Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s topic is meetings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways and Action Items

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

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

See you next Tuesday!

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

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

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

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

The Mistake of Believing You’re Unique

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

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

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

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

The Mistake of Believing You’re Typical

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

What does this imply for me as a library leader?

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

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

Takeaways and Action Items

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways and Action Items

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Takeaways and Action Items

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

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?