Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

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?

In mission-driven organizations, we tend to feel a particular irritation when those to whom we answer require us to account for our work with statistics. “Not everything that matters can be quantified!,” we insist – and we’re right. In fact, there’s a powerful argument to be made that the more important an endeavor is, the less likely it is that the endeavor’s success or failure will be easily quantifiable.

I’ll go further, in fact, and say that some of the most important aspects of our work are not only impossible to quantify, but also nearly impossible to assess qualitatively, at least with any degree of reliability. How can you know the real-world impact of a correctly applied metadata tag? How can you know whether the research assistance you provided to a student made any difference to her educational experience or her life? When you declined to purchase one book and decided instead to purchase another one, what exactly did the rightness or wrongness of that decision end up meaning for the people your library serves? Any one of these decisions could turn out to be pivotal in the course of an individual’s life and the institution’s ability to achieve its goals – and any one of them could have little or no real-world impact. Except in very rare cases, we’ll never know which was the case for most of the work we do. 

In light of this reality, it would be all too easy to make one of two common mistakes:

1. Throw up our hands and decide that since we can’t reliably measure all the impacts of our work, we should just give up on worrying about those impacts, or
2. Decline to do anything the success of which can’t be measured quantitatively and reliably.

I wish I could offer a magic technique for actually assessing the impact of most of what we do; if I could do that, I’d probably be in a much more lucrative profession. Here’s what I can offer, though: a question that we should always ask ourselves when undertaking a new project, forming a new committee, or defining a proposal:

How will we know whether we’ve succeeded?

The question won’t always be phrased exactly that way, but this is the general mindset that you should always have as you consider undertaking a new initiative. 

Let’s say someone in your library wants to redesign a public space. Great – as a leader, I hope you encourage creative thinking of that kind. But before going very far down the road, ask that person to consider this question: How will I know whether the redesign was a success?

Or suppose one of your managers wants to put together a task force to improve diversity and inclusion in your collections. Great – diversity and inclusion are important. Before undertaking that significant project, though, ask your manager this question: How will we know when the task force’s work is done?

Or suppose your HR director wants to establish a program to improve library morale. Great – staff morale is incredibly important. But right from the outset, the HR director will need to be able to answer this question: How will we know whether morale has improved? 

There’s a fundamental principle at work here: if you’re considering investing time, energy, and/or money in trying to achieve a goal that is intrinsically difficult to measure, ask yourself ahead of time how you will know whether the initiative was a success. If you can’t answer that question compellingly, take a step back. The danger in moving forward without a compelling answer to that question is that you will begin sinking limited resources into something that may or may not be working, and will have no way of knowing whether you’re making progress. Sometimes we do things just because they seem like things we ought to do, rather than because we have good reason to expect them to bear meaningful fruit.

Of course, not being able to answer that question fully and rigorously should not necessarily prevent you from moving forward with the project. In some cases, you’ll decide to go ahead because the likelihood of net benefit is great enough to make it worth the risk. But the exercise of asking and trying to answer that question will always make your initiative more productive and more focused.

Takeaways and Action Items

• You don’t have to measure everything quantitatively, but before undertaking an initiative, you should have at least a reasonable idea of how you’ll know whether it did or didn’t succeed.
• Just because something can’t be measured doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. But if you can’t figure out how to measure it, ask yourself how you know it’s important.
• Sit down with your management or leadership team and review all current projects and task forces. In each case, ask yourselves How will we know when this project is finished or this task force’s work is done? If you can’t answer that question clearly and compellingly, think carefully about whether the project or task force should continue.

If you’ve spent any time in library leadership, you’ve probably encountered a situation like this:

One of the people you supervise – let’s say it’s a librarian named Gary – wants a library policy to change. But the policy – let’s say it’s paid leave for part-time employees – is a campus policy over which the library has no control. So a conversation like this ensues:

Gary: “It’s deeply unfair that everyone gets paid time off on federal holidays except part-time employees. We’d work if we could, but we’re not allowed to, so we’re forced to just take what amounts to a pay cut.”

You: “I see where you’re coming from on this. The thing is, what we’re talking about isn’t a library policy; it’s a university policy, and the library has to abide by it.”

Gary: “You could use your influence with the administration to get it changed.”

You: “I do have some influence, but probably not as much as you think. I could try to get this policy changed, of course, but I’m not sure it would be a wise use of what influence I do have.”

Gary: “Come on, man! Your job is to advocate for us!”

Does Gary have a point? Sort of.

On the one hand, yes: advocating for the interests of library employees really is part of the library leader’s job. No leader should be afraid of doing that.

On the other hand, advocating for the interests of library employees is only part of the library leader’s job, and doing so in a non-strategic or indiscriminate way can create conflict with other, equally important parts of the leaders job, such as: 

• Advocating for the needs of patrons (which are not always fully in harmony with the desires of staff)
• Furthering the institution’s overall mission (which sometimes requires library staff to do things that they’d prefer not to do, or to set different priorities from what they’d prefer)
• Managing the library’s political capital (which requires being judicious and strategic in deciding which proposals to escalate to campus administration)

As a leader, you never want to have to tell your people that you’re not going to advocate for them. But sometimes what they want isn’t what would be best for other constituencies to whom you also have an obligation as a leader – or even for them. In some cases, the best way to defend your people’s real interests in the long run is to decline to advocate for what they’re asking for in the moment. 

So how should you respond when confronted with the “Your job is to advocate for us!” message? Obviously, it depends on the circumstance. Sometimes you’ll agree entirely and you’ll embark on making an advocacy plan. But other times you’ll be unconvinced, or you’ll feel the need to do more due diligence before making a decision. In such situations, possible responses might include: 

• “I have many different responsibilities. Advocating for what you want is an important one, but not the only one. I can see how this would benefit you, but it looks to me like it could undermine patron service – and serving patrons is also my job.”
• “The thing you want me to advocate for is not something that everyone in the library wants. Maybe we should have a broader organizational conversation about this.”
• “Every time I ask the administration to change a policy or give us something else we want, I expend a little bit (and sometimes a lot) of political capital. Insisting on a discussion of what you’re asking for would probably undermine my ability to get a discussion about other important things the library needs. Where do you think this particular issue should fall on the list of library priorities?”

Takeaways and Action Items

• As a library leader, you have multiple responsibilities, and sometimes they can be in tension with each other. What principles will you apply in deciding which ones take precedence?
• Sometimes, effectively defending the needs of your people means declining to advocate for something they want.
• Meet with your leadership team and consider scenarios like the ones discussed above, including any that have taken place in your library. How have you handled them? Is everyone on your team on the same page?

One of the most frequent and potentially vexing questions a library leader faces is “When do we make exceptions to rules?”

It’s a tough question in any organization, but maybe especially so in an organization that is constitutionally designed for the establishment and strict application of rules. Whether they be cataloging standards or circulation policies or restrictions on food or talking, rules can seem like the lifeblood of the library – the things that make it possible for us to serve our patrons well, and without which chaos would engulf the organization and render it useful to no one.

And honestly, I agree with that sentiment 100%. In the library, rules are not just important – they’re essential.

And yet, we all know there are times when exceptions have to be made. Circumstances regularly arise for which the rules simply don’t provide because we couldn’t have foreseen them. In such moments, the difficult questions we face are:

First, can there be an exception to this rule? 

Second, how will we determine whether an exception is sensible and fair?

These are questions that I deal with regularly (regularly) in my library, and I’m sure you do in yours as well. And my team and I have settled on a standard question that we ask ourselves when presented with the possibility of making an exception to a rule or policy. The question is:

What clear and fair principle would we be applying in a consistent way if we were to decide to grant this exception?

If – and only if – we can answer that question in a way that is both logically sensible and strategically compelling, then we feel confident in granting the exception.

Because let’s be honest here: the question “Why did you grant Phyllis, but not Fred, an exception to the rule against using group study rooms for graduate seminars?” is a perfectly legitimate one, and we should be able to answer it by reference to a clear and fair principle, consistently applied. If the real answer is “Because Fred has been driving me crazy all year and Phyllis did me a big favor,” that truly does not reflect the consistent application of a clear and fair principle (unless you think that “people who drive me crazy don’t get policy exceptions; that privilege is reserved for those who make my life easier” is a fair principle).

If, on the other hand, the reason Phyllis got to use the group study room for a graduate seminar was that Phyllis’s usual seminar room had experienced a flood due to a burst pipe and was being repaired, and that all other seminar rooms on campus were full, and the vice president for facilities had specifically asked us to make an exception to accommodate her, then the answer might be “Because Phyllis experienced a genuine emergency and the university asked us to help” – the underlying principle being “we make accommodations for genuine emergencies, especially when asked to do so by our host institution.” That’s a principle that is both clear and fair – and that can (and hopefully will) be consistently applied across the library. 

Sometimes, as leaders, it’s tempting to avoid making policy exceptions at all because of the knee-jerk belief that “if I make an exception for you, then I have to make it for everyone.” But that’s only true if the exception you make is not principle-based. (More on this in my next post.) If it is principle-based, and if you’re applying that principle consistently, then you’ll make the exception whenever it makes sense, and you won’t make it whenever it doesn’t make sense. The latter approach is more work may lead to more difficult conversations with staff, but difficult conversations with staff are part of the leader’s work – and as I said in an earlier post, if you’re going to take a leader’s salary, you’d better be willing to do a leader’s work.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Making exceptions to policy is fine – as long as you can explain the exception by reference to clear and fair principles, consistently applied.
• Making exceptions the right way doesn’t mean that the exceptions will always make everyone happy; it only means that you’ll be able to explain the exceptions in good faith.
• Talk with your leadership team about your library’s strategy for dealing with policy exceptions. Do you have a clear strategy, or do you just deal with each situation as it arises? Would it be helpful to clarify a statement of principle and share it broadly within your library? 

With today’s post, I’m introducing an occasional series with the theme “Two and a Half Cheers.” Let me explain, briefly, what it’s about.

Usually we use the phrase “Two cheers for…” to preface discussion of something that is commonly underappreciated or even denigrated, but that we feel deserves at least a modicum of credit – maybe not unqualified celebration, but more appreciation than it usually gets. E.M. Forster’s 1951 book Two Cheers for Democracy is a classic in this vein; more recently, a sincere if somewhat qualified apologetic by Josh Bivens for President Biden’s economic policies carried the title Two Cheers for Pragmatism.

My series of posts will take the “two cheers” concept and give it a little nudge in the direction of celebration – hence the unifying theme of “Two and a Half Cheers.” While recognizing that no orientation or philosophy or practice or area of organizational emphasis deserves religious, unqualified support, I’ll argue (briefly) that the item under consideration is actually much more beneficial than harmful, and that those who dismiss or denigrate it in principle – particularly in the context of library leadership – are making the classic error of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The first entry in this series will be a consideration of efficiency – a term much maligned or at least dismissed, especially in the academic context, and one that I believe deserves much more respect. 

Fundamentally, the term “efficiency” is simply a measure of how much waste is incurred in accomplishing a task. The less waste is involved in accomplishing it, the more efficiently it has been accomplished. Efficiency is different from effectiveness, obviously; a task may be accomplished very effectively either with a substantial amount of wasted time, effort, or money (in which case it was accomplished less efficiently) or with very little wasted time, effort or money (in which case it was accomplished more efficiently).

Efficiency has gotten a bad rap over the years, especially in academia and especially in academic libraries, for a number of reasons, some of them good and some of them… less good. Among the better reasons are the fact that academic work often does not lend itself readily to the rigorous measurement of either effort or deliverables, which means that demands for greater efficiency in academic work can actually be destructive of effectiveness; the fact that the uncritical pursuit of efficiency can lead to a soulless and sterile work environment that undermines some of the characteristics of the academy that make it uniquely valuable in a consumer society; and the fact that so much of what academia produces demonstrates its full value only long after the effort has been expended, making a reliable measure of efficiency in the short- to medium-term virtually impossible. 

However, there are also areas of academia – and especially of academic library work – in which efficiency is highly desirable and very much worth pursuing, even if it isn’t completely measurable. 

For example, we should always consider efficiency when planning and managing meetings. A one-hour meeting that involves eight people represents the equivalent time commitment of one person’s full day of work. When thinking about how to use that meeting time, the leader should ask herself “How likely is it that the outcomes of this meeting would represent a good use of one person’s full workday?” In this context, efficiency may not be precisely measurable, but it can still be maximized by keeping the meeting agenda tight and well managed and by ensuring that it results in real deliverables. 

Another example is the use of systems and IT staff time. A library leader should take care to ensure that this extremely valuable resource is being kept focused on the most high-priority needs of the library and its users, not squandered with poorly managed or prioritized demands. Does your IT staff have clear guidance from library leadership on when they should say “yes” and when they can say “no” to demands from staff? Do they get clear and regular guidance on how to prioritize projects? Are there well-established principles in place to help them make decisions without having to constantly ask their line leadership? If not, the balance of effort to outcome will be poor and everyone (including the IT staff) will be frustrated.

One more example of a library context in which pursuing efficiency is essential: the use of library space. Every library leader should have a good sense of how the space in his facility is being utilized, and of the degree to which these space allocations are helping the library help the university achieve its goals. How are study spaces and student service spaces balanced with space devoted to collections? Do back-office functions take up prime space that might be better dedicated to patron use – or, conversely, are patron spaces so generous that back-office services are being hamstrung by insufficient space? Every physical area in the library represents an investment of resources, and leaders should always be trying to assess the degree to which those investments are paying off in benefit to the host institution.

So let’s pause before reflexively pooh-poohing efficiency. Yes, like any organizational principle, it’s vulnerable to abuse. But it’s an essential leadership and management  principle nonetheless.

Tuesday’s post was about managing the library agenda in a macro, high-level way, by being careful to avoid the mistake of allowing your organizational agenda to be driven by the person who happens to be making his case in your office at any given moment. 

Today we’re going to talk about avoiding a similar, but more micro and granular error: unintentionally letting the first item on your meeting agenda become the one on which the most meeting time is spent.

Now, it’s important to note that there are many different ways of managing meeting agendas, and none is perfect; all of them have pros and cons. One way is to arrange the agenda in descending order of importance, and to take as much time as needed with each topic; this ensures that the most important item will get all the discussion time required, and that the likelihood of an item being pushed to the next meeting is inversely proportional to its importance. Another strategy is to assign a specific amount of meeting time to each agenda item, using both the importance and the complexity of the issue to determine how much time will be budgeted to each item.

And another way – let’s face it, the most common one – to organize a meeting agenda is simply to keep a running list of items up until the meeting, adding items to the list as they arise, and them providing the undifferentiated list to meeting attendees with no time allocations and no indication as to which items are either most urgent or most important.  

Although I’ve acknowledged that there is no single, perfect way to administer a meeting agenda, I’m going to make two very specific recommendations here. But first, some underlying realities of meeting management:

First, we all know how difficult it is to call an end to discussion of complex or difficult issues. (Let’s call this the “Inertia Problem”: discussions in motion tend to remain in motion.) In many cases, you will never arrive at a point where there’s no longer anything useful to be said on the topic; you will only arrive at a point where you have to choose to stop talking and make a decision. If you’re leading the meeting, your difficult task is to determine where that point is and then insist that the discussion end and the decision-making happen. 

Second, the current agenda item is the in-meeting equivalent of the employee who is standing in your office, passionately advocating for a proposal. That person is not more important than the other employees who are not currently in your office (and who may or may not share his advocacy for the proposal), but he’s the one you are being forced to deal with right now, and the temptation to mollify or placate him may work against taking the needs of all other employees (or library patrons) into account. (Let’s call this the “Proximity-Importance Fallacy.”)

Third, we all just lose track of time, especially when an issue is interesting, complex, or controversial. (Let’s call this “Time Blindness.”) I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in a two-hour meeting with a five-item agenda, and have suddenly looked at the clock in the middle of a fascinating and engaging discussion and realized that we’ve spent half of our allocated meeting time on the first agenda item – and are not yet anywhere near a resolution to that item.

The solution to these three problems – Inertia, the Proximity-Importance Fallacy, and Time Blindness – is (and please now picture me adopting a B-movie Nazi accent and walking stiff-legged around the room with a swagger stick under my arm) discipline! 

OK, “discipline” is easy to say. But in the context of managing meeting agendas, what does “discipline” actually look like?

I’m going to suggest two discipline strategies that will make your meetings both more productive and more enjoyable.

First, don’t have a meeting about a topic that doesn’t need a meeting. With my leadership team, most of the items on our meeting agendas are only there because we first determined that they couldn’t be handled asynchronously by email. This doesn’t mean we don’t deal with a lot of stuff in meetings – we meet weekly and our agendas are usually quite full – but it does mean that we don’t waste precious face-to-face time talking about items that don’t really require face-to-face discussion. Sometimes we start out discussing an issue by email, and quickly realize that we really do need in-person discussion, perhaps involving people from outside the leadership team as well. Fair enough; in that case, we still save meeting time by having gotten a head start on the topic.

Second, give each agenda item a time budget and either stick with it or consciously reallocate time during the meeting. For example: suppose you need to discuss a personnel issue that is important but not complicated, and you believe that 20 minutes of a two-hour meeting will be sufficient. You then allocate other chunks of time to four or five other agenda items, all of those allocations adding up to two hours. For that personnel issue, one of three things is going to happen: either you’ll take care of it in less than 20 minutes (excellent!), or you’ll be wrapping up the discussion at around the 19^th minute (still great!), or you’ll come to minute 18 and realize that the issue is going to require more than 20 minutes of discussion (oops). In that third scenario, drawing the discussion to a premature conclusion just because you’re out of time would be a mistake. Instead, you should pause for a moment, acknowledge that the item needs more discussion time, and propose one of two approaches: either suspend discussion and defer its continuation to a later meeting, or reallocate time from another current agenda item so that discussion can continue. (This could mean spending less time on another planned topic, or maybe pushing another agenda item to a later meeting entirely.) Either of those approaches allows you to keep control of the meeting’s time management – and it has at least two very important effects: first, it maximizes the likelihood that you’ll spend the right amount of time on the right topics; second, it increases your team’s confidence that your library is handling issues in a conscious, strategic, and rational way.

Now, I realize that the paragraph above might seem a bit rigid and prescriptive. A bit… I don’t know… Nazi. But here’s the thing: if you fail to allocate meeting time consciously and strategically, you will end up allocating it passively and chaotically, and that’s never a recipe for effective leadership or for a happy and effective library organization.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Remember that meeting agendas do not manage themselves. The only way they get managed effectively is if someone takes explicit responsibility for managing them.
• Assess your own meeting-management strategies. Are they effective? Do you regularly find yourself frustrated by your inability to get everything done in a meeting that you need to? Would any of the strategies discussed above be helpful?
• How do you asses both the importance of agenda items and the amount of time that each will likely need? Is that assessment method working well for you?