported to me – what would I have been saying to them? But also, the provost was concerned about my own work-life balance – he was saying “I’m your boss and I don’t want you to be working at 2:00 am.” I’ve never forgotten that experience, and I’ve tried to (maybe a bit more gently) convey the same message to those who work for me.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think there are any hard-and-fast rules about work-life balance, or any easy formulas that can help you decide whether you’re a workaholic. But if you think you might have a problem, I’d suggest that the best place to start is by talking to whoever it is you’re closest to – the friend, parent, spouse, daughter, son, sibling, or whoever it is that represents your most important relationship – and asking them what they think. You may or may not agree with or decide to act on what they say, but I bet you’ll come away with useful information.

Takeaways and Action Items

• There’s no hard-and-fast formula for defining an appropriate work-life balance.
• Your work-life balance affects others as well as you.
• Ask yourself whether your dedication to work is stopping you from doing anything else you really want to do. How much time do you wish you had for that other thing? What’s one thing you could change about your approach to work that might contribute to your ability to do that thing?

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.