Take a Leader's Pay, Do a Leader's Work

Many years ago, I gave a conference presentation on a controversial change that my department had made to its workflows. At the encouragement of my dean at the time, I had investigated the possibility of eliminating what was generally considered an essential task of serials management; we had tried out a new approach and found that it worked fine – and, of course, my dean and I wrote an article about the experience.

Unsurprisingly, the article generated quite a bit of controversy in the serials world, with the result that I got to give some conference talks about our experience. And after those talks, I found myself having a similar conversation over and over: a serials manager from another institution would come up to me (or email me later) and say something like "All of your arguments make sense and I would love to do what you did in my library. But I would never be able to get my staff to go along with it."

While (for obvious reasons) I never said this out loud, I came away from most of those conversations with the same thought: "Why is it up to your staff?". And this thought led me to formulate in my own mind, for the first time, something that I think is a bedrock principle of leadership: if you're going to take a leader's pay, you need to be willing to do a leader's work.

A leader's work consists in lots of things, of course. Setting an example of diligence, productivity, and balance is part of a leader's work. So is resolving conflict. So is workflow management. Setting (and following) a strategic direction is part of a leader's work, and so is helping one's organization stay on the right strategic path, and so on. But one of the most important roles of a leader is – leading. That means, among other important things, taking responsibility for moving one's organization in the right direction. A leader doesn't say "X is the right thing to do, but my staff won't like it, so I guess we can't do it." A leader says "X is the right thing to do, and I anticipate resistance among my staff. How will I work with them to overcome that resistance as effectively and humanely as possible?".

Of course, what I've just said presumes that the leader has in fact truly determined that X is the right thing to do – which implies due diligence, which very often includes counseling together with staff. It's essential to avoid locking yourself into a false choice between, on the one hand, simply bulldozing over your resistant staff and, on the other, letting resistant staff stop your organization from doing what it needs to do. Navigating the choppy waters between those two rocks is part of the difficult work of a leader; the expectation that leaders will do this difficult and challenging work is one of the reasons leaders tend to get paid more than those they lead. To take that money and then not do essential work of leadership strikes me as fundamentally wrong.

So how does an effective leader handle the problem of staff who resist necessary change? I'll have some practical thoughts on that question in our subscribers-only post on Thursday.