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By: Glen Holt
Published: November 6, 2007
HIRING THE RIGHT ASSOCIATES
The big moment arrives. Through your skillful politics, great
marketing, good timing and luck, your library has obtained the funds
needed to add a few additional senior staff. In that
maelstrom of vision that goes with new money, you recognize that these
new folks will play critical roles in your administration.
You want their work and style to help you set the institutional tone
for years to come. You know what you like in associates. You
also know that your organization has weaknesses at the top.
And, you recognize that the weaknesses are derived at least partially
from what you are good at and what you like to do. So, what
will be your hiring requirements? Who are “the right
associates”?
No doubt Frank Hermes’s Peer Panel members will present dozens of
suggestions as the characteristics of stellar upper-level
mangers. I’m sure that each will have extraordinary vision,
bottomless insight and immeasurable leadership qualities that I could
not possibly imagine. So, what I’m doing in this column is
drawing on experience. I’ve hired a lot of good staff – and a
few duds. Drawing on both kinds of experiences, here are some
characteristics of the “right associates” I would try to
hire.
- Hire professional
associates, not friends. A strong library hiring effort
begins with an appreciation for differences. Because of that
characteristic, great libraries always cast a broad net to obtain
applications from minorities like those whose numbers are growing among
your service constituency. That kind of search also produces
persons who have different professional experience from
yours. There is a huge difference between those
kind of searches and settling for someone who looks and thinks like you
and the rest of your management staff. Be especially careful
when your call for new professional associates generates calls from
elected and appointed officials or board and advisory group
officials. Such people often come with a burden:
they’re hard to fire no matter how mediocre or incompetent they turn
out to be.
- Smart people who can
measure quality. There is a huge difference between smart and
glib. Great library professionals are always smart and
thoughtful, certainly coherent but not always glib. Smart
professionals know that library leaders have to make innumerable
choices almost always in the midst of ambivalence. They are
smart enough to recognize that books, computers, staff and facilities
are tools that, if organized effectively, can deliver quality service
to their current and future clients. They also know that
quality is never a given but something that needs to be worked for and
measured. The ability to set up and measure the performance
of quality in service systems is a huge deficit in way too many library
organizations. Smart managers who recognize that you have to
measure service to manage it should be among any institution’s
leadership treasures. Hire them. They’ll help you,
your institution and the profession.
- Demonstrable
knowledge or skills in at least one library operations area.
That knowledge/skill set can be in a subject area, an operations arena
or the sociology and economics of a community segment, depending on
what is needed. Those who have rich skills in one area often
have “different personalities” and “ways of working” unfamiliar to
current management staff. Melding a management team is the
job of senior management. It is a task achieved by training
and the right cues from supervisors. Bosses and managers who
say, “We all hire people like us!” are going to have a difficult time
building a management team this is as rich in skills and knowledge as
it is in comfortable conversation at too-frequent meetings to figure
out what to do next because no one on the team can ask the next right
question. Look for those who will help you do that.
- Legal, ethical and
fair. Many – even most – library problems occur because
somebody in management forgets that the law is always the library’s
first guardian, that professional and institutional ethics take
precedence over personal belief and that fairness always is relative
depending on the vantage point and level of involvement.
Libraries get into trouble most frequently when a staff member “gets
tired” of problems with an individual or category of users.
Notable recent examples that have become the subject of bad publicity
have included pornography viewers, the homeless, the mentally ill,
along with noisy and unruly kids, including street gangs.
Unless you want to go to jail or are looking for a lawsuit to make an
institutional point, there are laws, institutional rules, and
professional (though often exceedingly vague) ethical canons to guide
management approaches. Look for people who respect the law,
ethical principles and fairness. That is especially
true in all aspects of library budget and finance, where legal
standards as a result of recent scandals are changing quickly.
- Says no and can
defend or explain that decision to others. If another
management staff member always agrees with you, how valuable is that
person to you and to the future of the organization? Library
managers should anticipate conflict with the same fervor that they
insist on civility in policy discussions.
As everyone who has ever raised children soon learns, “no” is a major
teaching tool. It keeps children from getting burned, jumping
off high buildings or getting bitten by the neighbor’s “friendly
dog.” The same process of saying “no” needs to be built into
library management discussions. When someone says “no”, it
ought to mean that your ears open wide to assess the validity of the
point and what it’s based on. That “no” may be a teaching
moment that saves you from making a huge mistake.
- Good listener who
communicates well. All organizations have communication
systems. Communicating across unit lines – like finance with
computers, service providers with marketing – are often
problematical. A good listener who communicates well knows
that in every library there is a formal and an informal communications
system. The good communicator separates the wheat from the
chaff and learns how to interpret information and make use of all the
communication networks that exist in the institution. In
troubled libraries, new leaders sometimes find that managing informal
networks, including helping close them down, is as important for change
as communicating through the formal systems. Good listening
and communication is the basis for being taught and teaching
others. You can’t have the much-vaunted “learning
organization” without good communicators. Also, a good sense
of humor is a real plus for all of them.
- Problem-solver, not
a whiner. Library management is filled with problems great,
medium and small. Lots of good – even great – management
comes when executives are working out a solution to a
problem. What good managers and great bosses ought to expect
is that the staff who work for them will bring them solutions to the
problems that they have encountered in their areas of
responsibility. Whiners do nothing different until someone in
authority tells them to do so. In library management, whining
is a sad surrogate for little thought and taking no
responsibility. Whining, alas, is one of the banes of all
not-for-profit professions. Do your best in hiring and
evaluation to keep it from becoming the centerpiece of your
organization’s work experience.
- Recognize that
proactive management is hands-on. The larger the library, the
more likely it is that you have staff who disappear. The
computer and the Internet have heightened this trend. If
you’re not sure about this assertion, read any library blog watching
for the “man of La Mancha” effect that defines professional activity as
writing little puffs of words that fill the time of readers and writers
alike. Proactive management always is hands-on
management. It can be management through intermediaries,
especially in larger organizations. Moreover,
proactive management is always about giving direction, for right now
set into a sense that here is the best way to reach a desired future
objective. Great managers never sit on the
sidelines. They are involved as long as they work in their
management position.
- Preference for
in-house or external hires? This point is presented in the
form of a question because it is a way of asking about the state of
your current management and the institution generally. Good
managers practice upward mobility, including suggesting that it is time
for persons to look for a job in another organization. Good
managers offer training opportunities so that employees can move up,
taking on more responsibility and experiencing greater
success. If the institution is troubled, if training has been
minimal and upward mobility has been governed by the “Peter Principle,”
then external hires may be the only answer even though they are more
expensive and time consuming. External hires should be used
to bring new ideas and new kinds of energy into an
institution. And, if the institution is troubled, then new
directors should follow the lead of DC Public under Ginnie Cooper,
where upper level management slots have been filled almost entirely
from among Cooper’s group of cosmopolitan associates from other
institutions. I have always considered positions as
opportunities to place someone in a particular job who will be better
than the person who now is gone. It is not an insult to those
leaving to say that. Rather, it is an example of an
institutional management that is behaving rationally, trying to move
itself toward a more effective future.
- Great Management
fires staff that can’t or won’t do the job. Perhaps more than
most, I have turned down job opportunities and left jobs when I thought
that a lack of training, firings, or critical new hires had created a
management situation where success was not a given even if I did all
the right things. Some examples: A Rasputin on the
management team who has the support of key board members; a highly
placed manager who is known for the legal suits won at the end of
previous jobs; a library where it is clear that union stewards run the
show including selection of new management staff; “gang management”
where a few senior employees have organized satrapies of supporters who
take pleasure in using institutional operations to play “gotcha!” with
each other; a foundation or friends group that has taken over important
decisions about how the libraries operates its publicity, community
relations or fund-raising. Why this list in this
article? To remind library executives who read this piece
that quick dismissals during probation periods are the easiest way to
get rid of hiring mistakes. They also for the right thing to
do for the future of the organization. Good hires of
management staff, with lots of work moves the institution
forward. Bad management hires just become management
disasters.
©
2007, Library Leadership
Network, LLC.
All Rights
Reserved.
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