Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

Some years ago I was in a meeting with Susan Gibbons, the brilliant former university librarian at Yale (and current chief of staff to the president and Vice President for Collections). During the discussion, she said something that has stuck with me and that I have quoted many times since – it encapsulates a fundamentally important insight for academic libraries. I’m paraphrasing, because her exact words are long lost from my decreasingly reliable memory, but it was like this:

If you want your library to get strong and consistent support from the university, make sure that you position the library as an essential strategic partner rather than just another expensive piece of infrastructure.

Let’s take a moment to unpack the significance of this insight. 

When trying to explain the importance of the library to its host college or university, we often draw parallels to other important campus services like, say, electricity. Or we might use an anatomical metaphor: “The library is the heart of campus” is a classic one, or “the library is the lifeblood of teaching and learning.”

The key to robust administrative support for library collections, services, and facilities is making it clear that additional investments in those things will materially advance the university’s mission.

But consider how a university thinks about electricity. Is it essential? Absolutely; the university can’t do its work without electricity, and recognizes that fact by paying for electricity continuously and reliably. Is electricity something that the university wants to support by dedicating more and more resources to it every year? No. In fact, just the opposite: if possible, the university will find ways to save money on electricity by using less of it. Electricity is an expensive piece of infrastructure, and the university has a natural incentive to spend the minimum possible on electricity while still accomplishing its mission. Spending more on electricity might be necessary from time to time, but the university will only do so reluctantly, if it has no other choice. 

Is that the way you want your host institution to think about the library?

Now let’s consider another way the library might position itself. What if, instead of as an expensive but essential cost center, the library were seen as a campus program that consistently responds to investments of university resources by effectively helping the university move in its chosen strategic directions? What if, in the administration’s experience, every time they send more money the library’s way, they find that the university becomes more effective and more efficient at doing what it’s trying to do? In that scenario, instead of trying to figure out how to get away with spending the least amount of money possible on the library, the administration would be looking for opportunities to direct more campus resources towards the library and away from areas that support campus goals less effectively.

This is the core of Susan Gibbons’ insight, and I believe it’s an absolutely essential one for library leaders to understand: the key to robust and ongoing administrative support for library collections, services, and facilities is making it clear that additional investments in those things will materially advance the university’s mission. This, I believe, is much more powerful than feel-good platitudes about the library being the “heart of campus” or the “lifeblood of teaching and learning.” Administrators may genuinely believe that those things are true, and can say them all day long. Why wouldn’t they? It costs them nothing to do so, and it makes them sound like good people. But when the time comes to allocate resources within the constraints of a strictly limited budget, those resources will end up going to the programs and services that most effectively move the university in the direction it’s trying to go. 

So what does your library need to do differently in order to become one of those programs and services?

Takeaways and Action Items

• University money flows to the programs and services that most clearly and effectively advance the university’s priorities.
• Being characterized as the “heart of campus” does not automatically make the library one of those strategically central programs and services.
• How do you believe your administration sees the campus library – as an important piece of expensive infrastructure, or as an essential strategic partner? What do you and your leadership team need to do differently to position your library more solidly in the latter category?

In libraries, we’re dealing with constantly increasing costs and are funded by institutions that are experiencing the same thing. This means not only that we’re competing with other campus units for budget enhancements each year so that we can continue doing what we’ve been doing – and hopefully expand collections and services a little bit – but we’re also, most of us, competing for those enhancements in an environment of significant institutional constraint. 

To put it more simply: we’re not just fighting to get more money to keep up with price increases; we’re fighting to keep what we have. And sometimes, because campus resources are strictly limited, we’ll lose that fight. Despite our most valiant and herculean efforts, there will be years when the library budget gets cut. 

In those moments, it will be tempting to avoid asking why the budget was cut. I mean really, does it matter? Whether it was because the university applied a 3% cut to every program and unit across the board, or because a cut was applied in a very targeted way to the library and one or two other programs on campus, the result is the same – and so is the impact to library services and the campus community. 

But the why question actually matters very much, for a number of reasons. For one thing, budget cuts are going to be implemented again at some point in the future, and knowing why the library was targeted this time will help you prepare better against that future scenario. For another thing, it matters very much whether the campus cut the library’s budget reluctantly or willingly. (Campus officials, of course, will tell you either way that they implemented the cuts with great reluctance, that the library is the heart of campus, and that it’s killing them to reduce the budget by even a penny. Take those assurances with a grain of salt and do not assume that they tell you anything meaningful about where the library lies on the list of campus priorities. I mean, honestly – what else would you expect them to say?) 

What you must prevent, as a leader, is the library getting a budget cut because your campus administration doesn’t know or understand what the library does.

This is one of those moments when an open, trusting relationship with the administrator to whom you report is absolutely essential. It’s one of those moments when you’ll need to cash in some of the political capital you’ve been building up and say to your boss “Look, I want you to be as candid and open with me as you can: why did the library’s budget get cut? Was it despite the fact that the library’s collections and services are genuinely seen as centrally important, or was it because there is decreasing confidence in the degree to which the library is contributing to campus priorities, or some combination of those, or something else?”. By this point, you should have established with your boss the fact that you can be trusted with honest answers and that you genuinely have the best interests of the university (not just your territorial interests) at heart. It should be clear that you’re asking in a spirit of sincere interest and a desire to lead the library towards a place of greater contribution.

And this leads to my central point for today’s article. If your administration fully understands what the library does and decides, nevertheless, to cut your budget, that’s fair. The library is – and should be – no more immune from budget cuts than any other important campus program. 

However, what you must prevent from happening, as a library leader, is your budget being cut because the university administration doesn’t know or understand what you do. And this point is very important: it is not the administration’s job to educate themselves about the work of the library. It is your job to gently, kindly, and relentlessly educate them.  

How do you do that? The answers to that question are many, and frankly are limited only by your creativity. I’m not much of a creative thinker myself, but here are a few (fairly obvious, I confess) ideas from me, which will also serve as today’s Takeaways and Action Items:

• Invite your boss to attend an annual meeting with your entire staff at which she is invited to say a few words, and then invite her to stay for an annual report on the library’s activities of the past year. This meeting – or at least, the part to which your boss is invited – should not last more than an hour. Make sure you design that annual report with your boss’s presence in mind.
• Every time you meet with your boss, share something your library is doing that is especially aligned with the university’s mission and priorities. Gradually, over time, fill his head with examples of ways that the library is contributing directly to whatever is most important to the university: it might be research productivity, or student retention, or undergraduate teaching, or sustainability, or whatever. But make sure the examples are not just things the library is proud of, but things that contribute directly to the university’s expressed goals.
• Listen carefully to what your university president says publicly and says repeatedly (more about this in Thursday’s article). The things that she says publicly and repeatedly are the things that actually matter most to her, whatever the university’s official statements and documents might say. As you discern these patterns, look at your library’s programs and priorities. Which ones are contributing most directly to those goals? How can you demonstrate their contribution to those goals? If you were to find yourself in an elevator with the president and had 30 seconds in which to mention how the library furthers those goals, what would you say?

On Thursday we’ll delve a bit further into the importance of positioning the library as a strategic partner with campus administration, rather than as one more piece of expensive infrastructure.

One of the more difficult situations you’ll have to negotiate as a library leader is when the people you lead believe strongly that you should be advocating for something on their behalf – a policy change, a budget increase, a program proposal – and you feel that advocating for that thing would be a mistake. 

When you’re a library leader, especially a dean or director, one of the things you’ll hear a lot is that the reason campus administration isn’t giving the library what your people want is that you’re not pushing hard enough. How will they know when you’ve pushed hard enough? When they get what they want. The assumption here, of course, is that you’ll always get what you want if you just push hard enough. There are two problems with this position: first, it’s simply not true, and second, you can do real damage to your ability to advance other priorities by pushing too hard for the wrong thing at the wrong time.

When you find yourself reluctant to push campus administration for something your people want, your unwillingness will usually arise from one of two categories of concern:

1. You disagree with the proposal in principle. Your staff may want something that you think would be wrong for the library, its patrons, or your host institution. This creates particular difficulty if the proposal you believe to be wrongheaded is widely supported among the people you lead.
2. You agree with the proposal in principle, but don’t believe it would be strategically wise to pursue it. What your team wants may be fully justifiable, but you may feel that pursuing it would cost more in political capital than it would justify – this could be because you believe the request is so unlikely to be successful that there’s no point in expending political capital pursuing it, or because you think even success would yield less benefit for the library than what it would cost. And your concern might be situational (i.e., the timing is wrong) or more fundamental (in other words, you may feel that the cost in political capital will probably always outweigh whatever benefit might accrue from pursuing the desired goal).

So how do you navigate this kind of situation?

Obviously, there’s no single right answer; the best approach will vary by situation. But here are a few ideas that might help:

• Test the water. If you think the proposal makes sense in principle but are not sure whether it would be wise to pursue it, have an informal conversation with the provost or other administrator to whom you report. Make it clear that you’re not advancing the proposal, but asking for a reality check on your feeling that the time or situation may not be right. This approach will generally not reduce your fund of political capital in the way that simply advancing the proposal would; it may even increase your political capital as you demonstrate your sensitivity to the campus political environment.
• Be open and clear about your concerns. If you are not convinced that the proposal makes sense in principle, don’t give your people false hope by pretending to be supportive. It may be tempting to curry favor with your team by pretending you intend to champion the proposal even if you don’t intend to make a strong argument for it to the administration. But here’s the thing about being dishonest with your staff: they will figure it out. Unless you’re a sociopath, it’s very difficult to lie successfully, especially over time. Much better is to explain as clearly as you can why you don’t support bringing the proposal forward. Will some of your people be upset? Yes. But doing what you believe is the right thing will often upset some people. Taking a leader’s pay means being willing to do the right thing even if people don’t like it (and then working carefully and kindly with those who are upset to help them move forward).
• Explain what you’re going to do and why. The people in your organization who went to the trouble of discussing and drafting a proposal deserve to know both what you’re going to do with it, and why. Their proposal should not go into a black hole. If you’re not going to carry it up to administration, say so and explain why. If you are going to bring it forward but think it’s highly unlikely to be approved, explain both why you’re going to advance it and why you’re skeptical of its success. Trust me: your people would rather know that you’re not supportive (and why) than labor under the false belief that you’re going to champion their proposal.
• Don’t backbite. When talking with your staff, it might be tempting to denigrate (either explicitly or implicitly through eye-rolling or tone of voice) the campus administration; when talking to the administration, it might be tempting to do the same about your staff. In both contexts, resist that temptation with everything you have. I’ll talk more about this in next Tuesday’s article.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Defaulting to transparency and openness is especially important when deciding whether/how to bring proposals from your library up to campus administration.
• Don’t lie to your staff. It’s wrong, and it won’t work.
• Ask yourself now how you’ll respond the next time your staff ask you to bring a proposal to campus administration with which you aren’t comfortable. What questions will you ask? How will you explain your discomfort? How will you decide what to do, and then explain that decision?

We’ve all heard other people do it, and some of us may even have done it ourselves: you’re in a discussion about some mission-critical (or at least notably mission-aligned) initiative for which there don’t seem to be enough resources. And someone (maybe you, maybe me) makes a derisive comment about “those bean-counters” who keep putting barriers in front of our goals with their talk of “limited resources” and “budget shortfalls” and blah blah blah. Don’t they understand that our work isn’t about business models and that we’re mission-driven, not bottom-line-driven? 

(I’ve heard a similar response sometimes within the open access movement when problems with various funding solutions come up: “Open access is not a business model; it’s an access model.”)

This line of rhetoric obscures two deeply important points about leading or managing in a library or any other mission-driven organization:

1. Every mission-driven organization needs more beans that it has; 
2. If you really care about achieving your mission, you’d better know how many beans you do have.

What all of this points to is a couple of sometimes unpleasant but still essential realities: you need good bean-counters, and you need to listen to them. That doesn’t mean they’ll always be right; it doesn’t mean that you’ll always follow every recommendation they make. You may choose to make trade-offs or even take risks that don’t make obvious sense to your controller. But you shouldn’t do so without doing your financial due diligence, which includes listening carefully to those who are charged with and – let’s be honest – almost certainly have more expertise than you in keeping track of your beans. 

If you really care about achieving your mission, you’d better know how many beans you have.

The thing is, being a mission-driven organization doesn’t mean you don’t care about money. It means that you need to care very much about money, because you care about achieving your mission and you can’t do that if you run out of money. 

So why is this piece titled “Two and a Half Cheers for Bean-counting” instead of “Three Cheers”? Because as with just about everything, it is indeed possible to worry too much about money, and to end up being penny-wise and pound-foolish. In my organization, I do worry about making sure we’re using resources carefully – but I also regularly remind my team that our goal is not to save money; our goal is to spend money, and to do it wisely, carefully, and effectively. There’s no virtue in spending foolishly, of course, but there’s also no virtue in failing to use our resources fully and effectively in pursuit of our mission. Our budgets are allocated and entrusted to us for a purpose, and our sponsoring institution would much rather that we spend our budget fully in advancing that purpose than give some of it back at the end of the year.

So what does all of this mean for you as a library leader? Several things, and these will act as today’s Takeaways and Action Items:

1. Never let your staff or your leadership team hear you denigrating your controller or your finance office for being responsible fiscal managers. Delete the term “bean-counter” from your vocabulary.
2. Budget constraints are an opportunity to help your team and your line staff understand both the inevitability of trade-offs and effective principles for dealing with them.
3. Budget decisions are ultimately your responsibility, and you can’t – either passively or actively – delegate that ultimate responsibility (even if you’re not directly involved in every budget allocation at every level).

As a library leader, you have to do a lot of planning: putting together a strategy for accomplishing a future task like renovating a space, hiring a librarian, adapting to an expected change in budget, etc. You also have to entertain a lot of proposals that reflect planning by others: you’ll have staff who want to institute a new program or policy, extramural organizations who would like to move into the library, people who want to reorganize a library department, etc.

It’s trivially obvious that every new initiative, every program change, every reordering of space, every new collection acquisition – in short, every decision you make as a leader – has consequences. Less obvious are what all the consequences will be – and yet anticipating and preparing for those consequences is an important job of leadership.

One thing that complicates the task of anticipating and providing for consequences is the fact that some consequences are more likely than others; another is that some consequences are intended, and others are unintended. Unlikely consequences are difficult to plan for because there are so many and most of them will never emerge; unintended consequences can be difficult to plan for because the people advocating for an initiative or a change don’t want to talk about them. Let’s look at each of those problems briefly in turn.

Planning for Unlikely Consequences

Obviously, you can’t plan for every conceivable unlikely outcome of a change or initiative. So how do you decide which unlikely consequences should absorb some of your bandwidth and which should not?

One good rule of thumb arises from the distinction between high-impact/low-likelihood scenarios and low-impact/low-likelihood scenarios. In the library, an active-shooter situation is very unlikely, but it’s a scenario that would have a high impact, so most libraries invest resources in some kind of planning for that situation. Low-likelihood scenarios that would also be low-impact require less planning and attention.

When considering a new program or course of action in the library, the same principles apply. Redesigning a multi-floor atrium should include planning for the unlikely (but high-impact) scenario in which someone tries to jump from a high floor; on the other hand, withdrawing a low-use book from the collection entails the risk that someone will want it later, but the impact of that low-likelihood scenario would be low enough that calling a meeting to discuss preparations for it probably wouldn’t represent a wise use of resources.

So planning for unlikely consequences is important, but it’s also essential not to let yourself get paralyzed by trying to provide for every possible outcome or scenario. Invest your time and energy focusing on the unlikely scenarios that would have the greatest impact: natural disasters, violent patrons, fires, etc.

Planning for Unintended Consequences

When someone comes to you in your role as a leader in the spirit of advocacy – presenting a proposal that they believe it is important to adopt or implement – it’s important understand that advocacy and analysis are very different things. The analyst’s job is to give you all the best and most relevant information so that you can make a well-informed decision; the advocate’s job is to push for a specific decision, and to focus on the information that will tend to move you towards that decision. For this reason, those operating from a position of advocacy will generally want very much to talk about the intended consequences of their proposals, and will not want to talk about potential unintended consequences.

This unwillingness can manifest itself in a variety of ways, one of the most annoying of which is a close relative of the It’s Not About Gambit (which I discussed in a recent post titled “Watch Out for the Subject-Changers.”) A typical exchange looks like this:

Leader: “I’m concerned about implementing the policy change you’re advocating for, because I’m afraid it will lead to [Unintended Consequence X].”

Advocate: “[Unintended Consequence X] is not our goal with this policy change. Our goal is to achieve [Intended Consequence Y].”

“That’s not our goal” is, of course, an irrelevant response to the concern expressed, because the concern is about a likely or possible consequence that is unrelated to the goal but that is nevertheless of enough concern to need consideration.

One good response to this gambit might be to say “I understand that [Unintended Consequence X] isn’t your goal with this policy change, but when we make changes like this, not every outcome is going to be one that we intended. Let’s spend some time working through possible outcomes of your proposed change and make sure we’re both prepared for and comfortable with them.”

Of course, not all unintended consequences of an initiative are negative – sometimes we experience positive unintended consequences too. But what’s most important is that we do what we reasonably can to anticipate those outcomes that are likely to be problematic and have a plan for responding to them.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Everything we do has consequences; not all of those consequences are what we expect or what we intend. Our planning needs to account for this reality.
• Be prepared for staff to resist discussion of unintended consequences when they’re functioning in an advocacy role.
• Has your organization experienced stress due to unanticipated or low-likelihood events for which you should have planned better? Looking ahead, what are some potentially troublesome low-likelihood but high-impact scenarios for which you should be planning now?

I bet you’ve had the frustrating experience of asking a manager or leader for permission to do something out of the ordinary (it may or may not have involved an exception to policy or an unusual budget outlay) and being told “Hey, if I let you do that it’s a slippery slope. Pretty soon I have to _______” (fill in the blank with some possibly absurd extrapolation from the really quite reasonable thing you’ve asked for).

For example, you might ask for some extra travel money so that someone in your department can attend a conference that is particularly germane to the work she does. Or you might ask if one of your employees can work from home one day per week while his wife goes through a two-month program of weekly physical therapy. Or you might want some leeway to let a staff member work overtime for a week because she’s been given an unusually large and time-sensitive assignment.

For a leader faced with such requests, the lazy thing to do is immediately imagine the floodgates opening – word gets around that Phil got to work from home one day a week for a couple of months, and pretty soon everyone wants to work at home day a week. One department hears that another department got some extra travel funds, and suddenly every department needs some extra travel funds. Etc. Not wanting to deal with that frustration, the leader may be sorely tempted to give the lazy answer: “I can’t do it for you if I’m not willing/able to do it for everyone.”

But the wise and hard-working leader will be willing and able to do two very important things in this situation:

• Act consistently, on principle
• Make difficult judgement calls

Back in February, I briefly mentioned the importance of making exceptions based on principle – then I promised to follow up on that in a subsequent post, but never did. So let’s talk about that.

As I mentioned in that earlier post, the way a good leader answers the question “How come [Person A] got [extra travel money, work-from-home clearance, permission to clock some overtime] and I didn’t?” is by reference to a clear and fair principle, consistently applied. This, of course, can only work if the leader has previously done the hard work of establishing, documenting, and communicating such principles to her organization – and has been applying them consistently.

So let’s look at one of the scenarios mentioned above.

In the wake of COVID, every library leader should have created a set of principle-based guidelines for remote work. These guidelines should be informed, first of all, by campus policy (because no library policy should break campus rules); second, by the needs of the community the library serves; and third, by a desire to give library employees a reasonable amount of leeway and flexibility. How those principles translate into specific policy will vary from library to library, of course, based on a variety of factors. But let’s take the example of the employee whose wife needs two months of weekly physical therapy and would like to work from home one day per week during that period. In that case, let’s suppose that the library normally requires that everyone work on site full time, but that the library’s leader a) has determined that campus policy allows employees to work for home for one day a week for a limited period of time; b) is confident that the employee in question can work from home for that limited period without negatively impacting service to the campus community; and c) believes that this arrangement represents a reasonable degree of flexibility that she could extend to any other employee in the same circumstance.

In this case, the leader couple probably feel confident in allowing the exception to normal policy.

But now imagine that another employee comes to that leader and says “You let Phil work from home once a week for two months, but my supervisor says I can’t. Explain to me how this is fair.”

The answer will be informed by a clear and fair principle, consistently applied. If this second employee’s circumstance is very much like the first employee’s, then the library leader should probably counsel with the second employee’s supervisor with an eye to giving the second employee the same flexibility. But if the second employee’s circumstance is quite different, then consistently applying the clear and fair principle may naturally lead to a different conclusion.

Going through this analysis and these conversations is, of course, much more difficult than either saying “The rules are the rules and there will be no exceptions” or simply giving in to everyone who asks for a exception. But, of course, that difficult work is the work of leadership, and it’s what we’re paid to do. The good news is that when we do it consistently and fairly, our organizations are much happier and serve our patrons better. And there are no “slippery slopes.”

Last week I offered some advice for library leaders on dealing with people who want to change the subject. This week I’d like to offer some advice on dealing with people who want to divide and conquer. Let me explain what I’m talking about.

When you’re dealing with a difficult or complex issue in the organization, the best approach is almost always – though not absolutely always (more on this later) – to get all the stakeholders around the same table at the same time. This may seem like an obvious principle, and that’s because it’s intuitively obvious that getting all the stakeholders together at the same time makes it most likely that all relevant views will be heard in a forum where they can be discussed openly, and that all relevant issues and facets of the problem will be aired openly.

The problem is, when you’re dealing with complex and (especially) contentious issues, it will not be in every employee’s personal best interest for all relevant views to be heard and all relevant issues and facets of the problem to be openly discussed and evaluated. There may be one or more people in the organization for whom such discussion will be threatening, because they already know how they want the issue to be resolved and open discussion might lead the library to a different conclusion.

When this is the case, sometimes that employee or group will attempt to divide and conquer, by which I mean he/they will try to have sidebar conversations with members of library leadership or other responsible parties, in which he will press his case and try to influence the decision, hoping either to derail the broader conversation or to change its direction from behind the scenes.

I’m going to propose two simple principles for dealing with such situations, and then propose a complicating factor that can create complexity in applying these simple principles.

The simple principles are:

First, Sunlight is the best disinfectant. What I mean by this is that when conflicts arise, or when different organizational interests are in conflict, the conflicts are usually best identified, understood, and resolved in an open and (to the degree appropriate) public way. Such an approach is one manifestation of the default to openness that I have urged from the very beginning of this newsletter, and which I have found to be almost always the best approach. Obviously, “public” is a relative term – it doesn’t mean that every meeting should be open to all library employees. It does mean that all genuine stakeholders should be at the table and should have a voice in the resolution of the conflict.

Second, More brains make better decisions. Getting all genuine stakeholders around the same table at the same time is not only fairer and more likely to bring to light all relevant issues and variables; it also creates problem-solving synergy by getting stakeholders with a variety of perspectives, strengths, weaknesses, backgrounds, and experience sets focused on the same problem at the same time. In my experience, this almost invariably leads to better decisions. No library leader knows enough about her or his organization to make big decisions alone; no library leader knows enough about her or his organization to know how accurate a single employee’s account of a problem or an interaction is. More eyes, more brains, and more perspectives are almost always needed if you want to get to the best outcome.

So when you’re approached by a Divider/Conqueror, be prepared to respond with statements like this:

This is potentially very useful information, thank you. Let’s make sure we discuss it in our upcoming meeting.

I really appreciate you bringing this to my attention. I think others in the group may have important perspective on this information as well, so let’s talk about it together.

This is an important issue, and I’d like to hear other stakeholders’s perspectives on it as well. Let’s put it on the agenda for our meeting.

Now, here’s the complicating factor: you can’t expose all problems to the same amount of sunlight, and you can’t always involve every stakeholder in every conversation. Sometimes people genuinely need to bring confidential information to the leader that can’t or shouldn’t be discussed in a wider meeting, or that they have a genuine need to share anonymously. That’s okay, as long as the information is both genuinely relevant and genuinely confidential, and as long as its accuracy can effectively be assessed. But just because one person wants information to be treated confidentially doesn’t mean it should be treated that way; and leaders always need to be very careful not to go off half-cocked based on one person’s account of another person’s behavior or of a difficult situation.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Defaulting to transparency almost always leads to better resolutions.
• Not everyone in your organization will always want open and transparent discussion of every issue, and you need to be prepared to deal with behind-the-scenes and backdoor approaches.
• Are there any pending issues in your library that you are trying to resolve right now, and that are being complicated by people taking a divide-and-conquer approach? What can you do now to defuse that approach?

A couple of weeks ago I called for “Two and a Half Cheers for Niceness,” in which I pointed out that “niceness and civility are not the same thing,” arguing that “civility… represents a rock-bottom standard of behavior to which all should be held” in any library.

And yet, it does seem that civility is not universally considered a “rock-bottom standard of behavior.” Sometimes issues seem so urgent that normal considerations of civil behavior can reasonably be suspended in order to get them resolved – or, as Benjamin DeMott quoted Randall Kennedy in a 1996 essay in The Nation, “when you’re in an argument with a thug, there are things much more important than civility.”

It’s hard to argue with such a statement. Certainly there are things more important, and sometimes considerations more pressing, than civility. That’s why I’m calling for “two and a half cheers,” rather than three, in this case. But the good news for us in libraries is that in the great majority of situations, the issues we are dealing with are ones in which we both can and should expect civil and professional behavior of ourselves and our colleagues.

Specifically in the context of librarianship, I’m prepared to defend the position that civility is, in fact, a rock-bottom expectation. This expectation is usually (actually always, in my experience) explicitly written into job description documents, and failures to act in a civil manner in the workplace usually count against – or should count against – a library employee in annual evaluations.

It would be easy to take a cynical view of this expectation: one could say that expectations of civility are designed merely to preserve the status quo by making it harder for people to fight effectively against it, or to protect the privilege of those for whom civil and professional behavior comes relatively easily, or to prevent the meaningful discussion of genuinely difficult and challenging issues.

I’d like to suggest a less cynical view of civility. In my view, an expectation of civility in the workplace actually works less often to protect privilege than it does to protect employees who might otherwise be victimized by colleagues with stronger personalities or a tendency to lose control of their anger. In my experience, a firm expectation of civility actually does much more to ensure that difficult and challenging issues are discussed and resolved effectively than it does to prevent such resolutions. And while expecting civil and professional behavior of all employees may indeed protect the status quo in some ways, it also creates the kind of behavioral guardrails that make effective challenges to the status quo possible.

So while there may indeed be situations in which normal considerations of civility should be suspended, I believe good library leaders will expect those to be very unusual. They will expect all of their employees, at every level and in every position, to abide by reasonable standards of civility in all their interactions with each other.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Civility and professionalism should be considered a basic expectation of every library employee.
• Suggestions that particular topics or issues are “too important” to be discussed and handled in a civil manner should be regarded with deep skepticism.
• Are there issues currently under consideration in your library with regard to which employees struggle to maintain civil discourse? How are their managers dealing with this? Do they need additional counsel from leadership?

One of the most daunting challenges a library leader faces is implementing change. It’s a challenge for multiple reasons.

First of all, libraries were never either designed or intended to change. On the contrary: for centuries, the purpose of the library has been to stay the same – to be constant, reliable, and solid, to act as a bulwark of consistency while all else in the world was being pushed to and fro by the winds of fad and innovation. This constancy is a deep-seated and longstanding characteristic of libraries, both for good and for ill.

Second of all – let’s acknowledge this – the library profession has not historically tended to self-select for people who are naturally inclined towards constant change and innovation. Historically, it has attracted people who feel an affinity for the traditional characteristics of the library: consistency, reliability, solidity, etc. (Please note that I am not saying there are no innovative people in libraries; of course there are. But it’s only been relatively recently that libraries have actively worked to attract out-of-the-box thinkers; historically, our job has been much more about gaining a deep understanding of the box and then thinking inside of it with a great deal of effectiveness – both for good and for ill.)

And third, it’s just a general fact of human life that change is disruptive and sometimes deeply distressing, especially at work. When you hear that your job is changing, a part of you may be excited, but usually a much bigger part of you is freaking out: will my new role be seen as equally essential to the library as my old one was? Will I be good at this new job? Will I enjoy doing it? What about all the effort I put into becoming good at my old job – will any of that effort translate as preparation for my new one? Do I even agree in principle with the new direction my library is taking?

All of the above are fully rational and reasonable responses to change. And this is where good leaders come in. Because leaders who reflexively dismiss such questions as reactionary rigidity or resistance will make both their employees and themselves miserable. So what’s the right approach?

In my experience, what works best when managing change in the organization is a combination of two things: firmness of purpose and kindness in implementation. Believe it or not, these two characteristics of approach are fully in harmony with each other; you don’t have to sacrifice one in order to do the other. Let’s look at them in turn.

Firmness in Purpose

Once you have done the necessary due diligence, considered alternatives, weighed costs and benefits, taken all reasonable steps to anticipate unintended consequences, and have made the decision to change something about the organization, you are ready to proceed. And at this point (as at earlier points in the process) some people will try to dissuade you. Of course, if they bring up legitimate and substantive issues you hadn’t considered as part of your due diligence, then it may well be wise to tap the brakes and reconsider. But for the sake of this exercise, let’s assume that you and your leadership team really did do all appropriate due diligence and are convinced the change is necessary. Now you have to be willing to stand your ground while people try to get you to stop.

Firmness in purpose does not mean heedless intransigence. Nor does it mean stopping people from (or punishing people for) expressing their concerns. What it does mean is not letting yourself be swayed from your chosen course of action by factors that aren’t actually relevant to your decision. In other words, it makes sense and may be wise to take a pause if someone brings up an unintended consequence that wasn’t discovered or discussed during the decision-making process. It does not make sense, and is not wise, to cancel the change because someone in an affected department has a panic attack. (In that case, the employee should be offered all necessary medical help and support, but the fact that this person reacted strongly is not an argument against making needed organizational change.) It makes even less sense, and is even less wise, to cancel or pause the change because an employee vociferously objects or threatens to make life difficult for their manager or peers.

One of the most challenging tasks of leadership is dealing calmly, professionally, and wisely with people who are very upset. A moment of organizational change is one when this challenge is likely to be felt acutely. And that leads to the second principle:

Kindness in Implementation

For leaders in libraries, it’s all to easy to think in terms of a false binary: “I have to choose between being firm in purpose and treating my employees with kindness and compassion.” I can’t stress enough how much damage a leader can do by buying into this false dichotomy. We’ve all had experience with leaders who either couldn’t bear to make anyone unhappy (and therefore ended up making everyone unhappy) or who didn’t care whether or not their employees were happy (and therefore made everyone unhappy), and I’ve written previously about the difficult but essential work of balancing genuine care for your employees with a willingness to make them unhappy when that’s what is best for the library and its host institution.

But I can’t stress this enough: even – especially – when you have to do things that some or all of your employees are going to hate, it’s essential to do it with kindness and empathy. As I’ve suggested before, the message “you don’t have to get on board because you’re upset” is just as destructive to the organization as the message “I’m in charge and you’ll do as I say.” Instead, a much more productive message is “I hear your concerns and I can see why this change is going to be very difficult for you. What can I do to help make this transition less stressful?”. The answer to that question may be a request that you do something impossible – but if you ask the question sincerely, and with the real intent to try to ease the burden of change for your employee, it will make a big difference even if you can’t give them everything they want. And you will almost certainly be able to do something that eases the burden for them.

Caring about your employees matters. It matters even – especially – when you have to do things they don’t want you to do, or have to make them do things they don’t want to do. Of course, the more clearly, consistently, and convincingly you convey your care for them on a day-to-day basis, the more likely they’ll be to believe that you really care for them when the chips are down. This is the kind of thing that can’t be faked; if you’re only pretending to care about your employees, they’ll know. But the good news is that they’ll also know when you genuinely do care for them, and that will help both them and you navigate organizational change.

Takeaways and Action Items

• As a leader spearheading change in the library, it’s essential to be both firm and kind.
• Your genuine love and concern for your employees will help you find the right balance of firmness and kindness.
• What was the worst experience you’ve had as a line employee in a library that was undergoing significant change? What could your leaders have done better to make that experience easier? How will you apply those lessons in your work now?

A year or two ago, I was in a meeting at which the participants were seated at round tables. This arrangement raises alarm bells in the head of any introvert, because it suggests that at some point during the meeting, participants are going to be given a topic and directed to “discuss at your table” (the dead giveaway is the pile of sticky notes and colored adhesive dots on the table).

Well, sure enough, we came to a certain point in the agenda and then it was time to discuss some questions at our tables. In this case, each table was joined by someone from the organization sponsoring the meeting, to help jump-start or guide the discussion as needed. During the course of our conversation at my table, I raised a question; as I recall, it was a slightly challenging one that had some bearing on the assumptions behind our topic. The organization rep responded by saying “Could we reframe that question, like this…?”, and then proceeded to ask what seemed to me like a related, but still very different, question.

So I pushed back. I said something like “What you’re proposing seems to me like not so much a reframing of my question as a change of subject. Your question is a good one, but I’d really like us to address my question too, if we can.”

Following that experience, I found myself reflecting on the number of times I’ve witnesses people using the Reframing Gambit to change the subject from a less-comfortable one to a more-comfortable one.

I’ve seen other, similar strategies employed for the same purpose as well. One of my (least) favorites is the It’s Not About Gambit. This comes into play when Emily raises an issue that Brian doesn’t want to talk about, and Brian tries to cut off discussion of that issue by saying “It’s not about [your issue]; it’s about [my issue].” When this strategy is employed, it’s rarely clear what the antecedent of “it” is – when Brian says “It’s not about [X]…,” the question left unaddressed is “What isn’t about [X]”? – but that very vagueness, along with the aggressiveness inherent in telling someone else that the issue they’ve raised isn’t worth discussing, can be very effective in shutting down the undesired conversation.

Another is what I call the This Won’t Cure Cancer Gambit. In the course of a group discussion, Hank proposes a solution to Problem A, and Bettina doesn’t like the proposed solution, but for whatever reason would rather not argue on the merits, so instead she asserts that the proposed solution won’t solve Larger Problem B. The exchange might look something like this:

Hank: “I keep getting questions from students wondering if we could stay open later during finals. They say they’re often still in the middle of studying when we kick them out at midnight. Should we try staying open until 2:00 am during finals week?

Bettina: “Staying open two more hours on those nights is not going to solve the problem of students procrastinating their study until the last minute.”

Yet another is the Real Problem Gambit. During a meeting, Jasmine raises a concern that Paul either is uncomfortable with or does not think merits discussion, so Paul says “[X] isn’t the real problem. The real problem is [Y].” Bam. Subject changed – unless, of course, Jasmine is willing to stand up for herself and say something like “Hang on, Paul. The problem you’ve raised is indeed real, but I think the one I raised is also worth discussing and I’d like us to address it too.”

And this is where leadership comes in. Because ideally, the person whose line of inquiry is being shut down in any of these scenarios really shouldn’t have to stand up for him- or herself against the person who is trying to change the subject; whoever is leading the meeting should take care of that. The bad news is that doing so requires the ability and willingness to confront inappropriate meeting behavior, which can be very uncomfortable. The good news is that the intervention doesn’t have to be harsh or unpleasant; in fact, it will be more effective if it’s gentle but firm. Possible examples of such interventions include:

“Brian, I’m not sure what you mean when you say ‘it’s not about [X],’ but I think Emily has raised an important issue and I’d like us to discuss it. It sounds like you have another issue you’d like us to address as well, so let’s make sure we come back to that.”

“Bettina, I think you’re right that student procrastination is a bigger and more complex problem, and that staying open later during finals won’t solve it. But it’s possible that staying open later would help students in ways that are worth the trouble and cost, so let’s focus on that question for a moment.”

“Paul, what you’ve raised is a real problem, but what Jasmine raised is a real problem too. Let’s address both of them, starting with Jasmine’s concern.”

Taking this approach has multiple benefits:

• It signals to your employees that you won’t let them be bullied.
• It keeps the meeting on track.
• It ensure that everyone has a voice – even the person who is trying to stifle someone else’s.

Takeaways and Action Items

• If you’re in charge of a meeting or discussion, part of your job is to protect those whom others may try to silence or shut down.
• When doing so, remaining respectful and gentle is important; so is being firm.
• Have you experienced this kind of behavior in a meeting at which you were not in charge? If so, what did the leader in that context do that worked well? Were there things you wish s/he had done differently?