This past year has brought a lot of changes for me professionally, without even getting into the influence of the coronavirus! For a long time, I really enjoyed being just a run of the mill faculty librarian – there’s a certain amount of freedom to subvert power structures when you’re not in the room where anyone is telling you directly that you can’t do certain things!
My library went through an extended transitional phase. The person who was Dean when I started retired in March 2017. The Associate Dean became Interim Dean, and selected an Interim Assoc Dean. A new person was hired as Dean, starting July 1, 2018. The former Interim Dean opted to go back to being regular faculty, leaving the person he appointed as Interim Assoc Dean in that role. That started an experience best described offline and with liquor, and ended with the newly hired Dean stepping down at the end of February 2019 and the Interim Assoc Dean being named Interim Dean. They just finally named that person as permanent Dean in early June 2020, bringing a little bit of stability for us to build on.
We had some significant morale issues when this all started. Part of that can be attributed to long term neglect from the previous library administration, and part of that goes back to a previous University President who crushed morale across campus. That previous University President stepped down in 2013, but some wounds take a really long time to heal.
All of that is background that led to a reorganization that went into effect Sept 1, 2019. Our Instructional Services department was disbanded, and two new departments were created: the former head of IS became the new head of Outreach & Assessment, and I became the head of Learning & Research Support. The two remaining IS librarians were moved into this new L&RS department. Our primary project for 2019-20 was to gather information in order to make an informed proposal for how to restructure our liaison program going forward. I’ll write about that process later.
Shifting into this new role has meant changing some of the dynamics with the librarians on my team. One of them was here before I started here, and was even on the search committee that hired me. As peers, we butted heads on things somewhat regularly, because we tended to take different approaches to things. None of that was acrimonious – we were friendly with each other, I just felt like we saw things pretty differently. The other librarian started more recently, and I chaired the search committee that hired her. We became good friends, to the point that I’ve been on vacation with her and her family, which makes the shift in power dynamics awkward in other ways! So in both cases, shifting from being peers to being in a leadership position was and still is a little weird.
I’m really glad we started this department with the project of redesigning the liaison program as a team. Going through the process of gathering information, figuring out what other info we need and how to get it, what we want to be doing, and what we need to prioritize until we are able to hire more liaison librarians created the conditions for us to find more common ground. Looking back on past disagreements, it now looks to me like we were set up to not have the conditions we needed for more productive conversations. Like, I think there was more common ground than I realized at the time, but we both were frustrated with stuff beyond our control, and that translated into just agreeing to disagree instead of figuring out how we were talking past each other.
One of the things we did as part of the liaison program redesign was read a selection of articles on other liaison programs. Instead of using a jigsaw approach, we all read the same article and discussed it, then all read the same next article, and so on. I really enjoyed the article discussions, because all three of us took away different key points from almost each one of them. I got more out of the article because of their input, and I hope they felt the same way. But more importantly for us, I feel like that also provided a foundation to talk through our thoughts on librarian practices and what we want to do here going forward, without feeling defensive or frustrated or whatever about how things have been done here in the past, which I think was really productive.
Now that we have finished that project – we have shared the proposal for our liaison program for 2020-21, and are ready to start implementing that – we are continuing the shared article discussions. We’re hoping to eventually be able to hire at least one more liaison librarian (we made it through phone interviews for one position last fall, but then put the search on hold due to budget issues, and now who knows what the future holds, since COVID is throwing enrollment expectations and state appropriations into limbo). So we shifted our focus to articles addressing best practices in hiring.
Through a lot of this past year, taking on this leadership role has meant that I’m the one facilitating the meetings – putting the agenda together and keeping us on track – but otherwise not changing too much about how I interact with them. Yeah, the power dynamics have shifted, but they’re both professionals who do good work on their own, so that didn’t come up too much… Except when annual evaluation time rolled around. That was the first really awkward point in this new structure.
Until relatively recently, we have not had clear expectations on how to do much of anything. It felt like the sand was constantly shifting under our feet, and sometimes the “right” way to do something depended on who you asked. We had a clear procedure for doing our annual evaluations: I write a self-evaluation addressing my job performance, professional growth, service, academic achievement, evaluation of performance on goals for the year under review, and proposed goals for the coming year, and then send that to my supervisor, who reads it and writes an evaluation of my performance in that period. But we didn’t have clear expectations for how to present that information or how to write those goals.
When I started, I was told to write goals sort of like a check-list and make sure to include stuff I had already done before I wrote that list to make sure I had a head start for next year’s evaluation, showing how much I had done… Then we were supposed to tie them to the university’s strategic plan. Then they were supposed to be SMART goals. Then I got frustrated with neglect from admin translating into pressure to do all the things, more than could be done well within a reasonable workload. So I started treating that section as my strategic plan for the coming year. That started as a way to protect myself from unrealistic expectations, but I found that it was actually a useful exercise for me. Writing that annual self-evaluation became more than just a bureaucratic hoop to jump through: it carves out time for me to reflect on what went well and what didn’t go so well in the past year, how I want to improve my practice this coming year, and also strategize how I want to prioritize my time in the coming year. Of course there needs to be room for flexibility to respond to external pressures, but I see it as a way to tap the breaks, stop just reacting and think about how to get ahead of things proactively.
Of course, there’s also the consideration that these evaluations go into your tenure and promotion packages, so it’s useful to think about how you’re presenting your accomplishments and what will stand out to the reader.
So the annual evaluation process this year went a little different. They both submitted their self-evaluations, and I suggested some revisions, and then wrote my evaluation based on those revisions. In some cases, I knew this person did this really impressive thing, but they failed to mention it or just threw it into half of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph about something else in their section on job performance. And some of those suggested revisions related to goals – *why* are you doing this thing, how does it fit with these other things, and are you sure you’re not doing too much?
I don’t know how much of it was my fear of pissing them off, and how much was actual frustration, but I felt like one of them at least was frustrated by this request for revisions. That was my first tense moment in this supervisor role…
But then I read the revisions, and was like, holy shit, they’re both rock stars! Like, thinking of this as just an annual evaluation process between you and your supervisor, sure, I know how much work you put into this thing, so just a nod to it could work between us. But when you take the time to think about how to describe it as if I didn’t already know, it really highlights just how much you’re accomplishing.
Despite that little tense moment when I asked for revisions, the actual evaluation meetings went really well. My worst criticism for either was that I am concerned that if they continue at this rate they could burn out, because they both do so much, so maybe think about what you’d like to take off your plate when it becomes possible. Who knows when that will be, since we’re dreadfully understaffed right now, but some day…
Another part of this shift is changing how I interact with others in the library. I now have a seat at the “Leadership Team” – the meeting of the Dean and department heads. Becoming a peer to the person who used to be my supervisor has been a whole other sort of tension. I was moved out of the Instructional Services department, to report directly to the Associate Dean, in 2016, so it wasn’t as abrupt as it would have been if I went from reporting to her to being her peer. But there are still times when she tries to influence what my department does, and I have to send a clear response that we have already established our priorities for the coming year. That’s all complicated by a whole lot of baggage related to her role in my past low morale experience here, but it’s an interesting shift to reflect upon.
I’m still figuring things out as I go, but I’m really glad I got the opportunity to step into this role. It’s not something I sought out, but I’m glad I was asked to take it on. I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished so far in the past year.