Attempting Elegance

A personal obligation — doctor’s appointment — kept me from attending a meeting at the library this morning.  I was busily feeling bad about that until I had a conversation with one of our IT staff as I grabbed a breakfast sandwich on my way to my office.  We were just chatting about learning curves and transitions and deciding when things are a crisis and when they’re just going to have to be handled by someone else…

And I flashed to this post, The Crisis and The Creative, by Rands in Repose, that I read last week.  He starts by saying, “If you polled my team about my daily agenda, they’d say, “He’s either running to meetings or in meetings.” Glancing at my calendar confirms this: 14 meetings this coming Monday – double-booked for five of them. Sweet.”  Okay, yes.  I’m hooked.  That’s me.  I read on.

The part I liked most when I read it last week was:

Whether it’s Crisis or Creative, activities in these buckets run hot. Whether I’m making sure that someone isn’t going to quit or I’m jump-starting a brand new project at a time when no one has a free second, when I’m working the edges, it’s fast and furious. The issue is that I’m responsible for a lot more than just the work that’s running hot.

See those boring lines in the middle between Crisis and Creative? That’s an important part of the model. Items in the middle are the silent non-Crisis, non-Creative responsibilities that are my team just making it happen. It’s all very important work, but it’s work that occurs with very little investment from me because I’ve hired, manage, and work with competent people who excel at what they do. The middle isn’t responsibilities that I’ve delegated and need to check up on, this is work the team just does, and to understand how to get the work there, you need to understand the edges.

And what I realized as I stood there, waiting for my sausage-and-cheese-on-an-english-muffin-please, is that today’s meeting, unavoidably double-booked with my doctor, is about something that I had delegated (or my predecessor had, actually) that had reached a crisis and needed checking up on — but I didn’t have to be at the meeting to do it.  I needed to declare that this crisis could be solved by someone else, people who are competent and excel at what they do, so long as they reported it back to me when they’d figured it out.

Because, really?  I need to finish some Creative work.   I really really really need to finish some creative work.  Performance goals.  Vision and mission planning. Strategic reorganization.  Service and communication plans.

And I’m the only one who can do those things.  I’ll need help, and will be consulting and revising and editing for a while — but I can’t consult, revise, or edit unless I have the things down on paper.  And I can’t put them on paper if I’m hopping from crisis to crisis.  I have to trust the middle, and I have to let the middle handle some of its own crises.

And I do trust them; I work with wonderful people who are very good at what they do.  But I suspect we’re all testing each other’s boundaries a bit, figuring out where The New Boss wants to be involved, needs to be involved, and is willing to be involved.  So I’m going to set a boundary for myself.  Let the middle work.  Ask the middle to manage some of its own crises.  Divide my time more evenly between Crisis and Creative.  It’s the only way to make it work, I think.

And the giant piece of paper covered in marker-ed post-it notes that represent the possible ways we might reorganize our administrative structure won’t get more interesting on it’s own, so I need to give it some love.

Hi, all of you who just heard me speak at MLA! Given that I’m out of Moo cards, I’m expecting to see a bunch of you click through here looking for the presentation, which I’ve just uploaded to the Presentations page.  Hope it was helpful!

Y’know, it’s hard to engage with the theoretical issues of your profession when you’re up to your ass in alligators.   Sometimes, you just have to keep draining the swamp and stop writing about it.  But since it’s a Monday morning and I’m not yet fully engaged in alligator-wrangling, I thought I’d steal a minute to reflect on what those alligators are, right now.

• I’m the Faculty Senate Secretary.  This isn’t a lot of work, but it’s a consistent workload.  I’ve also recently identified the need to archive the FS document trail more effectively, prompted both by the impending campus website redesign and a failed attempt to retrieve information from the ’90s for a colleague.  I’m currently working with the Libraries’ repository team, the College Archivist, and the Faculty Senate Executive Committee, in consultation with the campus’s Director of Marketing to make the whole thing fly.  We’ll see.
• Searches.  We have three positions either open or opening — our Director is retiring in May, a librarian left in September, and a building manager is leaving in December.  I’m chairing the search for the librarian.  This isn’t a big workload yet, as the first search deadline hasn’t yet hit… but I’m thinking about it a lot.  Mental energy is precious, too.
• Subject Allocations.  The Director and I are trying to get a handle on what we spend per subject area across material types.  This campus has a history of tracking library materials expenditures by subject by material type; how many dollars go to Philosophy materials for monographs?  I can tell you that in an instant, for the past 10 years.  Ditto periodicals.  What I can’t currently do is identify how much was spent on Biology resources across all material types, inclusive of monographs, periodicals, online resources, and document delivery.  So I’m trying to draft both a plan and a pilot implementation for reorganizing our administrative processes to account for this.  Lots of little threads of data tied in big messy knots to be unraveled.  I know I can do this, and I’m enthusiastic about it, but it requires a certain amount of focused attention that I’ve been lacking recently.
• Deadlines!  There are always deadlines!  We’re right in the midst of our fall spending deadlines for our monographic budgets, so I’m up to my ears in catalogs, Choice cards, faculty requests, and book lists.  I’m whittling away at it, but it’s complex and detail-oriented work. Again, focused attention.
• We also have an adjunct.  This is fantastic, as it takes the burden of being one librarian down and shifts the pain a bit.  Mostly, she works at the Reference desk for us, but she’s also working on a variety of projects from a variety of librarians.  I have several projects I want her help with, but each one requires that I 1) set it up, 2) explain it to her, and 3) be available for follow-up questions.  I’m finding it difficult to get through 1, let alone push on to 2 and 3!
• I also have 411 emails in my inbox; I’m sure it was just a few weeks ago that I had it down to 7.  I’m learning to hate email!
• I really want to explore buying more small, inexpensive technology to circulate to students.  The Flip Video cameras are first on my list of ideas.  But to make it work, I need to not only submit a New Initiative Proposal to the Director for funding approval, but discuss it with the public services stakeholders, and draft a marketing plan to get students interested.  The idea is small and easy, but there’s more to it than idea generation.
• Our Director has convened a Resource Sharing AdHoc Working Group, the members of which went to a series of workshops and conferences to talk and learn and think about the emerging issues around document delivery and ILL and information discovery.  My big “a-ha” moment was the realization that ILL is the same as Acquisitions, just with different software systems and terminology.  Our ILL clerk doe the same things as our Acq clerk — they take requests, process them to find a provider, track the item, receive it, and pass it on to the next step in delivering it to the user.  So why do we have two offices that don’t talk to each other?  Are there synergies there we should explore?  The group will keep meeting over the next six months, and our charge will be firmed up very soon.
• We’re getting digital signs on campus, prompted first by a need for a campus-wide emergency notification system, and secondly by a desire to do more innovative advertising of services and events on campus.  The working group for the Libraries’ install has begun meeting, and I’m on it.  Very interesting, but, again, very mentally engaging at a time when I don’t have a lot of mental energy to pass out.  I want to dive deeply into the project, but…

I want to dive deeply into all of them.  And I just have so many things to do…  Which one do I choose?

I gave my talk on getting support for new projects this afternoon, and my presentation materials are available on the Academic Library 2.0 wiki, or over on the presentations page on this site.  Enjoy!

My library has a very participatory management culture, in which everyone has a chance to make their voices heard on almost every issue.  I wobble back and forth on the fence about this, because at times I think it’s absolutely vital that we continue to be as transparent and inclusive as possible in order to ensure that we make sound decisions about the libraries’ future.  At other times I think that really, the people doing the work need to make a decision that will work most effectively for them, and just get on with it.

Today was a good example of both sides of the fence.  I went home sick yesterday afternoon, missing a meeting on how to implement an upcoming special project.  I felt badly that I was letting down my colleagues by missing the meeting, but the headachey part of me felt like, as the area manager, I didn’t need to sit in on a discussion of the details of workflow implementation.  The staff working on the project are smart, capable, conscientious, and able to make those decisions on their own.

And I was right.  When I got a debrief this morning, I learned that they had made a bunch of smart, capable, conscientious decisions about the project.  Had I been at the meeting, I would not have affected the outcomes of their workflow planning one iota.

I was also wrong.  As I discussed their decisions with one colleague, we realized that there were statistics and reporting implications to the global database change they were proposing to make, and that I, in fact, cared a lot about how that change was made.  Had I been at the meeting, we would have realized that, and changed the plan.

It’s a hard fence to balance on.  Too much involvement from unrelated people is just a waste of time for all involved.  Not enough involvement from engaged stakeholders means things can slip through the cracks.  So I spend a lot of time carefully putting one foot in front of the other, arms held out at my sides, trying not to fall one way or the other with an audible thud.