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I had an epiphany while sitting in an AALL conference session. As is often the case, I had heard something and it had sparked a thought that distracted me for a moment. I’ve posted here before that I’m not a huge fan of the concept of succession planning. I think, now, that a lot of that resistance is that it has been positioned around future promotion and legacy. The director is dead, long live the director. But in that moment, I saw that succession planning really could, should, be another phrase for operational resilience.
A director, especially a new director, can feel like they are walking a tightrope. You have certain responsibilities that you, alone, are expected to fulfill. As you head out, balancing pole in hand, potentially feeling something akin to vertigo. In my previous conception of succession planning, this director was modeling how to walk a tightrope for people watching behind them. If the director reached the other end, or fell, another person could step onto the high wire and keep going.
This is a hierarchical vision of succession planning. The one director to rule them all. The isolated leader above the fray. It also, in my mind, assumes that the successor exists or is known. In my own experience, when I saw this in organizations, it often meant an obstructed leadership path while the successor waited for the leader to leave. It was unhealthy. It was organizational atrophy. It also risked the successor leaving to chart their own future, undermining well-laid plans.
Holding the Threads
Funnily enough, as I sat there thinking about it, walking a solitary path is not at all how I think of myself. As I was explaining to someone recently, I really feel almost in a lateral role to the folks I lead. As I laid out in this post on recognizing leadership as its own knowledge domain, leading a law library isn’t about being above and omniscient.
This is particularly true, I think, because most of us will rise up one of the two or three interior knowledge domains in law libraries: public services, technical services, and technology. These silos have become much more permeable over my career so far, although I expect that there remain some preferences in organizations for people with experience from one or another of those starting points for director roles.
A director, then, will arrive with their own knowledge expertise, emerging from one of those knowledge domains. Just prior to becoming a director, they will probably have become highly expert in that domain and now face having to cede most or all of the work to someone else. This is a risk factor because it may be easier to hold on to what you know, and micro manage your successor, rather than to step out into the unknown.
Another way to think about it, though, is that you are carrying a thread to the leadership role. You then gather up additional threads, each one representing another team or person or function that you are accountable for. It’s at this point that you have a decision to make: will you entwine those threads into a single line for you to walk? Or will you weave other lines into them?
It’s this woven resilience that is, for me, what succession planning should be. It can exist without relying on a specific individual. It doesn’t rely on specific planning so much as embedding a philosophy of resilience throughout the organization. This is true not only for the director role but for every role. If the threads only run one direction, up and down, then the dropping of either end of that thread can create a crisis.
Shuttle The Threads
I think that, generally, leadership threads will run vertically because hierarchies are vertical. But just because accountability should run vertically—with the buck stopping at the top—that may not mean that responsibilities have to. For example, your law library probably has a catalog. Is it an IT responsibility or a technical services one? If you experience an expertise gap in whichever one has responsibility, who would the (temporary, perhaps) responsibility devolve onto? It is more likely to move laterally than up to the director.
This is where we start to get into the murk. It often lies in the area of cross-training, which is a well-intentioned but difficult to maintain goal. This is particularly true because law libraries tend to be small and we hire highly specialized people for our roles. Solo law librarians are true jacks of all trades but one would expect that they have to outsource some functions (accounting, HR, payroll, security, IT) to other parts of their organization or to third-parties. Larger libraries do the same thing, except for the core library work which tends to stay in, usually, one of two teams: public services and technical services.
Cross-training can be effective so long as the trained maintain their training. But we know that it’s the small things that will matter, not the big ones, when our operational resilience is tested. Most of us can figure out how to find something in a database. That becomes much more difficult if we need a password that has changed during the course of business but since we last trained with it.
More important than cross-training, then, is to have resilient systems that staff can tap into. For example, a password manager could smooth any interceding password changes so that any staff person can step into that breach. Or, even better and more important with critical systems, create a username and password for each staff person so that, when they need access, they have it. The benefit of this is that they can also start to explore on their own, when they have a moment.
Those with accountability can, where possible, exercise their powers to delegate. This can be valuable for reasons other than just ensuring that skills are disseminated and access is broad. When you have key systems, the tendency is to isolate them and in law libraries, where we tend to have small numbers of staff, there may only be one person who has access. This can invite fraud and one way to avoid the fraud triangle is to disrupt it and have more than one person have visibility into the system. In our library, although I am the conduit to our accountant, senior staff have access to our accounting software and our bill payment process, both of which have audit trails for account activity.
Perhaps the key method to create resiliency is constant communication. The most obvious is for people to document what they do. If this documentation is kept even relatively current, it can offset the need to do cross-training. A good document and a customer support line can accomplish wonders.
Transparency throughout the organization is paramount. Communication should still be purposeful, not for the sake of communicating. But it can happen in person and, my preference, asynchronous ways like a Microsoft Teams channel. Especially in the latter case, you can capture both the initial thought or concept but also gather input from colleagues and save the entire conversation in a re-findable location for the future.
I remain a meeting skeptic. But one meeting I value is my weekly sit down with my senior staff. It is, in fact, my only standing meeting and is often the only meeting I have in any given week. We sometimes have an agenda or a known topic of discussion. The first meeting of the month is always an IT update, for example. But otherwise we just go around the table and talk about things going on. More often than not, it’s an opportunity to ask questions that haven’t been asked. I’m sure our IT manager is sick of me asking whether our public and technical services teams have had an opportunity for feedback for an IT project! But it’s part of my mental checklist now. I think we’re also more aware of where we have gaps, places where our responsibilities abut and things can be ignored by both sides inadvertently.
These sorts of somewhat unstructured lateral (horizontal) communications shift information across the organization. We’re not big but, if all that information only flowed up to me and then had to flow down, I would forget some things. Or I would diminish them and not pass them on, not realizing their importance. The value is having a couple of people in the room who may not seem directly affected until they are.
I have to say, I am less resistant today to the phrase “succession planning” than I have been. But for me it will always now be “operational resiliency” at its heart. When people raise the issue, I will be looking not just for how they are building resilience in hierarchically, but also how they are doing it across the organization. Our organizations should be able to weather the departure of any role, at a moment’s notice, because we have been proactive about thinking about resilience.