FORGET THE OPAC: WHY DOES LIBRARY MANAGEMENT SUCK?

by George Needham
published October 26, 2006

It happened again this week. One of the librarians I’d mentored at Snowbird several years ago called me. He’s usually an upbeat, ebullient soul, but in this call, he sounded beaten down, dispirited. He’s one of two deputy directors of a library, and has worked with the director for nearly four years. But the library has been having some trouble, and the director has responded by pulling up the drawbridge and isolating himself. The two deputies have been trying to help, but they can’t seem to penetrate his shell. He has stopped sharing budget information with them, has forbidden them to attend board meetings (which by law are open to the public), and has generally decided to bull his way through. *sigh*

Over the last ten years, I’ve had the honor of being a mentor at five library leadership events, Snowbird twice and Library Leadership Ohio three times. After the events, I’ve stayed in contact with some of the participants, and I’ve also signed up for several new librarian listservs.
There is a depressing theme that runs through much of the discussion I monitor here, and it centers on a topic that is very difficult for me to write about: why is so much of library management so bad?

Let me give you a few examples. There is the library director whose main method of communicating with his deputy is a series of grunts, obscenities, and admonitions to “handle it!” There is another director who chases every management trend that comes down the pike, leaving the staff with whiplash every time a new bestselling business book or PBS special comes out. And then there are the department heads and other middle managers who withhold information, practice “guerilla performance review,” or provide no clues to how their subordinates are supposed to do their jobs.

I started this as a screed about what’s not being taught in library school, but then I came to realize that these aren’t library school issues, they are human issues.
There are a couple of reasons, I think, why “library management” seems to be a contradiction in terms.

First, we tend to promote really good staff people into management positions, whether or not they have any proclivity for this role. Someone who does great story hours and book talks becomes the head of the children’s department, or an efficient cataloger ends up running the Technical Services department. Sometimes, this works out fine; the promoted librarian applies the empathy and understanding she developed during her days as a staff member to her new role. But too many other times, this is a disaster. Lacking training or a natural talent for leadership, she applies the same attention to detail (synonyms: “perfectionism” and “micromanagement”) to the new job. She huddles with the clique of people who used to be her peers and ends up being seen as playing favorites. Or she decided that she can’t trust anyone any more, so she tries to take everything on herself, delegating only the most routine work because she doesn’t trust anyone to do it as well as she could.

Second, and closely related to the first, we don’t have ways to reward people sufficiently for doing their own jobs well. The only avenue for advancement and a better salary is promotion. (I am told by my mother, a retired teacher, and others in the education business that this is also a big problem in schools. Really good teachers have little chance to advance other than by becoming principals or other supervisors, whether or not they really want to leave the classroom.)

Third, we lack any profession-wide approach to mentoring. The leadership programs provide a handful of librarians with access to greybeards like yours truly, but it’s very hard for a working librarian to establish relationships that could provide good role models and informal teachers.
Fourth, and I promise this will be my only shot at library schools, library management classes in most library schools leave a lot to be desired. Like some connection to reality.
So where is there room for growth?

I think we need to ask ourselves some hard questions, whether we are hiring people or we are trying to decide if we want to move into management.
 
I think we also need to make a push toward having better mentorship within the field. When you read about or hear a politician or business leader talk about how he or she developed the skills needed to succeed, they frequently mention a mentor. Those of us who have been in the field for a long time should eagerly accept the challenge of mentoring our new colleagues.
My first mentor was Erna Hall, a branch manager in the Buffalo and Erie County (New York) Public Library, who hired me for my first library job in 1971. She must have seen something promising in her new shelver, so she gave me a lot of opportunity to try things way out of my pay range. She was a humanistic manager and a subtle leader who treated all of us as colleagues, not peons, and who modeled a standard of leadership behavior I’ve been trying to live up to ever since.

One of the joys of working on WebJunction and QuestionPoint here at OCLC has been the opportunity to deal with a lot of people who are new to the field, who are new to OCLC, and who bring a fresh outlook to our world. Their excitement and energy revitalize me, and I can be a sounding board for them as they test ideas and issues they are facing. 

Mentoring is a powerful force and we need to harness it more effectively. The upside is that we have the opportunity to support and encourage the next generation of library leaders, to learn from their fresh outlook and enthusiasm, and to share our hard-earned experiences. By the way, this means we learn from their experiences as well as boring them with our old war stories!
 Except for running the risk of rejection by people wary of what we offer, I can't really see a downside. But the downside risks of not communicating effectively and ignoring our opportunities to mentor are great. They can lead to a disconnect in the continuum of service that ties the library profession together, an uninformed rejection of values we fought to instill in the field, and a Sisyphus-like repetition of old mistakes. The upside of action clearly outweighs the downside of inaction.