Questions Middle Managers Ask: Ways of Seeing Everyday Work

This past semester, I participated in a professional development program at my institution targeting middle managers. My cohort included about a dozen such folks from across the university. While the size of our respective departments as well as the nature of our work varied, our shared experience as middle managers gave us a strong foundation of common responsibilities, opportunities, and challenges from which to work.

Each session seemed to highlight the balancing act that middle managers frequently have to strike. Like in our session about management and leadership skills, for instance. A typical framing presents the roles as distinct — are you a manager or a leader? the articles ask. Often, that framing elevates leadership as the more desirable role and positions management as inferior. Yet our discussion in this session positioned the skills as complementary. Instead of distinguishing management and leadership as separate roles, our facilitator acknowledged that department heads must lead and manage at the same time and that both are essential responsibilities.

We middle managers know this. Management is about planning, organizing, and coordinating. Management means attending to workflows, staffing, training, timeline, and resources. Leadership is about creating a sense of purpose and providing direction. Leadership means attending to vision and culture. Department heads use leadership skills to shape the environment for success and management skills to execute the work.

Yet managing the work can carry a particular sense of urgency. Without management, chaos can ensue. A staffing gap or a workflow problem requires attention now. Leadership is also essential, no doubt — developing culture, creating shared understanding, envisioning the future — but it’s quieter and slower. The busy-ness of management and its many demands can crowd out opportunities for leadership, continually pushing it to the back burner. The daily work of management can make it feel like there’s no time left for the big picture thinking of leadership. If you don’t create room for leadership, our facilitator said, you’re never going to get room for non-management work. So what’s a middle manager to do?

This next bit is where I really felt the light bulb turn on. What are the questions that management asks versus the questions that leadership asks?, our facilitator posed.

Framing management and leadership as questions to ask offered a simple yet significant shift for my thinking. It helped me see them as lenses to apply to any situation, habits of inquiry to bring to any opportunity or challenge. If my department is overwhelmed, a management lens could help me ask: What resources and support do we need? What processes or workflows might we improve? What timelines or expectations can we adjust? At the same time, a leadership lens could help me ask: What needs are most important? What work has the most impact on our mission? What assumptions are we making? What can we stop doing? How can we acclimate and support the team through changes we make?

Instead of being categories of work to carve out time for, this shift frames management and leadership as complementary ways of seeing my everyday work. This makes leadership feel less abstract and more actionable, positions them both as routine practice, and enhances their complementary nature, too. In fact, it’s helped me recognize the ways I already employ both regularly, and often in the same moments, with different lines of inquiry. This strikes me as an effective and sustainable way to carve out a bit more space for leadership practice, to strike a better balance between management and leadership.

What lenses do you apply to your everyday work? What questions do your lenses help you ask?

Coaching as Critical Leadership Praxis

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Angela Pashia, who was an academic librarian for 12 years before becoming an ICF-Certified (ACC) leadership coach.

For the first half of my library career, I was adamant that I didn’t want to move into any formal leadership role. I was an instruction and liaison librarian, and I loved working directly with students and faculty to teach critical information literacy. I also got to teach a credit bearing information literacy course on a regular basis, which gave me a lot of opportunities to practice using critical pedagogy. I valued these opportunities to challenge rigid hierarchies and empower students to shift from seeing themselves as just consumers to producers of information.

My vision of what it means to be in management did not align with these values at all.

Fast forward several years, through becoming a reluctant leader, learning that I absolutely loved the opportunity to develop a team, and then becoming a leadership coach for librarians… Now I work with library leaders who are struggling with similar challenges rooted in similar narratives about what it means to be an effective leader.

In this narrative, the leader knows everything about how everything in the unit functions, and always has an answer for how to move forward in any situation. It’s very clear that this leader is directing everything – whether that’s through giving orders or just through always handing out solutions to every situation, for team members who’ve learned that it’s simplest to just go ask what the leader thinks. It’s clear that this leader is the one making all of the decisions that keep this library functioning and moving forward.

The best version of this leader comes across as a very knowledgeable parental figure, telling you how things should be done because they care about you. But they’re still telling you what to do, instead of helping you learn to work through the process on your own. This leader does provide development opportunities for their staff, but that tends to focus on molding you to follow in their footsteps, regardless of whether that’s the best fit for you.

Another version of this leader just gives you instructions and then grades how well you followed those instructions each year on your annual evaluation. They may or may not provide the scaffolded lessons that you need to complete the assignment well.

We don’t see this leader admitting when they don’t know things or asking many questions or having doubts. We don’t see this leader actively sharing power with their team members in a way that would loosen up their control.

This narrative about effective leadership becomes problematic when a new leader steps into their position knowing that they don’t know everything yet. They need to ask questions, but fear that doing so will communicate that they’re not qualified for this role. And that leads to imposter syndrome.

And this narrative doesn’t fit those of us who value collaboration, empowerment, and shared governance. I resisted moving into a leadership position for years because I didn’t want to be the person telling people what to do. My clients need support in learning new ways to lead, because this narrative of leadership doesn’t fit their values, either.

And that’s why I fell in love with coaching.

For me, learning coaching skills, as defined and practiced by the International Coaching Federation (and described in my last post), provided a way to transfer the principles of critical pedagogy from the classroom to leading a team.

Banking Knowledge

I learned about the “banking method of education” long before I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Students aren’t bank vaults waiting for us to deposit bits of knowledge. Genuine learning is a dialogic process between student and teacher, building toward the development of a critical consciousness. Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” we can better support student learning by being a “guide on the side.”

And yet, we love depositing bits of knowledge! Many of the leaders I work with feel helpful when they come up with a great solution to every problem their team members bring to them. Leading a team is different from teaching a classroom, but these are often missed opportunities to develop that team member’s skills.

When a team member comes to you for help with a problem, using a coaching approach shifts you from depositing a solution to engaging in a dialogic process. When you start with a question like, “What ideas have you already thought of?”, and then ask genuinely curious follow-up questions to workshop one of those ideas, they learn more about how your organization works. Depending on the context, that may include learning to think critically about embedding equity and accessibility into library services, programs, and policies.

Holistic Approach

Building on Freire’s work, bell hooks proposed an “engaged pedagogy” that recognizes both student and teacher as whole people actively participating in the learning dialog. Students are not just passive consumers of information, and both sides bring a lifetime of rich experiences and emotional lives into the classroom.

The leaders I work with recognize that this is true with their team members, as well, but don’t always feel prepared to respond effectively when emotions are affecting how team members are showing up. When they do open a conversation, it can turn into two hours of the team member venting about everything they’re dealing with, which throws their schedule into disarray and leaves them emotionally drained. So now they’re afraid to even open that conversation again. And it’s one thing to know this intellectually, but when you feel pressured to keep things moving as quickly as possible because your library is doing too much with too little, it’s easy to overlook the bigger picture.

Learning to effectively use a coaching model to structure your conversation can help you navigate some of these tricky situations. This approach provides a roadmap to acknowledge those emotions, dig below the surface to identify the root of the issue, and figure out a path forward. It takes practice to find the right balance of listening to what’s going on now before jumping into problem-solving mode, but these models provide guard rails to keep you from just getting stuck in complaints.

And building a habit of using these ICF-style coaching skills can create openings to find out what’s really going on for people.

Self-actualization

As part of this engaged pedagogy, hooks wrote that “teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students” (p. 15). This includes ongoing learning and ongoing reflection.

A coaching approach to leadership also prioritizes your own wellbeing and ongoing learning. Developing a curious, open, nonjudgmental mindset requires you to give yourself space to reflect, consider other perspectives, and make sure that your emotions aren’t skewing your view of a given situation. To support librarians in their ongoing learning and development, I regularly write a newsletter about applying a coaching approach in your library.

And, although it’s not exactly connected to critical pedagogy, I’ve found that this self-actualization process helps to combat imposter syndrome. Explicitly adopting a leadership style that encourages curiosity and questions gives new leaders permission to admit to not already knowing everything. And that helps to support their well-being.

What questions does this spark for you?

I’d love to continue this discussion in the comments section!

References

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Exploring Coaching As a Leadership Skill

Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Angela Pashia, who was an academic librarian for 12 years before becoming an ICF-Certified (ACC) leadership coach.

When you think of coaching, what comes to mind for you?

I’ve been talking about this a lot over the past couple of years, since becoming a professional coach. It’s becoming common for job ads for library leadership roles to mention coaching as a responsibility or coaching skills as a requirement^[i]. On the other hand, I’ve worked with library leaders whose team members completely shut down at the mention of being coached, because of past experiences with workplace coaching. That seems like a disconnect, but I attribute it to very different definitions of coaching.

My first encounter with anything explicitly labeled “coaching” happened when I was a librarian exploring other possible career paths. I came across a video promoting a training program to become a book coach, and I thought that sounded like the coolest job ever! From this series of videos, it sounded like a book coach would mentor and guide authors through the publishing process, as well as do some teaching about the process when needed. As a librarian, the parts of my job that I loved the most were mentoring junior faculty and teaching critical information literacy in a credit-bearing course, so this seemed like a perfect fit! That idea of coaching as sort of the “guide-on-the-side” version of teaching and mentoring seems pretty common among the librarians I’ve talked with who haven’t had any specific training in coaching.

Being a librarian, I threw myself into researching more about professional coaching. Coaching is a completely unregulated field, but there are some professional organizations trying to establish shared standards and definitions. The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the largest and most widely recognized member-led professional organization for coaches. So I completed an ICF-accredited program instead of the book coaching course that set me onto this path, and discovered that coaching is not at all what I had imagined.

The ICF version of coaching is a strengths-based approach, assuming that the person being coached is a fully capable adult with strengths and resources to draw on. Unlike a mentoring relationship, in which I would share my experience and knowledge with someone less experienced in that area, coaching centers inquiry – asking questions and listening a lot more than I talk. The ICF defines coaching as:

“partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”

Partnering is about setting aside hierarchies as much as possible. For me, it feels like taking the next step from using critical pedagogy, shifting from the “guide on the side” to being an active collaborator. The process is a semi-structured inquiry model, with questions designed to help dig into the root of a challenge, so that we can find the best path forward. And this helps to maximize their potential by focusing on reaching goals that matter to them, in a way that works best for them.

In learning to coach, I shifted from sharing my expertise to helping others develop their own solutions.

Coaching as a leadership style

Coaching as a leadership style often comes up when I’m working with new leaders who are dealing with imposter syndrome. While it’s important to acknowledge the structural factors that contribute, I’ve found that our mental models of what it means to be “a leader” can also contribute to this sense of being an imposter. One common part of that is the idea that some people are “born leaders,” instead of recognizing that leadership is a skill that has to be developed. Another contributing factor is what your image of “a leader” looks like. If your idea of a good leader is based on watching experienced leaders who seem to know everything about everything and always have a solution for every problem, then how do you see yourself as an effective leader when you’re still learning?

Explicitly adopting coaching as a leadership style gives you permission to let go of the pressure to already know everything, and to embrace your curiosity. This approach encourages you to listen to your team members as the experts in their specialized areas – which means you should ask them questions to learn from their expertise! This invites more perspectives and ideas to the table, which leads to better solutions than any individual leader would be able to consistently come up with on their own.

The foundation for developing this coaching approach is to work on practicing staying in a curious, open, nonjudgmental mindset. That includes pausing to question what assumptions you’re making about a situation, continuing to learn, and viewing mistakes as lessons instead of as failures. That also includes paying attention the ways biases, context, and culture influence our interactions.

Practicing staying in this mindset is useful in all of your interactions, and helps you lead in a more inclusive, trauma-informed way. For example, staying curious while training a new employee can help you learn more about how they work best and how you can best support them.

The time to shift into actively coaching is when your team member is working through a challenge where there’s no one correct path forward – whether that’s planning a program, deciding the best way to do outreach to a liaison department, or thinking through which conference to submit a proposal to. Coaching is about helping your team member work through challenges and find the solution that’s right for them, so they need to be able to make the decisions about how to move forward.

There are some important skills to develop and several models that people use to shape their coaching conversations. Two fundamental skills are active listening and asking open-ended, non-judgmental questions.

What this looks like in practice

When someone comes to you for help solving a problem:

One simple way to start incorporating this mindset is to ask more questions before offering your solution.

“What ideas have you already thought of?”

And then get curious about workshopping those ideas before you add your own to the mix!

When you have information that they need:

The emphasis on partnering means doing your best to share information instead of giving advice that someone might feel pressured to take.

That can sound like the difference between:

“We tried that before, and it didn’t work. You should give up on that idea.”

And:

“We tried that before, and here are the things that went wrong… How does that affect the way you’re thinking about this idea?”

Depending on the details, they may decide to scrap that idea, or they may come up with some great improvements on the original plan. Either way, it becomes their choice.

When you need to address a performance issue:

This could apply to any time when you need to see a certain outcome within a certain time frame, because it can be hard to see what options they have. Either get this done by this deadline, or face consequences. But when you look for any opportunity to offer choices, you’ll be surprised at how many you can find!

One way this could show up is:

“I need to see this outcome by this time next month. How do you want me to check in with you between now and then to make sure you’re on track?”

A different version of coaching as a leadership style

I could go on all day about coaching as I understand it, but to understand why some employees reject it, we need to talk about other ways “coaching” has been taught. Within the well-established Situational Leadership Model, they include coaching in their “Style 2”:

“Selling, Coaching or Explaining: Leader still makes decisions but provides context and engages in dialogue to reinforce buy-in.”

This approach is grounded in work from the 1970s, while the ICF was founded in the 1990s, so that may explain the very different uses of this term. And I’ll admit that I haven’t completed this program, so I may be missing some nuance. But years ago, I had a supervisor who used this “selling” style frequently, focusing on getting members of our department to “buy-in” to their priorities instead of supporting us in setting goals that mattered to us. Let’s just say that this approach led to very different outcomes than I’ve experienced from ICF-aligned coaching.

Of course there will be times when a leader has to be the one to make the final decision. And in that case, being transparent about explaining the reasoning behind that decision is good practice. But that would not be considered coaching within the ICF framework.

So whenever you’re discussing coaching, it’s important to make sure you’re both using the same definition. And when I work with leaders whose team members have negative associations with the label “coaching”, we frame it as leading with curiosity, instead.

[i] I did a quick skim of ALA Joblist while drafting this post. On just the first page of unfiltered results, I found three job ads that mention coaching!

Thoughts From A Search Committee Chair Running Two Searches

This spring, I’m chairing concurrent searches for two new librarians role in my department. I’m thrilled to lead these search committees and bring new colleagues to the team. These roles opened up due to faculty retirements and gave the department and I a chance to reflect on what our institution needs right now.

For weeks, I’ve been thinking about how to write a blog post about this experience. At my past institution, I didn’t get too close to faculty librarian searches. I was at a large organization and had a supervisor who had me focus on other work priorities. I hired student interns and research assistants, but I was relatively removed from other searches. At my current institution, we are a smaller shop and as a department head, I have a different responsibility and focus on things like searches. While these two searches aren’t my first time chairing a search at my current institution, I feel a different search chair pressure since these are colleagues joining our department. This pressure is probably mostly internal pressure I’m putting on myself, but with every search, I feel there’s pressure for it to go well and find a successful candidate.

Instead of continuing to spin my proverbial wheels about how to write this post, I’m going to share a few highlights. These are big ideas or themes that continue to stay top of mind. As always, I’m curious if these ideas and themes resonate with others!

The Library Job Search + Emotions

In 2018-19, I collaborated with former ACRLogger Dylan Burns on a research project around emotions in the library job search. Dylan and I met in graduate school and noticed that during the second year of our on-campus program, there was a new energy in the air. A competitive and sometimes secretive energy as we all went on the job search. Our research was inspired by that experience and the emotions we felt as we went on the job market. We sent a survey out and had over 1,000 people start our survey! The paper we eventually wrote explored the themes we saw along with focus groups we conducted with survey participants. This research project was informative in so many ways, beyond learning so much about survey design, this research really solidified for me the challenges and struggles librarians experience. There’s such a black box when you apply for a job; you put your materials out there, invest time and energy in crafting a compelling cover letter and thinking about a potential institute that might employ you, and hope you hear something. As I navigate this search from the position of search chair, this paper is top of mind. I do what I can to communicate and move things along as quickly as I can. But I’ve also seen the various ways the systems and structures (or lack of those structures) slow a search down and rely on the chair and hiring manager to be organized.

Not everyone is invested or as tuned into the search as you are

Everyone has different capacity levels to think about these searches. As the chair, I feel like I’m really in it but that’s not the same for everyone around me. I continue to remind myself that it is my responsibility to pave the way and make it easy for folks to engage with our candidates. And part of that means I have to keep articulating what these jobs will do, and how the folks in the room might interact/collaborate/rely on these roles.

Searching for new people means less time to think about your current people

Something I’ve thought a lot about is how I’m refocusing my energy into bringing new folks into the department. That means something has to give and that has been some of the energy I’ve been able to put into the people on the current team. I feel fortunate these searches are happening almost three years into my time as a department head; I have a better sense of what folks need and they have a better sense of how to get feedback/support from me, especially when my time is in high demand. This also means when the searches wrap up, I can refocus my energy on the current department. Ultimately, just because I’m running a search doesn’t mean I have double the emotional energy. I’m still working through this, but try to be aware of what I can give and where I need to pull back.

Bottom line: searches take time and energy

For the past three months, I feel like I’ve been thinking about these searches constantly. I might be brainstorming questions, finalizing finalist interview schedules, noting strengths and opportunities for growth, or scheduling meetings. I’m pouring a lot of energy to prepare for finalist interviews and t once that interview week comes, I’m tuned in to running smooth interview days. I keep thinking of the comment my high school band director told us in the pit orchestra – the best pit orchestra is the one where people don’t even realize there’s a pit orchestra right in front of them. To me, a good search feels like that; it’s running and people are comfortable and supported but don’t necessarily see all the work spinning in the background. But that of course, takes time and energy, and weeks of planning and coordinating!

What happens after the search

I also think frequently about what happens after the search – a successful candidate joins the team. That naturally spurs a bunch of follow up questions: What will onboarding look like? How is the department involved? What are scoped projects I can give these folks to get acclimated to the organization and feel a sense of progress within the first six to eight months on the job? I keep reminding myself to finish the searches and then worry about what’s next. One step at a time.

At the end of the day, I’m really excited for what’s ahead. I feel like I’m learning and I’m growing in this double search chair role. I’m also going to be very thankful for when these searches wrap up!

The Back of the iPad Cart And Other Things I Didn’t Anticipate as a New Department Head

What felt like the longest month (January) is finally over. I don’t know about you, but the combination of cold temperatures, snow, the surge in COVID cases, and the push to “de-densify” the campus really put me in a pandemic funk. Each week felt out of my control and full of back-to-back virtual meetings. After spending a full semester working entirely in-person and only having a few virtual meetings each week, my body definitely needed time to readjust to working from my dining room table.The days went by fast, I was full of hectic energy, but January as a whole felt like a slog.

As I emerge and jump headfirst into February (my favorite month for many reasons, including the arrival of my birthday), I tried to identify the reason for a hectic January. I think part of it was encountering some things I hadn’t anticipated. As I’ve talked about on the blog before, I’m new to being a department head. I’m finding it challenging and rewarding in all the right ways and an opportunity for me to grow. But like any new position, things pop up that you don’t think would happen. As I stood in front of our iPad cart, trying to determine what cords went where, I figured it would be fun to discuss a few of the things I’m navigating!

Balancing team vs. me time

One of the things I enjoy about my new role is the ability to take a bird’s eye view at what the team is doing. It’s great to see how each individual is moving a project forward and I love to connect teammates when their interests and skill sets match up. I love thinking through the vision of the department and how our individual goals work towards collective goals. But sometimes I get to the end of the work day and realize that I’ve been spending so much time thinking about the team, I haven’t thought about me.

By me, I mean the individual projects and work I do that is connected, yet separate in some ways, from my department head role. For example, the awesome work I get to do with LibParlor and the IMLS grant we received. Or writing this blog post for ACRLog or planning a one-shot instruction session. I’m still trying to find the balance between how I assist and support the success of the team I’m leading, but also find time to work on the things that are part of my portfolio. Recently, I’ve gotten around to blocking off chunks of time for certain projects, closing out my mail when I’m not actively sending email, and using my virtual to-do list to label when work will be done (morning vs. afternoon) and if it will require ample brain space. I know a perfect balance will never be achieved, but I’m working on being more cognisant when one side is overtaking the other.

Defining workflows and processes

The name of this blog post comes from a recent experience where the department got new iPads (yay). As the department head, I got thrown into how we might manage them and how we work with our central IT to maintain them. I’m a process-oriented person, who is also aware that we should capture the success of using this technology (so future funding can be secured when we need it). As I watched our IT department deliver our iPads to the library, I realized that managing 24 iPads is not the same as managing my own personal iPad that I watch Hulu on. In the process of figuring out these new devices, I inevitably spent more time on them than I anticipated. And time I didn’t even consider – like rearranging the cords in the back of the iPad cart to be neat and orderly! Was that necessary? (Probably not). Did it make me feel more organized and together? (Sure did). I know this preparation work will pay off – I’ve gotten to know folks outside of the library and think about how these iPads are part of our bigger instruction work. However, the long game doesn’t mean the short game doesn’t feel hectic!

The pandemic (enough said, right?)

I feel like my pandemic journey at my current institution is backwards – I interviewed for the role in June 2021, during the sweet period of no masks. I started the job as the mask mandate was put back into place, and now my 2022 started off with my institution deciding to push the start of the semester back a week and encourage work from home as much as possible. I’m thankful that I had a full semester with the team before jumping into an almost entirely remote work situation. It has been weird not to see my colleagues on a daily basis and at times, I feel a bit disconnected from some of their day-to-day work. This was also really my first chance as a manager to manage in an evolving pandemic situation. It means I’m sending a lot of emails and trying to model the ways I remember feeling supported in my previous role when the pandemic was shifting and changing. We are just all trying to survive.

What’s next?

I wish I knew what was next! Ideally, I’ll go back to a “pandemic fall normal” on Monday. I’ll keep doing my thing and figuring out strategies along the way. I’ll keep celebrating the small wins, like functioning classroom iPads that have wifi! I’m curious – did anyone else have a particularly dreary January? What happened that you didn’t anticipate?