Management and Leadership Discussion #1: the Right Thing
17 January 2024
Bennis and Nanus (1985), two well-known scholars of leadership, once wrote, “Managers are people who do things right and leaders are people who do the right thing." What is the difference between doing things right and doing the right thing? Based on your learning and experience, do you agree that managers do things right and leaders do the right thing? Do you know any leaders, or managers, who do things right but also do the right thing?
The difference between “doing things right” and “doing the right thing” might seem like a trick question, but the underlying meaning is one that’s not hard to grasp if you ask “what is ‘right’ in a given situation?”
For example: since the library system I work at serves a sizable rural population, we circulate a lot of internet hotspots. Despite a bulk purchase that brought the number of units up to 100 some time ago, demand for them is so high that they never have the chance to sit on a shelf. I put one on hold late last November and it took a whole two months for my place to crawl up the wait list, since you can be sure folks will hold on to them for the whole two-week loan period. Patrons who otherwise do not engage with the library’s services will literally make cards just to get their hands on one. So, as you can imagine, patrons are quite disappointed if something comes up that prevents them from checking theirs out when the time comes. Around half of all the hotspot holds we get expire from a patron forgetting to come pick up theirs within the window of time it’s held, so most of the time, the culprit ends up being them for one reason or another.1 If a hold expires, or if it gets canceled, or checked back in for whatever reason, system policy says that the hotspot goes to the next person in line, no pleas entertained and little sympathy given.
Other times, though, the blame falls squarely on the circ department, such as when we get a locked or malfunctioning hotspot that nobody bothers to check before they [hand it off to the recipient. In this context, “doing the right thing” would be following policy—and policy would have us check the offending hotspot in and push them back to the end of the line again. Obviously, that’s arbitrarily stiff! Jumping ahead in the textbook, Moran and Morner (2018) write that “policies […] are essentially limiting because they dictate a specific course of action and are aimed at preventing deviations from a set norm. They attempt to guard against and eliminate differences that sometimes result from variations in personality and interpretation” (p. 102). While the policy is in place to keep the hotspot hold list moving along smoothly, it runs up against good customer service.
This is where a supervisor usually has to “do the right thing” and go against policy—which in this case, usually ends up being checking in the hotspot while keeping the unfortunate patron at the head of the line, while someone gets in contact with network services. Tons of these technicalities come into play dealing with the cat-and-mouse whodunits of damaged books and charging fees and patron reactions to things and all the little trials of circulation. While they don’t involve the management of people or “leadership” as described per say (except for like, the emotions of a patron), it is a context where “doing things right” and “doing the right thing” have to be constantly weighed against one another, usually in the favor of the latter.
1 ^I will say that our notification system is quite inadequate—they only come through email in the dead of night instead of through text message or our mobile app or some other avenue that is immediate and that people actively check.
References
Moran, B. B. & Morner, C. J. (2018). Library and information center management (9th ed.). Libraries Unlimited.