Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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?

As a library director, I spend a lot of time making decisions.

Actually, let me rephrase that: as a library director, I spend a lot of time engaged in decision-making processes. I make very few decisions on my own.

Sometimes, I sense, this makes my leadership team a little bit confused and maybe even a bit frustrated. I can’t count the number of times someone has reminded me “Rick, this is your decision.” And they’re right! My position in the library vests a power in me that I don’t exercise very often at all: the power to make unilateral decisions on important, library-wide matters. In fact, even our Administrative Council (AC), which we describe (and which functions) as the library’s decision-making and policy-approving body, functions in an advisory role to me; I can override any decision that AC makes.

And yet, in four and a half years, I have never done so once – and I both hope and expect that I’ll complete my tenure in this library without ever having overridden an AC decision. I have also never (yet) unilaterally imposed a policy of my own invention; when I believe we need a new policy or that we need to amend an old one, I bring a proposal to AC just like anyone else, and we discuss and vote on it there.

Now, let me quickly acknowledge that I fully recognize the privilege of my position in this context: I’m under no illusion that a policy proposal brought forward by the library director is treated with exactly the same critical objectivity as one brought forward by, say, a line staff employee. But while there’s not really anything I can do about my privilege, what I can do is ensure that my own proposals are subjected to critical examination and discussion just like anyone else’s, and I can do my best to ensure that the discussion of my proposals is rigorous, critical, and thorough – just as I would expect it to be of anyone else’s proposals. And in fact, I have ended up abandoning some of my proposals in the face of such discussion and analysis.

There are some fundamental principles and realities underlying this kind of approach. They include:

• Being a leader doesn’t mean that you’re the smartest or most insightful person in the room
• Exercising all of your authority in every situation is unwise; leaders who share their power wisely tend to have happier and more loyal employees
• More minds usually lead to better decisions
• The more inclusive and participatory your leadership style, the more your employees will trust you – and that fund of trust will come in handy in those rare moments when you really do have to exert your authority

Like all fundamentally wise leadership philosophies, though, an inclusive and power-sharing stance can be taken to an unhelpful, even destructive extreme. We’ve probably all had bad experiences with leaders who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) make decisions and take responsibility for them, or who dithered while pros and cons were presented and considered endlessly, or who delegated too much and then blamed others for failed initiatives and policies. As in all things, balance and wisdom are required here. But in my experience, keeping the principles outlined above in mind, and being willing to do a leader’s work (which includes taking responsibility, being willing to make difficult decisions, and listening to everyone) results in a fundamentally healthy, happy, and well-run organization.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Good leaders don’t always exercise all the power they have.
• Involving more people in decision-making usually results in better outcomes.
• Ask yourself how you make decisions in your library. Do you maintain a good balance between taking responsibility and sharing power? When you look back on the last five organizational decisions made in your library, how many of them were group decisions and how many were yours alone?

A few weeks ago I introduced a new occasional feature in the Vision & Balance newsletter: what I’m calling “Two and a Half Cheers.” These are posts that reflect briefly on concepts or practices that are commonly underappreciated or denigrated, but which I believe deserve more celebration than they often get – even while recognizing their limitations or downsides. My first installment considered the oft-maligned concept of efficiency.

Lately I have found myself thinking a lot about “niceness” in the context of library leadership and management. The term “nice” has become almost an epithet in recent years – it’s a term used frequently as a synonym for “shallow” and “insincere.” When complimenting people (and when writing evaluations) we tend to veer away from the word “nice” in favor of terms like “civil” or “collegial.”

I would like to suggest that niceness is undervalued, not only in broader society but also in professional settings. Niceness and civility are not the same thing; civility, it seems to me, represents a rock-bottom standard of behavior to which all should be held. (It reminds me a bit of the bumper stickers I regularly see that enjoin us all to “coexist” – which always makes me think “Seriously? Is that what we’re aspiring to now?”.) Collegiality comes closer, in that it implies not just civility but also cooperation and responsiveness. But you can be civil and collegial without being nice, and I think niceness matters.

Here’s my thinking: to me, niceness implies communicating actual care for the other person. Civility means not being actively mean; collegiality means working effectively together and pulling your own weight. But the nice person goes out of his or her way to show that they care about how you feel, or about how the work is impacting you; the nice person offers to take on a burden to lighten yours; the nice person shows his or her pleasure in working with you. At its best, niceness is synonymous with kindness. (In fact, in my experience people often use “nice,” in a sneering way, to characterize kindness when it is manifest in people they don’t like.) We all spend the majority of our waking hours at work – having nice colleagues makes a big difference in the quality of those hours.

Is it possible to exhibit fake niceness, or to weaponize fake niceness for nefarious purposes? Of course it is. Is niceness sometimes a mask worn by superficiality and unseriousness? Sure. That’s why this is a “two and a half cheers” post rather than a “three cheers” one. But you know what? It’s possible to make bad pizza too. That doesn’t mean pizza isn’t important.

One of the very wise things my library did long before I arrived as university librarian a few years ago was to create a guidelines document for administrative decision-making that includes definitions of various levels of “stakeholder” in a program, policy, or activity:

Steward – Someone whose job description includes oversight for the focus of the program or activity

Directly affected – Someone who is not a Steward, but whose essential job functions are significantly affected by the program or activity

Advisor – Someone who can provide particularly valuable input regarding the program or activity because of their job description or special expertise

Interested Party – Anyone else who has a personal or professional interest in the program or activity and wishes to make suggestions and/or stay informed

These categories reflect two important principles of decision-making in the library organization:

• Everyone should have a voice: no matter how distant they may seem from a particular process, position, or event, any employee may have valuable and relevant insights – and they certainly have the right to express their views.
• Not everyone can have a say: there are different kinds and degrees of “stakeholder” status, and the ability to directly shape policies and programs in the library needs to vary by role and assigned portfolio.

These two principles may seem to be somewhat in tension with each other, but in fact they are two sides of the same coin: a healthy organization recognizes that different people should have different levels of influence over policies and proposals, depending on their organizational function. If you make every library decision an organization-wide referendum, the result will be terrible outcomes, because those who have no skin in the game and no particular expertise in the topic will have just as much influence over the decision as those who do.

If every organizational decision is made democratically, the result will be terrible outcomes.

Of course, almost no one thinks that the library should be run entirely by democratic processes – most people intuitively understand that both relevant expertise and organizational role should confer greater influence according to the details of the specific case. However, too often leaders let themselves be swayed inappropriately by those who should have a voice but should not have a say. Sometimes they want to do a favor for an employee they particularly like (and perhaps want to keep); sometimes they let themselves be worn down by very persistent employees with particular axes to grind; sometimes they let themselves be swayed by employees with particularly strong personalities.

Wise library leaders remember that a leader’s work consists, to a significant degree, in saying no to people who want them to do the wrong thing. In the context of decision-making, this often means explaining to people why it is that although their voice matters, they still don’t have a say in a particular decision.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Everyone’s voice should be heard, but not everyone in the organization can or should have an equal say in every library decision.
• The degree to which any employee has a say in decision-making should be based on reasonable principles, communicated clearly and applied consistently.
• As a leader, when was the last time you said “yes” to someone when you really knew you should have said “no”? Did that lead to a bad decision? What will you do differently the next time you are faced with a similar situation?

In my two previous posts, I discussed a couple of important principles of policy management: first, the fact that library policies are like carbohydrates – in that they’re essential, but not all of them are equally healthy and it’s easy to overindulge if you’re not careful. Second, I described some healthy approaches to making, curating, and amending library policies.

In my third and final installment in this series, I want to touch on one very specific challenge that every library organization faces: the danger of what I call “policy hijack.”

Policy hijack is what happens within an organization when rules emerge (and acquire informal authority) that are not actually based in formal policy. Sometimes these are relatively innocuous – every organization has a culture that arises to some degree organically, and rules are part of every human culture. A department may establish a process for collectively buying coffee, with rules about how much each person should contribute and around who should consume how much. Another department might have informal rules about how its meetings are conducted, and those rules may be very different from those of another department. This kind of informal, localized rule-making doesn’t constitute what I’m calling “policy hijack.” Policy hijack is usually library-wide, and manifests in two primary ways:

• The emergence of unauthorized, library-wide “policies,” either organically or as the result of deliberate effort by groups or individuals
• The institution of policy by the imposition of procedural requirements

In the first case, these “policies” are usually implicit rules that arise as traditions but may be colloquially referred to as “policies” – which can create great confusion and distress in the organization. I addressed this issue more directly in last week’s post, so I won’t belabor it here. Today I want to focus more on the second problem: policy by procedure. Here’s how it typically happens:

First, a formal policy is created. Let’s say in this case it’s a policy about the use of the library’s van. The library administration, exercising its oversight responsibility for library-wide policies, approves the criteria that the facilities manager will apply when evaluating requests for the van. A policy document explaining those criteria is formally approved and promulgated. But now the library needs a separate document that lays out the procedures a library employee must follow in order to submit a van request. Those who have administrative oversight of library-wide policy are not usually the ones who write procedural documents; they usually assign that task to someone else (perhaps, in this case, the facilities manager).

And this is where, if you’re not careful, the hijack can happen. Because in the course of prescribing procedures, the person charged with doing so is now in a position to create new requirements that are not contained in the policy itself. For example, the procedures document might require a department chair’s signature, even though the policy doesn’t require department chair approval of a van request. Or the policy might say that van requests must be submitted at least one week in advance, but the facilities manager might decide that for purposes of his workflow, he needs to receive the form at least two weeks in advance, and put that requirement on the form.

It’s important to note that policy hijack is not always intentional – in fact, in my experience it’s not usually intentional. It doesn’t typically arise from someone trying to exercise bureaucratic power or undermine the authority of the library administration. I believe it usually arises because a in the course of creating a procedures document, it becomes clear that the policy as written hasn’t fully accounted for all the realities of the process. In that case, policy should not be amended by means of procedure; the person charged with creating the procedure document should go back to the administration and ask for a policy revision.

How do you prevent this kind of policy hijack (whether intentional or not)? Simple: whoever has authority to approve the policy should also review any procedures documents arising from the policy, checking to make sure they stay within the boundaries of the policy before they’re promulgated to the library – and then adjusting either the policy or the documents, as appropriate.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Beware of procedures documents that create shadow policies, or shadow amendments to policy.
• Avoid these by ensuring that whoever has authority to approve policy exercises oversight of procedures documents that arise from the policy.
• Assign someone (or a small group) in your library to review the procedures documents that are currently in use. Do any of them create or amend policy? If so, what needs to change – the procedures or the policies?

Every library needs policies – and, just as important, it needs a healthy system for making, curating, and amending policies, or what I’m going to call a “policy regime.” Let’s look at each of those three elements of the policy regime in sequence.

Making Policies

In a healthy library, everyone can answer the question “How do I propose a new policy, and what will happen once I’ve proposed it?”. And they’re able to answer that question not just because someone told them once, but because one of the library’s policies is “A complete, accurate, and up-to-date policy library is available to, and easily findable and navigable by, every library employee” – and because within that policy library is a policy that explains how policies are made.

Different libraries will of course do things in different ways, but successful libraries (ones that serve their patrons and their institution well, and in which people are happy to work) will all tend to implement policies in ways that adhere to principles like these:

• Everyone in the library has the right to propose a new policy (or an amendment to an old one, or the elimination of one).
• Appropriate channels are clearly set for such proposals, and follow a logical process chain up to whoever is authorized to set policy.
• Policies are clearly and completely written, as concisely as possible.
• Library-wide policy is set by library-wide authorities; unit policies are a) in alignment with library-wide policies, and b) are set by unit-level authorities.
• No policy is set, amended, or eliminated without input from relevant stakeholders – bearing in mind that while everyone has a voice, not everyone can always have a say (more about this in a future post)

How these principles are implemented will vary based on the specifics of the library organization. But the principles, I believe, are essential to any well-functioning library.

Curating Policies

As I pointed out in the last post, a policy that is not written down is not a policy – it’s a tradition, and while there’s nothing wrong with tradition per se, confusing tradition with policy can be very problematic. Traditions are subject to abuse, particularly when people with strong personalities adopt them and try to bring everyone within their sphere of stewardship into compliance. Traditions-as-policies also tend to create misunderstanding and confusion, because unwritten traditions will inevitably be remembered and understood differently by different people in the organization.

Once a policy is created according to the library’s well-established process and its written form finalized, it must then be stored in a place that allows everyone in the library to find and see policies, but to which only library administrators have “edit” access. The platform on which policies are stored must offer full-text searching capability (“I know we have a policy that says something about service animals, but none of the policies is called ‘Service Animals.’ Where did I see that?”), and once there the policies should be organized into some kind of logical order to facilitate high-level browsing (recognizing that there is no approach to ordering that will eliminate all potential confusion).

The policy library should be managed by one person, to whom all newly approved policies (or amendments or policy cancelations) should be communicated, and who should be tasked with making the changes within 24 hours of notification. Every policy should contain an indication of the date on which it was approved and of what authorizing entity approved it. The whole policy library should be reviewed at least once per year to ensure that it continues to be both complete and accurate.

Amending Policies

No policy is sacred, and no policy should be expected to last forever. The same process that is set up within the library for proposing policies should serve as a conduit for proposals of policy revision. The same channel of discussion and approval that is set up for new policy proposals should also be used for policy amendment proposals. The same criteria and principles used for the evaluation of proposed new policies should be applied to proposals of policy revision. And all of this applies equally to proposals of policy elimination: sometimes policies need to go away, and when they do, we should all rejoice – there is no virtue in having policies we don’t need.

Look, no one (well, hardly anyone) thinks creating, curating, and amending policies is fun. It can be brutal drudgery, and sometimes it’s brutal drudgery laced with interpersonal conflict and administrative frustration. But good policy is absolutely essential to a happy, well-functioning organization, and good policy depends on good process. The work is worth it.

Next Tuesday, we’ll talk about a slightly frightening policy topic: avoiding policy hijack.

Takeaways and Action Items

• You can’t have a healthy library without a healthy policy regime.
• A healthy policy regime necessarily includes solid procedures for creating, curating, and amending policies.
• Take a look at your organization’s policy library. How does it look? Is it complete and accurate? Is it up to date? Can you tell when your policies were adopted, and on whose authority? Can your employees find and understand all your library’s policies?