Bad boards and bad jobs: when the money is not enough

Citation

Holt, G. (1999), "Bad boards and bad jobs: when the money is not enough", The Bottom Line, Vol. 12 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.1999.17012bab.001

Bad boards and bad jobs: when the money is not enough

Bad boards and bad jobs: when the money is not enough

Keywords Boards of Directors, Public libraries, Corporate governance

I decided to write this article after reading in a January 1999 issue of Library Hotline that Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library has experienced the resignation of its second executive director in less than one year. Anyone who has kept abreast of the extraordinary recent events in Atlanta knows that this system's governance has gone from being simply a mess to a primordial monster that eats its directors.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, an old-time Windy City ward politician told muckraker writer Lincoln Steffens that "Chicago ain't ready for no ray-form." To any director who believes that she/he is the person who can bring sanity and good will back to Atlanta-Fulton County Public Library governance, I say, "Atlanta ain't ready for no ray-form." If you have the hubris to want to become Atlanta's next director, I would say what President Abe Lincoln might have said to General Sherman, "Go well-armed and don't unpack!"

A great deal has been written about how library boards should go about hiring and evaluating directors. Not surprisingly, almost nothing has been written about how library directors might detect, much less deal with, bad library governance. This article is a start on filling that void. The rules and examples presented here are the gleanings from two decades of not-for-profit consulting and even more decades of conversations with directors on their way to and their way from a variety of directors' jobs.

At the very least, I hope the article will help some of you ambitious directors (and those who want to be directors) to devise your own checklists of the characteristics of "bad boards and bad jobs". I also hope the article will help you recognize when "the money is not enough". For more than a decade, I have been extraordinarily fortunate to work for a thoughtful, smart library board that has worked to solve its own problems. At the same time it has made good policy and provided acute financial oversight for the library system. As I have told directorial recruiters, I am reluctant to move from working with this high-performance board into any situation in which I might regard the board as one of the library system's greatest problems.

Libraries have entered a new age in which networked computers provide untold opportunities to innovate essential services to con-stituents. At the same time, libraries face equally large challenges of increasing their financial base to pay for technological advance and the sharp challenges of maintaining good governance when rabid partisanship and incivility have come to dominate public life. Never has the contrast between old-fashioned and rapidly changing libraries been so profound. In this situation, the need is for high-quality governance and a steady policy-making hand on the throttle of change.

In their recruitment, library boards provide all kinds of evidence as to whether they want to hire a lackey, a martinet or a thoughtful and decisive director who will protect the board and help develop its capacity at the same time as she/he brings needed change in the institution. From experience and conversations, here is my list of signs that help me know if I am looking at a bad job and a bad board, one that I want to stay away from no matter how high the monetary offer:

1. 1.

   Let us start with time demands. How many hours does the board expect you will be in monthly meetings with them? A few years ago, I ran into a director who told me his new job required "24 board meetings a month." "That's a record!" I assured him. With so many meetings, there was little time for the new director to do anything else but meet. With all that time in meetings, when was the new director supposed to take on the important work of understanding the system and of orienting the staff to a different management style? I predicted a short stay. It was. Beware library boards suffering from the dreaded disease of "meetingitis".

2. 2.

   Except for setting executive compensation or similar issues requiring confidential discussion, how often does the prospective board meet to make decisions without the director being present? Good boards recognize that part of a director's job is to learn their nuances because she/he very often has to act as their public spokesperson. Being blind-sided by press questions as a result of decisions leaked from such "private" meetings is an important reason why one director I know has moved on to greener library pastures.

3. 3.

   What is the pattern of board attendance? I know one library board where getting a quorum is a monthly crisis. Denied board policy-making and oversight because of the absence of a quorum, the director at this library can do anything she/he pleases ­ until there is a serious mistake. Then the director takes all the blame. My rule is that if one-third of all board members do not regularly attend board meetings, major trouble is always just over the horizon. That assertion is especially true if a different third is absent at each meeting. In this situation, board-member inattention makes vulnerable the governing body and its professional director.

4. 4.

   How does a board deal with its "loose cannon"? On many library boards, there is one loose cannon whose motto reads, "Ready! Fire! Aim!" How does the board act when the loose cannon fires? Board discipline either is a board matter ­ or it does not exist. If board members will not discipline their own errant souls, then it is only a matter of time until a director is placed in the spot of doing the board's disciplinary work or, like board colleagues, bowing down and going forward on the loose cannon's "tangent of the month."

5. 5.

   Do board members know anything about the library's real financial situation? Financial attitudes and grasp of institutional finances provide another tip off to troubled boards. A board president recently asked me to look at his system's directorship. My first question was, "What are you going to do about your low funding level? You can't run a great library system without a lot more money." His answer: "We're going to get to money issues in about three years. We need to start with reorganization of staff." In this library's financial situation, that was putting the staff cart well before the financial horse. I found a similar attitude in a trustee workshop I did a few years ago. At an early point in my speech I stated that "every board member has a responsibility to be a financial advocate for his/her library system." One board member immediately stopped me and said, "It's not my job to worry about money. I govern the library." As might be expected, this was a system in deep trouble. Governance is always about financial oversight ­ and that makes every board member responsible for money issues. A board that does not worry about finances in the short and long term is not a good board.

6. 6.

   Does the board have any sense of the strengths or weaknesses of the staff over which they watch? After I read in recruitment materials about the "great staff" of one library system looking for a new director, I looked at an organization chart that had not only job titles but the names of those holding those positions. Among the top dozen staff names, I found two persons who are notorious for the trouble they have caused in jobs in other systems. New directors need to remember that nearly the first conflict they will have with their board bosses will occur when they start trying to deal with a system's staff problems. And, inevitably, the first staff problems for new directors are always at the top of the organization. If a board seems unaware that there are weak people in high-level positions, or if those weak people are in their positions with the knowledge of particular board members, then a rocky board-director relationship lies ahead.

7. 7.

   Is the board proud of being provincial? "Being home-towned" is a phrase I learned as a boy who participated in small-town athletic competitions where home-town umpires and referees were inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to local team members. In some library systems, new directors quickly learn that "there is the right way, the wrong way, and the local way" ­ and the local way is always the only way. When boards defend gross inefficiencies in staffing and number of branches, then complain about lack of operating funds, that is being home-town library provincial. When a library board takes pride in too many buildings and not enough computers and books, then positive change is often only a glimmer on the distant horizon ­ and likely to stay there. A prospective director needs to recognize that home-town pride can mean that important and necessary change will come only by breaking valued local practices. Breaking out of home-town ways can be shattering to library board pride and practice.

8. 8.

   In the search process, does the board allow certain staff to be involved or even to dominate the recruiting process? And is that involvement directed toward naming one favored candidate at the expense of others? I had this happen on one job I considered. Local staff tried to maneuver the appointment to "the inside candidate". The board recognized the challenge to their authority and moved the search outside the institution. When I recognized what had happened, my respect for the board rose considerably and I continued my candidacy.

9. 9.

   Does the board as a whole or do individual board members give any indication that they understand how to solve big problems? Mark Twain once reminded his readers, "The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one." Is the board that wants to hire you "simply overwhelmed" by the problems it faces? If it is, their dispirited state may be more than you can overcome even by several quick successes. It is the great director who can take a board overwhelmed by its circumstances and move it through a task-oriented change cycle.

10. 10.

    Do those in important elected and appointed government offices care about the library? Library boards sometimes fool themselves about how they are regarded within the area governmental structure. Not long ago a friend was interviewed for a new library job. In the days before and after the interview, this person spent time on the phone checking out how the library and the library board looked to people in city hall, in area congressional offices and in local party headquarters. The prospective director found that hardly anyone of importance in the region cared about the library. The friend walked away from the job opportunity because the library board's puffery about a bright future was not borne out by conversations with the powerful and influential in the region. The opposite of the latter situation occurs when every board member is either a surrogate for some elected or appointed official or the representative of a narrow, specific constituency. When library service is reduced to back-room horse trading, there are seldom many real winners.

11. 11.

    Do board members want to micro-manage? There is one US library board so famous for micro-management that they brag about it in their recruitment materials. Two national searches later, the only person they can find to take their directorship are those they promote from within.

12. 12.

    Does the board have a sense of what is legal? A few years ago I sat in on a library board meeting at which one of the topics discussed was "which worthy groups" in the community ought to get the library's old window air conditioners. Nothing wrong, right? Yes, unfortunately quite a lot in a state that has a law about how public agencies should dispose of surplus property purchased with tax funds. An irate local citizen in the audience finally broke into this board discussion to inform the members about the state salvage law.

Readers of this article are likely to think of other questions that will serve to tip prospective directors about the problems they will face in working with a new group of bosses. No library is without problems, and boards hire new directors to help solve those problems. Sometimes, however, the board is the library's principal problem. If that's the case, no matter what the amount, the offered salary needs to be balanced against the reality of the governance problems that have to be faced to make even small changes. There are bad jobs and bad boards where no amount of money is enough.

Glen Holt is Executive Director of the St. Louis Public Library, USA.