God – and the devil – are in the details

Citation

Holt, G. (2002), "God – and the devil – are in the details", The Bottom Line, Vol. 15 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2002.17015dab.001

God – and the devil – are in the details

God – and the devil – are in the details

Keywords: Leadership, Libraries, Authority, Time, Employees, Libraries

In the secular world of library administration, there exists a whole range of opinions about a director's need to master the details of organizational operation.

On one hand, we all know the director who is like the winter cold: every place you go the director is there. Management of the mundane, no matter how trivial, is this director's specialty. My best example: a decade or so ago, a secretary took me down a long hall for my meeting with the director whom I had not visited before. Instead of heading into an office, I found myself in a motor services bay with the director in the pit supervising while a mechanic changed the oil on a vehicle.

On the other hand, there is the director who is above it all. Flying about from city to city and country to country to consult, give speeches and serve on this or that committee, this director limits personal organizational management to outlining policy. "Leadership" is this director's mantra and expertise, and no seminar on this subject, no matter how distant, is too far away to deter the director from finding out more about this mystical art. My example: a library director who has a deputy sit next to him at board meetings, because he needs help with the names of board members.

These two managerial extremes should remind us that in libraries, as in the leadership of other organizations, God – and the devil – are both in management details. Too much attention creates an organization that is incapable of managing itself at the lower levels without the word from on high. Too little attention usually results in irresolvable turf battles and a fearful lack of direction for the whole organization.

In the mid-1960s, English historian W.L.’Burn wrote a book on Victorian England which he titled The Age of Equipoise. In the title, Burn used the term as a noun, but it also is a verb that means to "counterpoise" or "to equal or offset in weight". Intriguingly, Burn used the term to designate how the Victorians attempted to counterpoise their past, present and future.

Like the mid-Victorians, library directors must counterpoise the leadership and the details of their management. Standing on the verge of change, a professional library director needs to sense important changes, to lead the institution by pointing out these changes and to have sufficient grasp of detail to work the change through the fabric of the organization. Counterpoising the past and the future is not easy, and directors need help doing it. In my library I achieve a counterpoise by what I regard as a process of "consensual management".

Consensual management has three relatively simple steps. A professional director senses important shifts in all-affecting areas like customer service, the age revolution, and technology. Then, in consultation with staff, the director defines the mission-driven service problem that the change creates, lays out which parts of the organization will need to change, and then either has, or gains, a sufficient grasp of detail to weave the change through the fabric of the organization until it becomes engrained in the work culture. That shift in the daily or hourly method by which work is accomplished represents real change. If a director does not drive change into details of daily work, the supposed change is little more than a well-contrived illusion.

Developing consensual management for me is based on three principles. First, that I as the director have power and I will use it if I perceive the need, especially if some of my managers are locked in turf wars. Second, I depend on management staff to engage me in creative argument to ensure the best future for the institution. And, third, I depend on both formal and informal communications to obtain sufficient detail to make sure that our institutional decision-making is informed.

In short, consensual managers have lots of room for healthy dissent and time to talk things through. There are many good paths to the future. The best way is found, almost always, when those most responsible for the organization have the opportunity to talk themselves into which is the "best" path on which their library should take its next steps. Nearly always, consensual management saves time because those organizational leaders who have to know to achieve success are well-informed before a project starts.

Consensual management should not be confused with the "teamwork trap" into which so many newly minted library directors fall. Directors in new positions, especially those who apprenticed under martinet directors, have a tendency to state, "I am a different kind of director. Under my watch, all of us will work as a team of equals."

This announcement makes all the staff bullies smile. They go back to their old behavior of protecting their own fiefdoms without worrying very much about any organizational detail except those that involve protection of turf. By’starting from the "teamwork trap" premise, a new director has lost the leadership-management war before the first administrative battle begins. To reiterate, when directors do not exercise the overt and/or latent power and authority of their office, the street-fighters on every library staff distribute the commodity unequally among themselves.

Consensual management works best when God rather than the devil is in the details. To put the matter simply, a director unengaged with organizational detail is less a director than a symbolic figurehead. Directors do not need to know everything about the organization, and replacing oil in a van's engine seems to me just as ineffective as a leadership style as above-it-all disengagement.

Why this column in The Bottom Line? Because nothing is more expensive in any organization than staff time. And, the most expensive staff time is management time. If you need a rationale for thinking about the ideas in this column, take your salary schedule and a calculator into any of your management meetings. Then calculate the hourly cost of the meeting.

Developing and following the management style that makes the best use of management time to move a library forward is a prime concern of any director. This is especially so when a director has been lucky enough to recruit and retain a coterie of managers who are highly qualified professionally and who take a real interest in how effective management can bring positive change to the institution. Consensual management is one way of making lots of hard decision-making significant in the life of the organization and as much fun as decision-making ever can be.

Finally, there is one set of details that is so important that a director cannot leave them to anyone else. That is the process by which a management team working with their unit heads agree on the specific work outcomes that will be used as the measurement of success. And, at the same time, it is important to articulate evaluation techniques and/or standards by which the work unit members and management know that the unit has succeeded in carrying out its mission.

God is in the details when directors equipoise their time working on this level of detail, especially the specification of expected outcomes. The devil is in the details when directors forget the necessity to counterpoise the institution between the present and the future, between doing current work and making appropriate changes, between spending time on the petty and not spending enough time on defining behavior outcomes.

The result of either deficiency almost always means confusion among staff from the top down. When staff is confused, operational expenses rise. Ultimately, therefore, library directors have to balance vision with detail and the desire to move an institution quickly with the need for consent for change from those have to make the change in their daily work lives.

Glen HoltExecutive Director of the St. Louis Public’Library, St. Louis, MO, USA