Impossible positions and bad decisions
From PLN
Impossible positions and bad decisions
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Sometimes it just isn't right--your position or your decision.
You have to expect that. Perfection isn't part of the human condition and it certainly isn't part of any known organizational structure.
These three posts may prove useful for you in thinking about severe imperfections in the real world.
Editor's note: You might also want to consider "Bad leaders avoid the stove"--by Jeff Scott but posted at Leadership turn. The copyright assertions for that blog are so restrictive that I'm choosing to point to the post rather than attempt fair-use excerpts.
Mission impossible
- By Tasha Saecker, director of the Menasha (WI) Public Library. Adapted from this July 14, 2008 post at Sites and soundbytes by permission.
John Berry's latest column for Library Journal is about library directorship, The Impossible Job. Berry writes of the balancing act of being a director, and he gets it exactly right. Even if you aren't a library director, you should read this. Actually, you should read it particularly if you aren't a director.
As anyone who has directed a public library knows, it certainly is tricky to balance your professional passion for library service with not only budget restrictions, but also with working together with staff and board who may not see the library and its services in the same way at all.
Recently here in Wisconsin, we have seen at least two surprising firings of library directors in fairly large libraries. Both of them shocked me and rattled me to my core. Especially because both directors were innovative, passionate, and creative. They were leading their libraries forward.
But it failed. They didn't fail. The situation did. I am not privy to what happened behind closed doors and at board meetings, but I know that at the center of each must have been issues between the board and the director. Perhaps they were moving too fast for the board. Too slow. Too technological. Too book-centered. Too community-based. Too innovative. Too too too. Too anything.
And we are back again to the balancing. The moving forward without pushing. The constant growth without loss of quality. Innovation without leaving people behind. Protecting traditional services at the same time you embrace new roles. It's a dance without end, without pause. When it works it is nearly magical in its success, but for every director failure is waiting and can come at any moment. Any issue can trigger it.
I have been a library director for 13 years and wouldn't want to do anything else. In my career, I have been fortunate to direct two libraries where I have been given the right combination of respect and freedom. Without that, it just won't work. There has to be space to make mistakes, to take risks, and to fail. And not fail small, fail big. Because we will not move forward without taking risks, and with each failure we learn, change, adapt and try again. If we are allowed to. If we can stomach it. And if our boards can too.
As more directors head into retirement, I wonder who will be willing to take on these impossible jobs. Many of the young librarians I talk with, don't want to be directors. They want to be librarians and many even shun being in management in those libraries much less directing them. So I attempt to share what I love about the job while being honest about the complexity of the position. It rarely works. But every so often, you see a spark in someone's eye and just maybe there will be a future director there. Let's hope so.
Management is easy: It's like having 50,000 bosses
- By Jeff Scott, director of the Casa Grande (AZ) public library. Adapted and excerpted from this July 16, 2008 post at Gather no dust by permission. Scott comments on John Berry's column, Tasha Saecker's post (above), and the July 15, 2008 "Transparent library" column, "Check your ego at the door."
The common theme here is the difficulty of being a manager and difficulties caused by managers. Managers cause a majority of a library's problems (or any organization) since the decisions they make influence everything. That's why my tag line is
- An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.
The problem is when you make the wrong decisions or you make decisions based on your ego. Who does this benefit? How will I do it? Who are you thinking of when you are making a decision? Is it what the community wants, your staff wants, or you want? The average employee has one boss, but a good boss answers to 50,000 people.
It's not an impossible job. It can be a very rewarding job. You aren't just gathering small accomplishments; you can make a huge impact. That requires stifling your own ego and doing what everyone wants. Figuring out what that is, gathering resources and implementing are the tough parts.
Do you know your community?
The pressure on the library director is to know the community. Making a move, starting a program, speaking with community members, all part of establishing that relationship.
Most librarians are liberal. Many of the ideals of librarianship set forth by the American Library Association are liberal in nature. Some library directors get into trouble stem by misunderstanding a conservative base or a group they may not understand or agree with. It may have nothing to do with the library director's viewpoint, but if concerns are not addressed, things tend to escalate.
A few years ago Jo Ann Pinder was fired by the Gwinnet County Library Board. This drew a heated discussion from the library world and from a conservative group that pushed her out. You'll find details and commentary here and here. She was fired without cause. Some would say she was unfairly fired, others would say she didn't listen to a growing community group that criticized her direction.
Who is right here? It isn't for me to say. It makes me wonder whether some library directors look to serve the community or to do what they think serves the community. If there are enough people to push through a firing without cause, it begs that question.
Which brings me back to Berry's column:
- Few administrators or the members of their governing authorities have the tolerance and flexibility needed to maintain the balance of power and still make the right policy and operating decisions. Few have learned how to navigate the troubled waters when administrators disagree with their bosses on the board. Yet I remember a strong director who was faced with board opposition to acquiring video formats because it competed with a local store wisely agreeing to acquire the library collection from that store. The discount in purchasing locally was a bit lower, but everyone was happy.
What is worth it?
We can also discuss the fotonovella controversy at the Denver Public Library. That prompted a review here, and major vendors also reviewed content they make available for libraries. The Phoenix Public Library dealt with a serious controversy regarding library filtering. Again, it forced us to review our policy. Is resistance to community pressures worth it? Are the complaints valid or unreasonable?
Library directors have their own feelings about how things should be. The question becomes: Is it worth it to resist pressure? Do you stand on principle or do you make a change because (some part of) the community demands it? If you are not on the same page with the board or the public, you are perceived to be out of touch. If you do nothing to address known concerns, it will only lead to a blow-up.
It takes engagement whether it is the public or your own staff. As noted at Slow leadership:
- If you would take the time—and be honest and sincere in your efforts—you could ask people for ideas and be assured they will come up with most of the solutions required for them to do their best, both for themselves and for the good of their team and organization. Asking employees improves their self-esteem, motivates them, and empowers them. They take ownership for finding solutions and making change. Asking communicates: “I value you as a person. Your opinion is important to me/us/the team/the organization.”
"I will bend like a reed in the wind"
There's much talk about what the library needs to do in the community. We discuss strategic plans and ways to integrate the library into the community. The truth of the matter is that we need to provide the collections and services the public wants instead of what we think it wants.
From "Check your ego at the door"
- The ego, we concluded, can be a very damaging thing. Inflated. Overbearing. Egos create rules for rules’ sake. Egos complicate procedures and keep good people down. Egos squash good ideas and can take the best of an organization and turn it on itself.
We should be discussing whether staff is available to provide a program. Once the director pursues what he or she wants to do, rather than the community, problems occur. Why don't you do this? Why don't your provide that?
Every complaint, every concern must be addressed. It must be addressed in a way that demonstrates an understanding of the issue and a response or review, then followup. That shows you care about everyone--and when librarians say "every reader his/her library," this is when that matters the most.
Why would you want to deal with all of that?
Being a director isn't for everyone. Many librarians came to the field from other jobs. Their hope was to escape politics that may be more prevalent in the private sector. If that is the case, they would hate management.
It's worth it if you want to make change on a larger scale. My library can serve the community's biggest needs. It's interesting to see, when we start programs to serve a specific need, how many other organizations start working on the same issue. That demonstrates a real community need where organizations can collaborate.
If you are creative, like working with people and have a high tolerance for stress, management may be for you. It isn't an impossible job. It is a job that involves delayed gratification.
Working towards building a new library takes years. New programs, new services, building changes, technology changes--all take planning to develop, fund and implement. Knowing where to get money, knowing where to reallocate resources (including staff), and being able to influence and be influenced by others can lead to great success.
I have been fortunate enough to be able to build one library, renovate another, and in a few years, build a new main library. It is an impact I can see--and it's faster than average. That success makes the job wonderful.
Good reasons for bad decisions
- By Steven J. Bell, AUL for Research and Instructional Services at Temple University. Adapted and excerpted from this July 7, 2008 post at ACRLog by permission.
One of the most important responsibilities of any library leader is to make the right decisions. When our decisions have minor consequences the long-term impact of deciding poorly will likely be minor or non-existent. But decisions involving people’s positions, large-scale automation or significant resource allocations can have long-term and profound implications for our libraries and institutions. A leader able to make good judgment calls is an asset to his or her library. But according to the speaker we heard at ACRL’s President’s Program at the 2008 ALA Annual Conference, most of us are going to make plenty of bad decisions. Why? Because not only are we irrational, but we are so irrational that our bad decisions can practically be predicted.
Our speaker, Dr. Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions gave an insightful and entertaining talk about the forces of irrationality behind our decision making. Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics, MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Media Laboratory. He provided many good examples and colorful stories to prove his points, most of them based on experiments that support his premise that people are easily influenced and fail to know their own preferences. There are more ideas from Ariely’s talk than I can share here so if it sounds interesting to you, read the book. But I’ll share what I consider the two most important take away thoughts from the talk.
Consider the frame
Pay attention to how questions requiring decisions are framed.
Ariely demonstrated that simply changing a question from a positive (accepting something) to a negative (rejecting something) could make a significant difference in how people responded to a decision--even if the outcome of the decision was the same in each situation. Ariely told us that humans are susceptible to visual illusions, decoys and being overwhelmed by more than a few options, and that our intuitions can be dangerous to follow. Just being aware of these basic failings should cause us carefully assess a decision so we understand the potential consequences of the outcome.
Understand user irrationality
As organizations that have services and products to market it may benefit librarians to better understand how our users are predictably irrational so we can better frame decisions we give them to make.
Google or a library database? Properly framed, a student may judge that the right decision involves consulting a library research guide or getting personalized help from a librarian. Telling students the library has 400 or 500 databases may sound impressive but it may actually cause them seek out web sites with far fewer choices--like one resource option and a single search box.
Loss aversion
Ariely is not the first to bring to our attention that we lack the ability to make good decisions.
Behavioral scientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky researched human bias and risk handling. Their research showed most people would make decisions based on loss aversion, avoiding a loss rather than making a gain. They did this using the same technique Ariely uses in his experiments--reframing the same situation to offer both a loss and gain proposition.
In their experiments Kahneman and Tversky found people were far more likely to make decisions based on avoiding a loss, even when it was irrational. Like Ariely, Kahneman and Tversky found that our decisions could be manipulated depending on how the decision question was framed. It also reminds us that we can make bad decisions simply in trying to avoid taking a risk.
Deciding before we know it
The latest cognitive decision-making research shows we may have even less control over our own decision making then previously thought.
The Wall Street Journal reported just recently that the brain appears to make up our mind ten seconds before we become conscious of a decision.
A series of experiments suggests that the brain uses our perceptions and experiences to plan ahead for us and acts on incomplete information to help predetermine our choices. If this is true then it may be best to base decisions on gut reactions and avoid overthinking things.
But given the research of Ariely and others, our perceptive and intuitive abilities have so many flaws that it is no surprise the brain would lead us to bad decisions in any number of situations, especially those where circumstances are so new or unpredictable that good judgment calls are difficult.
So if you readers still think you have all the makings of a totally rational decision maker, better think again.
Related articles
- Learning from failure - Librarians comment on tolerating risk and learning from failures.
- We got trouble... - an overview for articles on internal difficulties.
- Learning from failure - a home for such stories at the Library Success wiki.
- Change management - This Peer Panel offers comments about managing change, including learning from failure.
- Cooperative efforts - Another Peer Panel discussing multilibrary cooperation, successes and failures.
- Problematic organizations includes one suggested method for learning from failure before it happens, the premortem.
