During my first few weeks working at the world’s largest library, I was witness to a situation in which a middle-level manager tried to pull the wool over the eyes of an executive-level manager. It was apparently successful and taught me that a manager – or supervisor – at any level should never be completely confident that he/she knows what is happening within their area of oversight. And the higher a manager is in the chain, the less they can truly know about what is happening at the mission employee level.
Here is what happened. I had just started in a temporary position that was to tide me over until the start of the fall 1983 intern program, which was to begin in a couple of months. My job was in a division of about 75 staff responsible for receiving and cataloging serials – periodicals, magazines, and journals. When I was shown around the physical layout of the division, a bank of five computer terminals was pointed out to me. (That was in the days before there were PCs on everyone’s desks.)
“Those are our new CONSER terminals,” the person showing me around stated with pride. There was no one sitting at them, but they sure looked pretty. CONSER was – and still is – a cooperative program for cataloging serials and making the resulting records available for reuse by other libraries. In essence, the program allowed labor-intensive cataloging work to be shared across many participating institutions. For example, if library A was the first to receive a new periodical, it would create a catalog record for the publication in the system. Subsequently, when other libraries started to receive the same publication, they would simply take the existing record, make a few local changes, then use it for their own catalogs. Cooperative cataloging programs save libraries money, a noble goal.
So, there were those five new CONSER terminals sitting there in a row. I had no idea how much they cost. Nor did I understand at that time how much bureaucratic effort is required for such an acquisition, not to mention securing approvals up the line. What I could see with my own eyes, though, as I sat toiling away doing temp-type work that summer, was that there rarely was anyone at those computers. Occasionally, there might be one person working and maybe two. But there certainly was never an instance that I witnessed when all terminals were in use.
Then the word came down from division management that Henriette Avram, the Director for Processing Systems, Networks, and Automation Planning, and the executive to whom our chief reported, was coming to visit the division. Ms. Avram was legendary in the library world as the person who led the development of the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) format that enabled various library automation functions and the sharing of data between libraries. As a recent library school graduate, I was very excited to hear that I was going to get a chance to see – and maybe meet – Ms. Avram.
Division management perhaps was not as eager for her to visit. Staff were instructed that all five CONSER terminals must be in use when Ms. Avram visited. And so, it was. All five terminals were in use from before her arrival until after her departure. I did not get to meet Ms. Avram, but did see her from a distance as she admired the new terminals.
Was Ms. Avram fooled? It seems unlikely – she was a brilliant woman. But maybe she was misled. And the fact that this ruse was arranged at all was instructive to me.
Over the years, I have thought about that incident frequently. The higher up one goes on an org chart, the more difficult it becomes to actually know what is happening at ground level. Heck, it is sometimes a challenge even for the supervisors of mission employees to know what they are doing. Obviously, there is always communication regarding assignments and work accomplished, both for units and individuals, but that usually doesn’t tell the full story.
Thus, there is a great temptation at all levels of management to obtain insights through various, sometimes unsavory, means. They include management by walking around, where an executive simply shows up in different areas to see what’s going on. Such an approach, however, takes the legs out from under subordinate managers and displays a lack of confidence in them. Some executives also take advantage of longtime relationships with lower-level employees and seek out their perspectives on what may be happening in an organization. That can also be unseemly and reeks of spying.
The best way for any supervisor or manager to feel confident that they know what is going on is to have trusting relationships and open lines of communication with direct reports. Bad or disappointing news should travel – in both directions – as smoothly as does positive information. In the situation described above, I can only surmise that the use of the CONSER terminals was far less than had been projected. My division chief had apparently not shared that information with Ms. Avram and thus had to stage a charade when she visited, thus getting himself further into the muck. I don’t know what their relationship was like overall, but based on this slim bit of evidence, the trust seems to have been missing.