Five Sucky Things about Being a Library Leader

This is Part 1 of a two-part essay, the first on downsides of leadership and the second on upsides. I debated with myself about whether the one that comes first (and is free to the public) should be the positive one or the negative one, and finally decided that since my Tuesday issues are usually the shorter ones and I'd rather say less about suckiness than about awesomeness, I’ll start with the negative and end with the positive.

So, leaders, let’s (relatively briefly) commiserate:

1. One of the first things you'll notice about being in leadership is that no matter how many times you say something, you’re going to have to say it again. I once worked for a director who was struggling with the fact that people in the library were failing to grasp an essential element of his vision for the organization. In a leadership meeting, several of us told him “You’ve got to say it explicitly.” His response was “I’ve already said it explicitly!”. And of course he was right. But, as we all told him, “You’ve got to say it over and over, in multiple contexts and in multiple formats and platforms.” There’s no point in lamenting this aspect of human nature; we simply have to accept and deal with it. Repeating yourself is part of the job. 
2. You will never make everyone happy. A win-win solution is great when you can get it, but win-win solutions are not always possible; sometimes two people genuinely want mutually exclusive things, and only one of them will get what they want. Sometimes the tough work of leadership involves giving one person a win and another person a loss, and leaders who are incapable of doing this, or unwilling to do it, when necessary will end up making everyone miserable. Deciding who will win and who will lose is – not always, but regularly – part of the job.
3. No matter how well you do your work, some people (both inside and outside your organization) are going to be dissatisfied with your leadership. Do your job perfectly, make every decision correctly, and manage every resource with perfect balance and judgment, and your library will still have some unhappy employees and some unhappy patrons. Of course, if you do these things badly you’ll make even more people unhappy. But even consistently doing the right thing, and doing it in the right way, will leave at least some people dissatisfied. Making people unhappy is part of the job.
4. Everything you do will be under scrutiny. Some of the scrutiny you receive will be fair; some of it will be unfair, but you can’t – you mustn’t – assume that anything you do in your work as a library leader is (or will remain) invisible. Being seen is part of the job. At the same time, a lot of what you do will be neither seen nor appreciated at the time by anyone else, including those who benefit from it. This is not only inevitable; it’s as it should be. A lot of the work you do as a leader is designed to be unseen and unappreciated. You can’t assume that anything you do will remain forever under wraps, but you also can’t assume that every good thing you do will be seen and appreciated in anything like a timely way. Being unseen is also part of the job.
5. People will always assume you mean what you say. Sometimes you think you’re speaking off the cuff, whimsically, and/or with clearly casual or ironic intent. And yet in those moments, there is always a significant risk that what you say will be taken to be in earnest – perhaps by only a handful of your listeners, but perhaps by most or all of them. As a line employee you can say teasing or whimsical or facetious things that you simply can’t get away with as a leader – for the simple and good reason that as a leader, your utterances are invested with power that does not attend them when you’re not in a leadership position. It’s less dangerous to wave a chopstick around than to wave a baseball bat around – and like it or not, when you’re a leader you’re always carrying a baseball bat, and you swing it every time you speak or write to the people you lead. As someone with a highly developed sense of whimsy and (I like to tell myself) a keen sense of irony, this is a lesson I have had to be taught repeatedly, the hard way.

In Thursday’s subscribers-only post, I’ll spend a bit more time discussing five of the things I think are awesome about library leadership.