I was talking to a legal publisher about some training recently, as we’ve had some staff changes in the last year. At some point, I became backup for one of our staff managing our electronic access accounts, as you do when you work in a small team. When that staff person moved on, I’d just kept doing the task. When the publisher’s rep heard that I was the law library director and still doing this task, they suggested that someone else should take on this administrative task. But just because a director can delegate something, does that mean they should?

Our work is segmented into activities. In a law library, those activities are generally segmented by specialization (technical services, reference, etc.). Those specializations can help to determine who should be doing what. We capture those details in job descriptions and then move forward.

It’s a good approach, generally. But it’s not exact. People will accumulate activities that do not exist in their job description. Organizations sometimes try to use consistent language across roles that can make the task alignment with a role even less clear. Sometimes these activities will represent a unique technical ability held by the person in a role, like working on the library web site. Or a special professional interest, like working on rare books. And sometimes, they’ll just be the person who is most available at the moment to take on a role.

Job descriptions lack exactness. They can’t take into account the details of what a person might experience. I tend to see them – my own as well – as guidelines for expectations. It’s only when there’s a continuous aberration that I look to make changes. In my experience, a job description only comes into play when you start or when you leave a job.

This accretion of tasks can cause a role to become detached from the job description that describes it. At some point, that role, due to the specific person and their capabilities currently occupying it, may have become something new or different. One benefit to a more generic job description is that it can absorb more of these edge cases that require effort but not necessarily a different skill set.

Just as often, though, it’s a bit like avoiding having a miscellaneous category in a taxonomy. You can’t have a catch-all approach to tasks: someone has to be accountable for each task. If there is no-one to do the task, then it should be made clear that it isn’t getting done.

One outcome can be that, since those job descriptions are tied to salary, that certain tasks are seen as more important because the time they take has a higher dollar value. That can cause a task to flow to a person who is less able – due to resources or expertise or time or hierarchy – to be successful at it.

A Question of Scale

The solo law librarian does everything. And everything they don’t do, doesn’t get done. As you start to scale up your law library staff, and break them out into discrete teams, you gain the ability to do more things. Many hands make light work.

If you’ve come up through the law library, you bring your own subject matter expertise. That can cause you to feel as though you retain that expertise even when you’ve grown distant from it. A law library leader can pretty easily fall into a place where they re-insert themselves into their former specialty, rather than letting the people hired to do the work do it.

I was tidying up some personal records recently and came across a 360 performance review that I did about 10 years ago. I have no idea who the participants were any longer, I just have the output. If I remember correctly, I did this on my own hook to see what the outcome was.

I didn’t find the 360 very useful, nor did I find participating in other people’s 360s very helpful. For all the reasons that this SHRM piece from 2011 describes, it’s a fraught effort. The 360 review has all the same failings that focus groups bring to law library service surveys.

One of the verbatim responses carried a warning that “[s]ometimes it appears that it’s easier for him to just go ahead and do something himself. No problem with that, as long as he has the time.” At least, I took it as a warning. I do not follow the “if you want something done right, do it yourself” rule.

As a law library leader, doing things yourself can create two potential negative outcomes. First, you may find that you are micro-managing in areas where you arguably aren’t the most expert person. I’ve found that this is most common when it comes to project work and a leader really needs to step back. It is the idea that the route you might take to a solution isn’t necessarily the one that your staff will take. In my experience, there’s rarely a benefit to dictating the route so long as the outcome is the expected one.

Second, your staff loses out on growing their own skill set. There are times when the CEO or some other senior person will ask for legal research support. I’m pretty confident that I could do the work and I am most likely to have the relationship with that person. But if I do it, I remove the ability for my staff to get that expertise as well as that potential visibility with a senior staff person. When my staff do work for someone up the chain of command, I ask them to respond directly with their findings, so the person in the C-suite knows who the subject matter expert was.

This goes doubly when it is an area where you may have subject matter mastery and your staff do not. In my case, I have a deep technology skill set. I do not use it much in my day-to-day law library director role. It has been useful in strategizing about potential solutions.

But if I insert my own expertise into each situation that requires technical know how, even when I have the most of it, I’m missing a leadership opportunity. In the same way that we mentor new reference librarians or catalogers rather than answering every question or doing MARC records for every item ourselves, a director can mentor in a whole variety of ways. I can help a new manager by letting them feel their way forward, providing advice and feedback without making decisions. I can help guide the law library’s technology choices by helping the person who is tackling the problem, prodding at their choices and making suggestions to help them explore the issue.

A Question of Time

Not everything is a growth opportunity, though. A lot of accreted tasks are mindless process steps. Others require resources that inhibit delegation. Some of the ones that I’ve absorbed over the years:

  • creating and deleting legal publisher license accounts for corporate staff (repetitive)
  • supporting the library’s brochure-ware web site content, by making small edits for hours of operation or policy edits (repetitive)
  • creation of the library’s Twitter account (@greatlibrary), a simple step that I took about 5 years before we actually decided we wanted to start using it (one-time)

Some of the tasks are more complex than that. When our organization was remediating its web properties to comply with Ontario’s accessibility law, it didn’t dedicate any resources to the law library for the project. We had to fix our properties – web site content, blog, catalog – ourselves. This was a highly technical project for which we had neither technical staff nor money nor time to grow the skill set internally.

As the 360 reviewer noted, I could do this myself . . . if I had the time. A benefit of being the law library director is to have a top down view of what people are doing. I knew that not only could I do this work as fast or faster than anyone else, by doing so, I could avoid overwhelming other staff when I had the cycles to do the work myself. Or ourselves, really, as I had help from our head of technical services to remediate the discovery layer.

When I first arrived at my law library, I had an assistant. In every job that I’ve had the title Director, I’ve had an assistant at the start. It’s always presented me with a challenge because I could delegate to them if I wanted. But a lot of what can be delegated are things I’m comfortable doing myself.

For example, I schedule my own meetings and answer my own phone and write my own memos and crunch my own data. I don’t use any paper objects so all of my files are digital and as accessible to me as to anyone else. I was floored when I realized that one of my department heads had my assistant – through a years-long practice that preceded me – type up her memos. Online calendaring, voice mail and email, and word processing make it hard for me to justify delegating this work.

So who should get these smaller tasks, the things that need to be done but don’t belong to any specific person’s expertise? I tend to look at:

  • who needs the output? If a person on staff needs it for their work, there’s a good chance they should do the task. If it’s an external person, and we tend to route those requests through the client services desk, then it may be our front line people who need to do the task so they can be responsive to those requests.
  • who’s got the skill set? Sometimes it’s a task – like web site support or a particular practice area – that someone is already highly skilled at that knowledge domain. You can assign it to that person who will be able to do it most efficiently. You can also create a plan for them to train others (like peer reference librarians) so that everyone can grow into the same knowledge domain. These are opportunities to help someone who has started down a particular path to grow their skills in a way that is interesting to them.

You should distinguish who’s got the skill set from who’s efficient or effective at this for a couple of reasons. High performing staff may be able to do lots of things but it doesn’t mean that they want to be doing more. It’s not fair to overload your top performers any more than it is fair to deprive others from personal growth. This is a leadership opportunity to help newer librarians and staff to raise their own level.

I’ve recently been divesting myself of some of these roles. While I’ll still be available, I’m passing the primary contact point off to others. It creates the need to decided whether to pass it off to an individual (which makes it clearer who is responsible for the task) or to a group of people (who can back each other up, creating more resiliency). I’ll be the backup but there’s no need for me to continue to do low accountability tasks like account management that can be done more responsively by front line staff.

It also makes me wonder if I should be doing an annual survey of staff to find out what tasks they’ve absorbed without anyone knowing. We can assess whether they are the right person to do it rather than merely the person who was available. It would be good to have a deliberate approach to this grey area around our primary roles.