Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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?

Every healthy library organization has a clear workflow for producing, re-examining, and revising policies. No library can function well unless its employees (and its patrons) are able to easily find and clearly understand its organizational policies, nor can it function well if there isn’t a clear and comprehensible process in place for creating new policies and revising or eliminating ones that no longer work well. 

Here’s the thing about policies, though: they’re kind of like carbs – you’ve got to have them, but not all of them are equally healthy and it’s easy to overindulge. In this short series of posts, I’m going to explore several dimensions of healthy policy management:

• The right balance of implicit rules (traditions) and explicit ones (policies)
• What a healthy policy regime look like
• Avoiding policy hijack

Today, let’s talk about balancing implicit and explicit rules.

First of all, it’s important to know that implicit rules are an inevitable feature of every organization. The longer people work together, the more likely it is that casual, unwritten rules will emerge as they learn to negotiate their intersecting workflows and personal interactions, and as they figure out what strategies and approaches to their work are more or less effective. Implicit rules fill in the spaces between explicit rules: the library may not have an employee dress code, but different departments may have different understandings about what’s allowed, understandings that are enforced with varying degrees of strictness. (We’ll return to this scenario in a moment.)

Another word for “implicit rule” is “tradition.” When an employee says “That’s just how we’ve always done things” or “Everyone understands that this is what’s expected,” he or she is talking about a tradition. Every organization has its own culture (and an array of subcultures), and those cultures will always generate traditions – there’s nothing wrong with it. Unless, of course, the line between “tradition” and “policy” gets blurred. Then the potential for problems grows.

Policies that contradict themselves, are vaguely written, or leave essential elements or relevant issues unaddressed do more harm than good – they create the appearance of policy but don’t deliver on the function of policy.

A policy is an example of an “explicit rule.” Policies are, by definition, written down and should always be archived in a place where everyone in the library can find and read them. They should also always be clear and easily comprehensible; policy documents that contradict themselves, that are vaguely written, or that leave essential elements or relevant issues unaddressed do more harm than good – they create the appearance of policy but don’t deliver on the function of policy. There also need to be very clear policies around the creation of policies (call them “metapolicies” if you like, but I refuse to use that term). In other words, it’s not only essential that the library have clear policies, but also that that library be very clear about how policy is created and authorized – otherwise, you run the risk of people going rogue and creating policies that may or may not be aligned with the library’s organizational goals.

What’s the right balance between implicit and explicit rules in an organization? The answer is not a number or a percentage: it has more to do with the nature than with the number of organizational rules.

For example: in some libraries it may be important that employees follow a dress code. In others this may not matter much. Some libraries need to have clear and strict rules about who may and may not enter; others can be more flexible. Answers about which practices should be embedded in formal policy and which can remain in the realm of tradition will vary depending on the needs and mission of the library.

However, there are some consistent principles that I believe apply across a wide variety of library organizations:

1. Every formal policy should have a clear purpose. You should always be able to answer the question “What problem is this policy designed to solve or prevent?”. If you can’t answer that question compellingly, the policy may not be necessary – and may be causing more trouble (in the form of unnecessary restriction or overprescriptive workflows) than it’s worth.
2. Every formal policy must be formally approved. No library-wide policy should be established without administrative approval. Divisional or departmental policies should always be consonant with library-wide policies, and subject to administrative appeal. (In other words, if an employee objects to a departmental policy, there should be a process in place for requesting administrative intervention.)
3. Policies should be built on principles that are clear, explicit, and consistent across the library. Not every library department has to have identical policies, but differences across the organization should be explicable by appeal to consistent principles. For example: the library may not have an organization-wide dress code, but a department that handles heavy equipment may require its employees to wear steel-toed shoes. When an employee of that department asks “Why can staff in Acquisitions wear whatever shoes they want, but I have to wear steel-toed shoes?”, an appropriate answer would be “Your department has exceptional rules for reasons of employee safety.” On the other hand, if one service area requires its employees to wear slacks or skirts and another allows jeans, there might not be a good explanation. This leads to the final principle I want to propose:
4. Policies must be principle-driven, not personality-driven. Consider the dress code situation again. Two departments may have different dress policies for legitimate reasons arising from the work they do – or they may have different dress policies for illegitimate reasons arising from supervisor personality: one manager might just hate denim jeans. A small degree of variability based on personality is more or less inevitable, but the greater the variance from department to department within the library, the greater the likelihood that it will result in conflict that needs to be resolved by creating (or modifying) a library-wide policy. 

The bottom line is this: there’s nothing wrong with tradition, but tradition shouldn’t be confused with policy. And policies are essential, but not all policies are equally important. 

On Thursday, we’ll talk more about that last point as we discuss some characteristics of a healthy library policy regime. 

Takeaways and Action Items

• Policies are essential; but not all policies are equally wise or important.
• Tradition is fine, but should not be confused with policy.
• Policies must be based on principle, not driven by personality.

As a library leader, one of your most important jobs is to make space in your organization for the expression of minority perspectives. Of course, one complicating factor is that the term “minority perspectives” can mean so many different things. For example, it can mean:

• The viewpoints of people who are in a minority within the organization
• The viewpoints of people who represent minority groups in the larger society
• Views or opinions that are held by a minority of people in the library

Each of these dimensions of “minority”-ness can contribute to both the useful uniqueness of a person’s opinion or perspective, and to the difficulty that a person may face in expressing that opinion or perspective.

Of course, the fact that a viewpoint is in the minority does not, in itself, say anything one way or the other about the validity of that viewpoint. If you have a library employee who believes the earth is flat, that will almost certainly be a minority viewpoint in the library; does it deserve the same consideration as, say, that of a library employee who subscribes to the majority view that the earth is round? Similarly, most large organizations will contain a variety of views on topics related to the management of the organization, some of which will be held by the majority of employees and some of which will represent minority views of various kinds – all of which may conflict with each other. When deciding which viewpoint will prevail, in what ways and to what degree should the minority or majority nature of the viewpoint factor into the decision-making process?

For our purposes today, I’m going to focus on two specific dimensions of “minority”-ness and briefly consider questions that library leaders should ask themselves about making space for those perspectives: first, the social/cultural dimension, and second, the intellectual/political dimension.

On the social/cultural dimension: we have long known that there are multiple important reasons for fostering ethnic, racial, and cultural diversity in our organizations. One reason is that members of various minority groups have experienced a range of discrimination and oppression throughout our history, resulting not only in harms that can be partially remediated by intentional efforts at inclusion, but also in the exclusion of valuable perspectives on issues important to library services and collections: without the perspectives that arise from Black people’s experiences, for example, the library collection is less likely to represent the realities of those experiences effectively; without the perspectives that arise from neurodivergent people’s experiences, our services may not provide well for unique needs of neurodivergent people. All of these factors suggest an organizational imperative to make space in our policy discussions, leadership cohorts, and program initiatives for the voices of people from underrepresented groups – all while recognizing the legal and policy limitations within which we may have to work while doing so. A wise library leader will be constantly monitoring the cultural and ethnic makeup of her organization and asking herself what its implications are: is there an appropriate diversity of voices and experience at the table in light of what the library hopes to accomplish? Is anyone either inside or outside the organization experiencing a remediable disadvantage due to their race, gender, religion, or other demographic characteristic? 

If someone in the library has a view that differs from the majority view, is there a safe way for that person to express it – not without risk of disagreement, but with the expectation that she will be listened to and her perspective respectfully considered?

On the intellectual/political dimension: Every library organization has a majority culture – or, in many cases, multiple majority cultures. There will not only be (in most cases) majorities that follow ethnic, racial, age, and gender lines, but also majorities that follow ideological and political ones. Just as someone who is the only woman in a room full of men, or the only person of color in a room full of Anglo-European people, may feel inhibited in speaking up in a meeting, so might someone who senses that her opinion on the topic at hand is a minority view and who expects that expressing it will be costly for her – socially, professionally, or both. A wise library leader will be constantly monitoring the ideological diversity of his organization and asking himself what its implications are: is there such a strong unity of social or political viewpoint within the organization that other legitimate perspectives are being crowded out or dismissed out of hand? If someone in the library has a view that differs from the majority view, is there a safe way for that person to express it – not without risk of disagreement, but with the expectation that she will be listened to and her perspective respectfully considered?

These issues are neither simple nor easy. Making space for people of different backgrounds and characteristics may create uncomfortable social dynamics both for them and for others, and may require the leader to deal with difficult questions about equity, justice, and principle; making space for differences of opinion and viewpoint will almost certainly lead to some degree of conflict and may raise difficult questions about the appropriate boundaries of thought and inquiry (are there any views against which the library will take an organizational stand? Must every opinion be treated with equal respect, no matter how outlandish it is, or how offensive to the majority of library employees and patrons?). But this difficult work is the work of leadership. Leaders who decline to engage in it are not doing their jobs, and are giving neither their employees nor their patrons the support they need in order to thrive in their work.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Every library organization contains different kinds of minority groups. Each offers distinctive perspectives that may be important to the health of the library, and wise leaders will look for ways to include those perspectives in the work of the organization.
• As you look around your organization, ask yourself questions like:
  • Are different minority groups represented both in the organization and in leadership? If not, what perspectives are missing from our discussions?
  • Does our organization have a clear ideological culture? If so, are we appropriately welcoming of heterodox viewpoints? 
  • What needs to change in our organization to ensure that all employees understand that they belong, and to ensure that the diverse perspectives contained in our organization have an appropriate platform for expression and consideration?

Some years ago, I was on a campus search committee that was chaired by one of the university deans. As search committees are, we were tasked with winnowing down a large group of applicants to a small group of finalists.

As anyone who has taken on this unenviable task knows, the process can be both long and excruciating, as discussion threatens to spiral into unending cycles that have no natural endpoint. There’s always more that can be said about a candidate, or things already said that can be rephrased, or other dimensions of consideration that could be invoked. And that’s just for a single candidate – the same dynamic applies to the discussion of every candidate, which means the process of winnowing a pool can be both hugely time-consuming and exhausting.

There are lots of ways to short-circuit some of this process without unduly short-circuiting the necessary due diligence: sometimes committee members are asked to come to the first meeting with a force-ranked list of candidates, or with the candidates sorted into tiers of preference, or with a “top three” list. In all of those cases, though, the most natural (and common) agenda structure for the meeting involves going around the table and asking each committee member to explain her or his reasons for organizing their list the way they did, which of course threatens to throw everyone into a vortex of conversational churn that is likely to generate maximum discussion for minimal gain. Useful, even essential information will come out of it, but at the cost of much less-useful, less-essential talk.

This particular dean did something I had never seen anyone do before, and that has changed the way I approach decision-making in meetings. Instead of going through the list of candidates and discussing all of them, he started by taking us through the list and asking one question about each one:

“Does anyone believe this person should be a finalist?”

If no one spoke up, then we were finished talking about that candidate. If someone did speak up, then we put that candidate’s name aside and moved on to the next one. 

This process took, literally, no more than five minutes. At the end of those five minutes, we had a very small list of names and were prepared to invest all of our remaining meeting time talking about which of them should rise to the level of a finalist. (And if we had established that the whole group considered only two or three of the candidates on the list acceptable as finalists, the meeting would literally have been over, its mission accomplished.)

This approach accomplished two things, both elegantly and efficiently:

• It established immediately which candidates were considered by no one on the committee to be eligible for finalist status. (In a more traditional committee meeting, we would have gradually figured that out over the course of a long conversation about multiple candidates that, unbeknownst to the committee members, everyone already considered unacceptable .)
• It ensured that even if only one person on the committee considered a candidate acceptable, that candidate received full consideration by the whole group.

In other words, although this strategy might seem on the surface to be perfunctory, it did not actually result in any candidate receiving less than full consideration. The only candidates excluded from further discussion were those that everyone in the group had come to the meeting already considering unacceptable. 

Since my experience on that search committee, I’ve applied a similar principle not only in the context of recruitments, but also in other group decision-making situations. For example, when discussing a policy change in a group, if it starts seeming very clear that everyone agrees with the change, I will gently intervene and ask “Does anyone feel that this change is a bad idea?”. (Or, of course, if the group seems to be negatively inclined, I’ll ask “Does anyone feel that this change is a good idea?”)

One danger of this approach lies in the fact that people do not always feel comfortable speaking up in a group setting, especially if their own view is at odds with what they believe is the prevailing group position. But this is also a danger of relying on extensive discussion – and, in any case, part of a leader’s job is to foster an organizational culture that tolerates and encourages the expression of minority views.

That, in fact, will be the topic of my subscribers-only Thursday column this week – so if you’re not already a subscriber, consider joining us!

In recent years, as social and political issues have become increasingly fraught and there has been more and more division and conflict both in our society and on the campuses that academic libraries serve, there has been increasing controversy over the issue of library neutrality. One on side are those who believe the library is (or should be) “never neutral,” and who argue that the library profession’s values necessitate taking a stand on social issues; on the other side are those who believe that neutrality on political and social issues is, itself, an essential library value that preserves our ability to serve all patrons equally in a pluralistic society.

Caught between are people (like me, for example) who worry that the concept of “neutrality” has become a political football, too often oversimplified and wielded to score points against ideological opponents, and too rarely considered and applied in a careful and critical way. Left behind in the rubble of this cultural conflict are the patrons who are directly impacted by the library’s choices and policies regarding neutrality.

The fact is that there are some significant and meaningful ways in which the library not only is, but absolutely must remain neutral. For example, libraries generally cannot take an organizational position on matters of party politics, by endorsing candidates for office or ballot initiatives. On such issues the library is and must remain neutral. On the other hand, libraries are not at all neutral on social issues like literacy (of which we stand in favor), the freedom to read (ditto), and providing equal access to everyone in the communities we serve. From a slightly different angle, there are also some who argue that libraries are “never neutral” in light of their organizational connections to “structures of oppression” – an interesting position, and one that itself is (or should be) subject to critical examination and analysis and on which there will exist a variety of viewpoints among librarians. 

So instead of the misleadingly simple and binary question “Is the library neutral?”, I would like to propose a more complex and reality-based question: “In what ways should my library be neutral, and in what ways must it not be?”. 

The answers to this question will, of course, vary depending on what kind of library you work in – and the answers will often be complex, because (to take one example) a library that says “We take a neutral position regarding the political affiliations of our patrons” is taking a non-neutral position on the question “Should libraries treat patrons differently depending on their party affiliations?”. But the question of neutrality goes deeper than issues of institutional position. As a leader, you also need to work to determine answers to questions like:

• How much ideological diversity will we tolerate in my library or my area of stewardship? Will there be sanctions for the expression of particular viewpoints, and if so, how will we decide which ones will be sanctioned?
• How will we handle internal disagreement on social and political issues? When disagreement leads to interpersonal conflict, what principles will be applied to resolve or manage it?
• What kinds of political expression are allowed in the library building, and within the library organization? How will limitations on such expression (if any) be enforced?

Each of the questions above engages with the issue of “neutrality,” because none of them can be answered unless the library has a coherent organizational position on the degree to which its employees and patrons can speak their minds without fear of organizational sanction. In the current, extremely difficult social and political moment, a shared understanding of what those boundaries are is more important than ever in the libraries we lead.

Takeaways and Action Items

• It’s unhelpfully reductive to say either that the library is “neutral” or that it is “never neutral.” As a leader, you need to know (and help determine) the ways in which your library is and is not neutral.
• The ways in which your library is and is not neutral will be significantly shaped by the mission of the institution you serve.
• Ask yourself: Do our patrons and employees understand where the library has taken an institutional stance and where it has not? Do our employees have a clear understanding of what boundaries there are in our library on the expression of political/social views – and on responding to others’ expression of their views? 

In an earlier post, I wrote about what I called the “value-neutrality” of innovation – basically making the point that an initiative isn’t necessarily either more or less valuable simply because it can reasonably be called “innovative.” What matters is whether it represents (or leads to) improvement. Improvement that is accomplished in an old-fashioned way is better than stagnation or regression achieved through innovation.

Today I’d like to expand a bit on the important leadership principle that underlies the point above: the principle of keeping ends and means straight in our minds as we create and carry out strategy in the library.

Innovation is not an end; it’s a means to an end. The same can be said of other principles that I often see invoked as if they were ends in themselves. Collaboration is one. (As Cliff Lynch once said in my hearing, “The purpose of collaboration is not to collaborate.”) And another is assessment. “Innovation,” “collaboration,” “assessment” – all of these are “halo words,” terms that libraries sometimes invoke because they know they should, or in order to signal their organizational virtue. And the terms can serve that purpose quite well. Unfortunately, however, a more virtuous library may or may not be one that serves its patrons and its institution better.

Today, let’s look at this issue in the specific context of assessment.

Many libraries – my own included – repeatedly emphasize their commitment to fostering a “culture of assessment.” And this is a good thing! We should be assessing ourselves constantly, rigorously, and effectively. Are our collections aligned well with the curricula we are here to support? Are students and faculty having good and productive experiences with our staff and services? Is our website inviting and easy to use? Are our physical spaces organized and maintained such that they meet the real-world needs of our patrons?

If we make the mistake of seeing assessment as a goal in itself, our tendency will be to assess everything we can as rigorously as we can.

These are all absolutely essential questions to ask – and we should be asking them iteratively and regularly. Assessment is the process of gaining answers to those questions, and to the degree that we do assessment well the answers will be accurate, precise, and reliable. 

And then… we will have done assessment. Goal achieved! Right?

Wrong. 

Assessment is not – or should not be – a goal in itself. By the same token, fostering a “culture of assessment” is not a goal in itself. What we need in libraries is a culture of improvement, in the pursuit of which assessment is one important tool. If we make the mistake of seeing assessment as a goal in itself, our tendency will be to assess everything we can as rigorously as we can. But if our goal is to achieve organizational improvement, we will focus our assessment activities on the things that matter most to our strategic priorities, and we will assess them to the degree necessary to support real and meaningful improvement. And we will then act, strategically, on the results of that assessment behavior.

To be clear: none of this is to say that there’s anything wrong with fostering a culture of assessment. It is only to say that we shouldn’t confuse the means (fostering a culture of assessment) with the ends (improving our libraries). If we see assessment as a goal in itself, we’re liable to end up with an ongoing series of very thorough, very rigorous assessment documents that get filed in a drawer (either physical or virtual) and are never consulted again because they have fulfilled their organizational purpose – which is to demonstrate our culture of assessment. I’ve seen this happen too often, and I’ll bet you have too. The way to avoid this is to assess strategically, and always with the purpose of using assessment as a tool for the accomplishment of clear and specific goals.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Assessment is a means to an end, a tool that we use to accomplish a task. It is not an end in itself.
• Libraries need more than a “culture of assessment” – they need a culture of strategic improvement, informed by assessment.
• How does your organization approach assessment? Can you identify important changes in your facility, collections, and programming that were informed and facilitated by effective assessment? Have there been assessment initiatives that resulted in little or no organizational improvement? If so, what needs to change in your library?