Watch Out for the Dividers & Conquerors

Last week I offered some advice for library leaders on dealing with people who want to change the subject. This week I'd like to offer some advice on dealing with people who want to divide and conquer. Let me explain what I'm talking about.

When you're dealing with a difficult or complex issue in the organization, the best approach is almost always – though not absolutely always (more on this later) – to get all the stakeholders around the same table at the same time. This may seem like an obvious principle, and that's because it's intuitively obvious that getting all the stakeholders together at the same time makes it most likely that all relevant views will be heard in a forum where they can be discussed openly, and that all relevant issues and facets of the problem will be aired openly.

The problem is, when you're dealing with complex and (especially) contentious issues, it will not be in every employee's personal best interest for all relevant views to be heard and all relevant issues and facets of the problem to be openly discussed and evaluated. There may be one or more people in the organization for whom such discussion will be threatening, because they already know how they want the issue to be resolved and open discussion might lead the library to a different conclusion.

When this is the case, sometimes that employee or group will attempt to divide and conquer, by which I mean he/they will try to have sidebar conversations with members of library leadership or other responsible parties, in which he will press his case and try to influence the decision, hoping either to derail the broader conversation or to change its direction from behind the scenes.

I'm going to propose two simple principles for dealing with such situations, and then propose a complicating factor that can create complexity in applying these simple principles.