The key personnel issue
of the library board of a small library is the selection of the library
director. Frequently, the director is the only staff member of the small
library. In larger libraries, of course, the director has personnel
responsibilities of his/her own in dealing with subordinate staff. The
hiring of a director is especially crucial because it will determine the
whole operation of the library and of its interaction with the public that
it must serve.
For quite a number of years, I was chairman of a
large academic department within the City University of New York. At its
largest, the department had 54 highly educated faculty members,
approximately one-half full-timers and one-half adjuncts. One of the most
difficult aspects of the job was that of making decisions concerning whom
to hire, whom to keep, and whom to promote (and navigating such decisions
through the bureaucracy). Given the size of the department, these issues
were a constant challenge and now, in my retirement, a lasting memory.
Whether you are a chairman, director, or trustee, you are, in
effect, an employer. In looking back at my own experience, I continue to
feel that the personnel matters were the most demanding and the most
dangerous decisions that came with the job. By most dangerous, I mean that
they had the greatest likelihood of being bad decisions, of being
mistakes. They are also the ones that I most appreciate and most regret,
depending upon how their consequences worked out as time passed.
There is a lot of luck involved in hiring; for you (the employer)
are doing no more than guessing how the individual will turn out, and you
are doing that on the basis of very partial and incomplete information
(vitae, recommendations, personal interviews, and, sometimes, rumors both
good and bad). If anything rings wrong at any time, if anything makes a
thought cross your mind that you should be careful with this person, I’ve
learned that you should believe in this thought as a real warning sign.
Long shots can be successful, and they are well worth taking under some
circumstances, but we must take them deliberately, never simply by
suppression of our doubts.
In making decisions about
keeping/firing (or promoting/demoting) those whom you already have on the
staff, you are on firmer ground. You have experience with the individual's
record. Even so, the decision is a complex set of balances among your
knowledge of the person's past performance, your hope (justified or only
fanciful, depending upon your own intellectual rigor) concerning the
person's future performance, and your worries about the uncertainties of
hiring a replacement. You must be equally sensitive to those warning bells
in the back of your mind, but you at least have more information with
which to work.
For this reason, I am in favor of probation periods
for new hires.
A key ingredient of the decision concerning keeping
a director about whom there are problems is not to give in to the false
hope of future improvement. This is certainly true in the case of any
person who has shown any dishonesty, any lying, any intentional
misdirection, or any attitude toward the job that seems to treat it as a
means to promote a personal agenda. The latter is revealed by various
behaviors: hostilities at persons and things that seem out of place,
manipulations of ideas and facts that don't fit the circumstances,
resistance to even consider others' perspectives, actions that create bad
consequences for the library but which do not seem to bother nor to deter
the person, who well may deny the obvious facts. These signs are
especially dangerous in the cases of faculty, directors, presidents, or
anyone else whose job can influence and direct the lives of others.
I have seen all of these at one time or another. They are all
components of a fundamental incompetence for any position of real
responsibility. My experience is that (with adults) these are irredeemable
defects: they don't change within the time frame of normal employment, and
they are not counterbalanced adequately by charm, intelligence, and
knowledge that occasionally may disguise them for a while.
Simple
ignorance, on the other hand, is often acceptable in a new hire if the
person shows both willingness and aptitude to learn. Ignorance is curable,
but the individual must also have the attitude that the learning process
will be forever ---not just for a few months or a year after which he may
"coast" mentally until retirement. During probation or first term, you
have the opportunity to correct their normal ignorance about a new job, to
verify their competence, and to observe those important aspects of
honesty, emotional stability, and hidden agendas that are so important
over the long run.
However, you must also avoid the major pitfalls
of probation periods.
We all get used to people over time. We can
even get to like the rogues somewhat although they may have revealed those
basic faults of character that I've mentioned. We ourselves can deny the
facts ('He/she probably just had a bad day, ...or week, ...or month, ...or
year."). We can vainly hope ("It’s bound to get better."). We can fear
that no better replacement can ever be found ("Oh, God, I don't want to go
through that rehiring process again!"). We can blind ourselves to the
consequences of his behavior ("Although the library has suddenly lost ALL
community support for the first time in its history, who of us can prove
that the director really is at fault?").
Probation periods are
especially dangerous if they have been used to gloss over a sloppy hiring
procedure that relies upon the probation period or first term to catch any
deficiencies (“Let’s get this horror over with and hire the guy; otherwise
we’ll be at this forever. If he doesn’t work out, we can always fire him
after the probation period.”). Any laziness or weariness that so
foreshortens the hiring process can also infect the probation process; so
that we end up living with the original mistake uncorrected.
Probation periods are the Plan B of personnel actions. Someone
once said that the secret to successful living is to be always flexible
enough to move to Plan B whenever Plan A doesn’t work. For us, Plan A is a
painstakingly careful initial search for a director. We must try to do it
right the first time, fearful of sloppiness and undeterred by weariness or
impatience. However, if we have made a mistake, it is absolutely necessary
that we pursue Plan B immediately as a corrective ----- to honestly
recognize the mistake for what it is and to replace that person as soon as
possible; for the destructive repercussions of personnel mistakes never
cease to multiply.