Muddle Management

I was talking to a law librarian about career plans recently. One of the challenges of any librarian is the one about whether to go into library management. You may be able to make more money and there may be a status change. But it’s also a swapping of subject matter expertise. A law library director can spend very little time doing research. And yet there can be a perception that managers are not necessary because they don’t do “the work.”

It was hard when I moved to my current role because this line became very bright. When I was in Ohio, even though I was the library director, I still spent time doing reference work and whatever else needed to be done. That’s the reality of a small law library (there were 7 of us): you contribute what you can, regardless of your job title.

A move to Canada, though, meant relearning some of what I’d known. But my context was also much larger, so the subject matter expertise of a law librarian was less valuable than the subject matter expertise of a manager and leader. It’s the albatross of the law library director: unlike other managers, we may have worked our way up and out of our original skill set.

Someone replied to a retweet with this interesting and, I think, common perspective on managers and their need if there is flexibility on where people work:

Managers can’t justify their jobs if no one to oversee, CEOs can’t justify a big salary if everything handled by a self-motivated workforce, company can’t justify expensive office campus,the only ones who matter are the ones doing the work-bringing in the money. Not management.

— Get the jab. (@t2meg) August 4, 2021

The perspective is that managers do not contribute to “the work” and therefore, if people can do the work without a manager nearby, the manager isn’t needed any longer.

Manager in the Middle

I have had managers who I felt contaminated rather than contributed to the success of the work. Some of them were direct but mostly they were higher up the organizational hierarchy. I have been exceptionally fortunate that the law librarians for whom I’ve worked have been stellar.

A bad manager says more about the person or perhaps the role than it does about what managers can do. A good manager is invisible and so, as many law librarians have experienced, may not be valued because their expertise isn’t seen. Everyone can see a bad manager.

In many law libraries – perhaps all but some courthouse law libraries – the law library director is a middle manager. There’s a dean or a judge or a partner or someone else who is a decision-maker above the director. Even where the director is the top of the organizational hierarchy, they are hired and fired and working with a governance board.

This can mean that our own agency is constrained by the organization in which our law library operates. It is at those facets where our operations connect to other parts of the organization that our management skills are necessary.

We had a recent example, one of many experiences I expect we’ll see as we navigate the return to work. Staff who did not have a home computer when the pandemic started may have been issued a laptop. Now that we are returning, one of our people was told they’d lose their desktop computer because they’d been issued a laptop.

But they hadn’t been asked if they wanted to shift to a laptop and no-one in the library has a laptop. Some staff are uncomfortable carrying a laptop on a commute. It might be for security reasons or the personal strength required or any number of concerns.

From a bigger perspective, we hadn’t as an organization talked about what technology we would provide. Is a move to a hybrid workforce necessarily a move to a laptop-only workforce? Do staff have any say in the development of this new mode (other than a choice between a laptop and only working on-site)?

This is where the middle manager lives. It took a couple of conversations with people outside the library but the approach was put on hold. The staff person kept the desktop in the office and the laptop at home. And we’ll hopefully find a more deliberate approach to what hybrid workforce technology looks like.

But the manager’s job is straightforward: work with staff to create the framework and get out of the way. As obstacles arise, remove them so the work can get done. It’s not leadership, it’s the tactical subject matter expertise of the manager. And without it, each staff person is going to spend time and resources to negotiate these obstacles on their own, assuming it’s not a holocracy. Our job isn’t to oversee – it’s to ensure there is an environment in which the work can be achieved, where staff can be successful.

Lose the Manager

I do not want to give the impression that I think all middle management is justified. It isn’t and each organization needs to decide why they have these people and what they’re doing. We just eliminated a management role because we were short subject matter librarians. But even if the organization is very flat, like a lot of law libraries, as long as you have a few people or things that need to be organized, you will have a manager.

The element I’d pull out of that tweeted reply, though, is the focus on control. I would agree that, if the manager’s role is primarily to control the employees – where they work, how they work, when they work – rather than to control the output, there is going to be less need for those sorts of managers.

It is interesting to already see managers who are comfortable with the traditional control model start to struggle a bit. We need to think differently about our workforce. But if you are not confident in your management-as-subject-matter-expertise, it can be frightening. If you are accustomed to managing your people but do not know how to manage their work, you’re going to have problems.

I was on a call with some folks who were talking about this issue. One mentioned that, in a month, their team completed 400 interactions. And the next month, they completed 250 interactions. In both cases, they completed 100% of the interactions that arose. The concern this manager raised was this: when they are working from home, I can’t tell if they have extra time or not.

But why does it matter? The staff are completing 100% of the tasks assigned to them (interactions). To make this more clearly a library issue, your reference staff are working remotely. Each month, they complete 100% of the reference requests they receive. Why do you care if they use 4 or 8 hours a day to accomplish it?

The reality of a law library is that there is always more work. There are libguides to update, courses and training and tutorials to practice and refresh, signage and tools to rethink. But each of these things can be managed without managing the hours.

Middle managers will be a stumbling block to the extent they can’t start to handle ambiguity. And I think the aspect of control, which seems to be a big struggle for law firms, will make certain workplaces uninteresting and uncompetitive for the best staff.

We need to be clearer in understanding why we are asking people to do things. Someone said they were looking forward to requiring quarterly face-to-face meetings. I commented how I wouldn’t be that thrilled, since it would require me to commute for 4 hours (2 hours each way) for a one hour meeting that we had already shown could be done virtually. We are going to have these opportunities to think about what the purpose is (control? actions that require face-to-face?) and whether we’re being honest about that purpose.

And we will probably muddle through. Management requires decision-making and sometimes you make the wrong one. So you do better the next time and learn. But the best managers in the past were the ones whose management was essentially invisible. And we will need to find ways to do that in the future without the physical workplace.