"But Your Job Is to Advocate for Us!"
Sometimes the best way to defend your staff's interests is not to go to bat for them.
One of the more difficult situations you’ll have to negotiate as a library leader is when the people you lead believe strongly that you should be advocating for something on their behalf – a policy change, a budget increase, a program proposal – and you feel that advocating for that thing would be a mistake.
When you’re a library leader, especially a dean or director, one of the things you’ll hear a lot is that the reason campus administration isn’t giving the library what your people want is that you’re not pushing hard enough. How will they know when you’ve pushed hard enough? When they get what they want. The assumption here, of course, is that you’ll always get what you want if you just push hard enough. There are two problems with this position: first, it’s simply not true, and second, you can do real damage to your ability to advance other priorities by pushing too hard for the wrong thing at the wrong time.
When you find yourself reluctant to push campus administration for something your people want, your unwillingness will usually arise from one of two categories of concern: