When “You Own It” Means You Own It: Closing the Gap Between Empowering Words and Empowering Action

13 Tuesday Oct 2026

Posted by tadawes in Communication, Employee Morale, Honesty, Inclusion, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Psychological Safety, Trust

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Communication, Leadership, Organizational Culture, Psychological Safety, Trust

Most of us have worked for a leader who says all the right things. “I empower you.” “This is your call.” “You own this decision.” The words are generous and sincere, and they reflect values the leader genuinely holds.

Then the decision gets made, and it turns out it was never really yours. The recommendation is reworked, the meeting ends with the leader’s preferred option, or the “final” call is quietly revisited a week later. Over time, people learn that the words describe the leader’s intentions while the actions describe how the organization actually works.

This post is about that gap between what a leader says and what a leader does, and about how leaders, their teams, and their organizations can close it. The good news is that the gap is rarely a sign of bad intent. It is usually a blind spot, and the right structures, conversations, and habits can address it.

The say-do gap

Organizational scholars have a name for the alignment between a manager’s words and deeds: behavioral integrity (Simons, 2002). When it is high, people take a leader’s statements at face value. When it is low, people start translating, listening less to what is said and watching more closely for what will actually happen.

The leader I have in mind often sincerely believes they are delegating. They may describe themselves as collaborative, hands-off, even overly trusting. When someone on the team gently names a different pattern, the leader disagrees honestly because their self-image is built on their intentions rather than how their behavior lands.

Unaware or narcissistic?

It is tempting to reach for the label “narcissist” when a leader cannot see what everyone around them sees. I would resist that, for two reasons. Narcissistic personality is a clinical and research construct, and most of us are not in a position to diagnose a colleague. More importantly, the label closes the conversation; it frames the problem as fixed rather than as something that can change.

That said, the research on narcissistic leadership is useful because it describes a spectrum of behaviors that many leaders show to some degree (Maccoby, 2000; Rosenthal & Pittinsky, 2006). These include a strong need to be seen as right, sensitivity to disagreement, and a tendency to equate the organization’s success with one’s own vision. Most leaders who struggle with control sit far from the extreme end of that spectrum.

A practical way to tell the difference is to watch what happens when the leader receives clear, specific, well-timed feedback.

The unaware leader may be defensive at first, but they become curious. Given evidence and some time, they start to notice the pattern themselves.
The more self-protective leader consistently reframes the feedback as the other person’s problem, and the pattern does not change even when the evidence is clear.

The first leader needs better mirrors. The second needs firmer structures. Most organizations will benefit from providing both.

What the gap does to trust

Trust rests on three things people perceive in a leader: ability, benevolence, and integrity (Mayer et al., 1995). The leader I am describing usually scores well on the first two. People believe they are capable and that they care. The erosion happens with integrity: each time “you own this” means “I own this,” the leader’s words lose a little value.

The effects ripple outward in predictable ways:

People stop investing in decisions they are told they own. Why spend weeks building a recommendation only to have it rewritten?
Accountability becomes blurry. If a decision goes poorly, the person who “owned” it may be held responsible for a choice they did not actually make.
Direction gets discounted. When the leader announces a plan, people wait to see whether it will hold before committing.
Upward communication thins. People share what the leader wants to hear and save candor for the hallway.

None of this requires anyone to act in bad faith. It is simply how reasonable people adapt to mixed signals, and it is why closing the gap matters for the whole organization, not just the leader’s direct reports.

Where the ideas go

Research on employee voice shows that people decide whether to speak up less on formal open-door policies and more on what they have seen happen to others who spoke (Detert & Burris, 2007). If past suggestions were politely received and then set aside, people conclude that speaking up is not worth the effort. Morrison and Milliken (2000) call the collective result “organizational silence.”

Silence is costly precisely because it is invisible. The leader doesn’t see the idea never offered, the risk never raised, or the better process someone kept to themselves. From the leader’s chair, meetings may even feel more harmonious, reinforcing the belief that everyone is aligned.

The ideas do not disappear. They move into side conversations, workarounds, or other organizations when talented people leave. The people most likely to go quiet are often those with the least positional power or those who already feel on the margins, which makes this an inclusion issue as much as a leadership one.

Becoming more self-aware

Tasha Eurich’s research found that most people believe they are self-aware, while only a small fraction actually are (Eurich, 2017, 2018). She distinguishes internal self-awareness (knowing our own values and reactions) from external self-awareness (knowing how others experience us). Leaders who struggle with the say-do gap usually have plenty of the first and too little of the second.

Some practices that help:

Audit decisions, not intentions. Look back at the last ten significant decisions. For each, ask who proposed it, who shaped it, and whose version was adopted. The pattern in the data is far more persuasive than any feedback.
Ask “what” rather than “why.” Eurich found that asking “Why did I do that?” tends to produce self-justifying stories. Asking “What was happening when I stepped in?” produces insight.
Notice the trigger moments. Control often reappears under specific conditions: high stakes, time pressure, visibility to senior leaders, or a topic the leader cares deeply about. Naming those moments makes them easier to manage.
Practice humble inquiry. Schein (2013) describes asking questions you don’t already know the answer to. A useful test: if you already know what you want the person to say, it is not really a question.
Seek structured feedback. A well-designed 360 review, an executive coach, or a trusted peer outside the reporting line can say what direct reports find risky to say.
Look for the competing commitment. Kegan and Lahey (2009) show that people often hold a hidden commitment (for example, “I must never be associated with a failure”) that quietly undermines a stated goal like empowering others. Bringing it to light is often the turning point.

How those who report to the leader can help

A label rarely changes behavior. When someone hears a word that describes their style, they compare it with their intentions, find a mismatch, and reject it. Stone and Heen (2014) call this a “wrong spotting” response: the receiver finds what is inaccurate in the feedback and discards the rest. A better approach is to make the impact visible, specific, and safe to explore.

Clarify the decision up front. At the start of a project, ask, “When you say I own this, do you mean I decide, or I recommend, and you decide?” Either answer is legitimate. The point is to name it before the work starts, not after.
Describe a specific moment and its effect. Instead of characterizing the leader, describe one event: “In Tuesday’s meeting, after you chose option B, the team stopped offering alternatives. I don’t think that’s what you intended.”
Share the impact on the work, not on feelings alone. “We spent three weeks on the recommendation, and the final version changed most of it. Next time it would help to know your parameters at the start.”
Invite the leader to test it. “Would you be open to tracking who makes the final call on our next five decisions? I’m curious what we’d see.” Data the leader gathers personally is much harder to dismiss.
Ask for permission and frame it as support. “I’d like to give you some feedback that I think could help the team trust your delegation more. Is now a good time?”
Go together when appropriate. One voice is easy to explain away. Two or three people describing the same pattern respectfully, with examples, is harder to ignore.

It also matters that this is not only the direct reports’ job. Upward feedback carries real risk, so the leader’s supervisor and peers have a responsibility to reinforce what the team says.

Structures that match authority with responsibility

Good intentions need scaffolding. The most effective fix is to make decision rights explicit, so that “you own this” has an agreed meaning. Rogers and Blenko (2006) showed that clarity about who recommends, who agrees, who decides, and who is consulted improves both the speed and the quality of decisions.

A simple shared vocabulary goes a long way. For each significant decision, the leader and the team agree on a level in advance:

Level	What it means	What the leader commits to
1. Inform	The leader decides and explains why	Share the reasoning openly
2. Consult	The leader decides after seeking input	Show how input shaped the outcome
3. Recommend	The team recommends; the leader decides	State criteria up front; explain any change
4. Decide within limits	The team decides inside agreed parameters	Name the parameters early; do not revisit later
5. Own	The team decides and informs the leader	Support the decision publicly, even if they would have chosen differently

The value is not in reaching Level 5 on everything. Some decisions properly belong with the leader. The value is in honesty: a team told “this is a Level 2 decision” will feel far more respected than a team told “you own this” about a decision that was Level 1 all along.

Marquet (2013) adds a helpful habit. Instead of asking permission, team members state their intent (“I intend to…”), and the leader asks questions until they are comfortable, rather than substituting their own answer.

Steps toward a more inclusive organization

The say-do gap is a leadership issue, but it thrives or fades depending on the organization’s systems. Some steps the organization can take:

Include decision levels in project charters so the conversation happens routinely rather than as a confrontation.
Close the loop on ideas. When you gather suggestions, report back on what you adopted, what you didn’t, and why. People keep speaking up when they can see their input travel somewhere.
Build multiple channels for voice, including anonymous ones, rotating meeting facilitation, and structured rounds where everyone speaks before the most senior person does (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006).
Include delegation and behavioral integrity in leadership evaluation. What gets assessed gets attention.
Invest in coaching and development for leaders as a normal part of growth, not as a remedy for a problem.
Model it from the top. When senior leaders openly ask, “Where am I getting in the way?” and act on the answers, they give everyone else permission to do the same (Schein & Schein, 2018).

These practices build psychological safety, the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks (Edmondson, 1999, 2019). They also strengthen inclusion because an inclusive organization needs to hear the voices most often lost in a top-heavy decision culture (Nishii, 2013).

Looking ahead

The leaders who say “I empower you” usually mean it. That is the hopeful part of this story. Their values are already pointed in the right direction; they just lack the feedback and structure to let their actions catch up with their words.

When that happens, the change is noticeable. People invest in their recommendations again, meetings get livelier, and ideas that had been circulating quietly start to surface. Trust grows not because anyone declared it, but because words and actions begin to match.

Every one of us has a gap somewhere between how we see ourselves and how others experience us. The work is not to eliminate it once and for all. It is to build the habits, relationships, and systems that keep helping us see it.

Why Am I Talking? When One Voice Fills the Room

21 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by tadawes in Communication, Equity, Inclusion, Leadership

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Communication, Equity, Inclusion, Leadership

Every organization has at least one. The person who arrives at a meeting with genuinely good ideas, who cares about getting things right, and who, without quite meaning to, ends up talking for most of the hour. They are not malicious. Sometimes they are among the most capable people in the room. But the effect on everyone else is the same regardless of intent: less room to think out loud, less room to disagree, and eventually, less reason to show up at all.

I have experienced this dynamic frequently over the years, in library and institutional leadership meetings, in cross-functional committees, and in my own moments of catching myself talking longer than the topic warranted. The research on this is fairly consistent. Leigh Plunkett Tost and colleagues at the University of Michigan, Harvard, and Duke found that when people in formal positions of authority talk a great deal in a group, the rest of the team perceives them as dominating the conversation, and group performance suffers as a result (Tost et al., as reported by the Association for Psychological Science, 2013). Interestingly, the same talkativeness from someone without formal authority does not produce the same effect, because peers naturally push back. Authority changes the physics of the room. When the dominant voice also has positional power, silence from everyone else is not agreement. It is often just the path of least resistance.

That is the real cost of meeting dominance. It is not simply that other people get less airtime. Good ideas quietly stop arriving. Someone who has tried twice to add a thought and been talked over will, on the third occasion, decide it is not worth the effort. Given the choice, they may stop attending altogether, or attend and mentally check out, contributing nothing and absorbing little. The organization loses access to perspectives it needs, and it often does not notice the loss, because withdrawal is quiet. Nobody files a complaint about being talked over. They just go quiet, or they stop coming.

What colleagues in the room can do

If you are not the one running the meeting, interrupting a colleague, especially a senior one, can feel risky. It does not have to be confrontational. A few approaches that tend to work well:

Use a bridging phrase rather than a correction. Something like, “That’s a helpful point, and I want to build on it,” or “Picking up on what you just said,” lets you take the floor without implying the other person overstepped.
Redirect toward someone else by name. “I’d like to hear what Maria thinks about this before we move on” does two things at once: it interrupts gracefully, and it signals to the quieter person that their input is expected, not just welcome.
Use time and structure as cover. “We have about ten minutes left and three more items, so let me pause here and come back to you if there’s time,” relies on the clock rather than on judgment, which makes it easier to say and easier to hear.
Ask a direct, narrow question. Open-ended interruptions can turn into another monologue. A specific question, such as “What would that look like for the timeline we discussed last week?”, tends to produce a shorter, more focused answer.
If it is a recurring pattern, raise it outside the meeting. A private, low-stakes conversation, framed around shared goals rather than personal criticism, is usually more effective than trying to manage the dynamic live, in front of the group.

None of these require confrontation. They require a plan, and a willingness to use it more than once, since one polite interruption rarely changes an ingrained habit.

What the person who dominates meetings can do

Most people who talk too much in meetings are not trying to crowd anyone out. They are enthusiastic, thinking out loud, or they have simply never received reliable feedback that the pattern exists. A few practices can help build that self-awareness.

The simplest is WAIT, an acronym for “Why Am I Talking?” Before adding a comment, especially a second or third one on the same topic, the question forces a brief pause: does this genuinely move the conversation forward, or am I filling space because I am comfortable filling space? Jo Ilfeld describes WAIT as a way to keep contributions purposeful and stay aware of how much room one takes up relative to others (Ilfeld, 2024). It is a small habit, but it works because it interrupts the impulse before the words do.

A few other practices pair well with it. Counting contributions, literally noticing how many times you have spoken versus how many times a colleague has, can be a useful gut check. Deliberately asking a question and then waiting through the silence, rather than filling it, gives others room to respond; the instinct to rescue an awkward pause is exactly what you need to resist. And after a meeting, it is worth asking a trusted colleague directly: did I leave enough space today? Most people will not volunteer that feedback unprompted, but they will usually answer honestly if asked.

None of this is about talking less for its own sake. It is about making sure the room reflects the thinking of everyone in it, not just the person most comfortable speaking first and longest. Good ideas do not sort themselves by seniority or confidence. They show up in people who need an actual opening to say them out loud. Creating that opening, whether you are the one who talks too much or the one trying to get a word in, is a small act with an outsized effect on whether a team functions as a team at all.

The Question Nobody Answered: When Managers Can’t Deliver Bad News

29 Wednesday Jul 2026

Posted by tadawes in Communication, Employee Morale, Failure, Honesty, Leadership, Trust

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Communication, Employee Morale, Leadership, Trust

We’ve written before about poor communication in the hiring process, about building trust through two-way organizational communication, and about the hidden costs of dismissive communication. Each of those posts circled a related but distinct problem. This one goes to the heart of it: what happens when a staff member asks a direct question, one that would resolve real uncertainty, and the manager simply will not answer it.

Not “won’t answer it clearly.” Won’t answer it at all.

The Question That Hangs in the Air

Picture the scene. A project has stalled. A promised promotion hasn’t materialized. A reorganization is clearly coming, but no one has said so. A staff member, tired of guessing, finally asks the manager directly: “Is this project being canceled?” “Am I getting that raise?” “Is my position being eliminated?”

The honest answer might be difficult. It might be “yes.” It might be “not yet, and I don’t know when.” But it is knowable, and the manager knows it. Instead of answering, the manager changes the subject, offers a vague reassurance, promises to “circle back,” or simply goes quiet. The staff member leaves the conversation with the exact same uncertainty they walked in with, except now they also know that asking directly doesn’t work either.

This is a different failure than the silence I described in the hiring context, and different again from the condescension I wrote about in dismissive communication. This is a manager who has been handed the one thing that would resolve the problem, a direct question, and has chosen (or felt unable) to answer it honestly.

Why Managers Avoid the Answer

Most managers who dodge these questions are not cruel. They are, more often, afraid. Afraid of the reaction. Afraid of being blamed for a decision they didn’t make, or afraid of owning one they did. Afraid that saying the hard thing out loud makes it more real, more permanent, more theirs to answer for. Some hope the situation will resolve itself before they have to say anything. Some were simply never taught how to deliver bad news and freeze when the moment arrives.

None of this makes the avoidance acceptable. But it is worth naming honestly, because managers who understand why they’re avoiding the conversation are in a much better position to stop avoiding it.

The Trust Cost of Silence

When a manager dodges a direct question, the staff member doesn’t conclude “my manager is protecting me.” They conclude one of two things, and both are corrosive.

The first is that the manager is being dishonest and deliberately withholding information. The second, often worse, is that the manager doesn’t actually know the answer, or lacks the authority or competence to get one. Either conclusion damages trust. And unlike a single instance of bad news delivered badly, this pattern tends to compound. Every dodged question becomes evidence for the next one. Eventually, staff stops asking directly at all, not because the question resolved itself, but because they’ve learned the manager cannot be relied upon to answer it. That is a much harder trust deficit to repair than the discomfort of one honest conversation would have been.

It Comes with the Territory

Delivering bad news is never easy. It wasn’t easy for me, and I doubt it is easy for anyone who takes their responsibility to their staff seriously. But that discomfort comes with the job. Managing people means, eventually, telling someone something they don’t want to hear: that the position was eliminated, that the answer is no, that the timeline slipped, that the project failed. Avoiding that responsibility doesn’t make the manager kind. It makes the manager unavailable at the exact moment their staff needed them most.

It is also, simply, human. Nobody enjoys watching someone’s face fall. Nobody wants to be the reason a colleague has a hard day. That instinct to avoid inflicting pain is not a character flaw; it’s part of being a decent person. The failure isn’t in feeling that reluctance. The failure lies in letting reluctance win, especially when a direct question has already been asked, and an honest answer is sitting right there.

What Better Looks Like

None of this means bad news needs to be delivered badly. A few practices can help managers meet the moment rather than avoid it.

Answer the question that was actually asked. If someone asks “Is my position being eliminated?” answer that question, not an adjacent one. Redirecting to a related but easier topic is still avoidance, just better disguised.

Prepare before the conversation happens. If a difficult question is foreseeable, and most are, think through what you will say before you’re asked. Managers who improvise bad news in the moment tend to soften it into meaninglessness or blurt it out clumsily. A few minutes of preparation prevents both.

Lead with the headline. Don’t bury the answer under ten minutes of context. Say the hard thing early, then explain. Staff can handle difficult news far better than they can handle watching a manager circle it for five minutes before landing.

Own the decision, even one you didn’t make. “That wasn’t my call” is rarely as reassuring to the listener as the manager hopes. If you’re the one delivering the news, deliver it as someone accountable for making sure the person understood it and was treated with respect, whether or not you controlled the underlying decision.

Give a next step, even a small one. Bad news lands better when it isn’t the end of the conversation. “Here’s what happens next” or “here’s what I can do to help” gives the person something to hold onto besides the disappointment itself.

Practice the hard conversations with someone you trust. Rehearsing what you’ll say out loud with a peer or mentor makes an enormous difference in how the real conversation goes. This isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s preparation for one of the harder parts of the job.

Follow up. A single difficult conversation, however well delivered, rarely closes the loop entirely. Check back in. Ask if there are lingering questions. This signals that the conversation mattered, not just that it happened.

Closing Thought

A manager who cannot deliver bad news isn’t protecting their staff from discomfort. They’re transferring the discomfort of uncertainty onto the very people who asked, in good faith, for clarity. Staff generally don’t expect their manager to have good news all the time. They do expect honesty, especially when they’ve asked for it directly. Managers who can consistently provide that, even when the news is hard, build the kind of trust that survives the next hard conversation too.

The Permission to Stop (or at Least to Do Things Differently): Leading Libraries Through VUCA

01 Wednesday Jul 2026

Posted by tadawes in #BlackLivesMatter, Academic Libraries, Leadership

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Chamge Management, Change, Leadership

I recently attended the ACRL President’s Program at the American Library Association Annual Conference. The session was titled “Leading Academic Libraries through VUCA in Higher Education,” and it left me thinking about a few things that have been lingering with me for a while. VUCA, for those unfamiliar with the framework, stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. It originated in military strategy and has since found a comfortable home in leadership discourse, particularly in sectors like higher education that are experiencing simultaneous, seismic disruption on multiple fronts.

The panelists, who represented R1 university libraries and a liberal arts college library, were candid, thoughtful, and helpful. They spoke about budget pressures, the shifting political landscape, the erosion of public trust in higher education, and the relentless pace of technological change. Throughout the discussion, the topic that stayed with me most was deceptively simple: how do we stop doing things? This is a question we continually ask, and for which I posit not many have found the answer.

A Quote Worth Thinking About

One of the panelists shared a quote from Peter Drucker that I still think about: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

I have been in this profession long enough to know exactly what Drucker is pointing at. We are remarkably good at refining processes, improving workflows, and optimizing operations, sometimes without ever pausing to ask whether the work itself still makes sense.

A friend later added a corollary that made me laugh before it made me wince: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all, except doing inefficiently that which should not be done at all.”

In some libraries, that second version may be the more accurate diagnosis.

The Service Trap

Libraries are, at their core, service organizations. That orientation is one of our great strengths. We step in when others step back. We fill gaps. We say yes. Over the decades, we have accumulated layers of work, some of it clearly ours, and much of it that migrated to us because we were willing, capable, and present.

The problem is that service orientation, unchecked by strategic intentionality, can become its own form of institutional drift. We take on work that arguably belongs in other departments of the college or university. We hold onto services that once addressed a genuine need but have since outlived their moment. We keep doing things because we have always done them, and because stopping feels like a kind of failure or abandonment.

This is not a character flaw. It is a structural one. And in a VUCA environment, where every resource decision carries real consequences, we can no longer afford to let inertia make our choices for us.

Why Stopping Is So Hard

To understand why stopping is difficult, we have to take seriously what work means to people. Staff often define themselves through their responsibilities. The cataloger who has maintained a particular collection for fifteen years, the archivist who built a finding-aid system from the ground up, the librarian who pioneered a service once considered visionary: these are not just job duties. They are identities. They are sources of purpose and professional pride.

Change management research is detailed on this point. William Bridges, in his foundational work on transitions, drew a crucial distinction between change and transition. Change is the external event. Transition is the internal psychological process of letting go of what was, navigating the uncertain middle, and eventually orienting toward something new. Leaders who focus only on managing change and skip the transition, in Bridges’ framework, set people up to fail.

This means that when we decide to sunset a service or restructure a workflow, we have an obligation to create space for grief. That word may sound dramatic in a workplace context, but it is the right one. People lose something real when the work they have invested in is discontinued. Acknowledging that loss, naming it, and not rushing past it is not soft leadership. It is effective leadership.

John Kotter’s eight-step model for leading change reminds us that generating short-term wins and communicating a clear vision are essential, but so is building the coalition that helps people move together. In academic libraries, that coalition often includes department heads, frontline staff, and faculty partners who have come to depend on specific services. Their voices belong in the conversation, not as a veto, but as a vital source of intelligence about what the work actually means and what might be lost or preserved through redesign.

The question “what should we stop?” is best answered not by leadership alone, but through a structured process that invites honest input, sets clear criteria, and separates the emotional weight of transition from the analytical work of evaluation.

A Different Path: Doing Things Differently

Stopping, of course, is not the only answer. Sometimes the right response is not to eliminate a service or function but to reimagine how it is delivered. This path, doing things differently or more efficiently, can be harder to see clearly precisely because it requires us to hold two things at once: a commitment to the underlying purpose and a willingness to release our attachment to the current method of fulfilling it.

Consider how many library workflows were designed in an earlier technological era and have simply never been revisited. A process that once required three staff members and a stack of paper forms may now be handled in a fraction of the time with the right tools, or it may be ripe for automation, consolidation, or elimination of redundant steps. The work still matters. The way we are doing it may not.

This kind of redesign demands honest self-assessment. It is easy to believe that a process is irreducibly complex because we are close to it and have invested in mastering it. But complexity is sometimes real and sometimes inherited, a historical artifact of decisions made under different constraints. Lean thinking, which has been applied with real success in library settings, invites us to map our workflows and identify waste: unnecessary steps, handoffs that add time but not value, approval chains that exist by convention rather than by genuine necessity.

Process redesign also opens conversations that pure elimination forecloses. When staff understand that the goal is not to take their work away but to improve it, resistance softens. The cataloger, freed from repetitive data entry because a system now handles it, can redirect attention to complex materials that genuinely require professional judgment. The reference librarian whose administrative burden is reduced can spend more time with the patrons whose questions matter most. Doing things differently is not always a consolation prize for failing to stop. Sometimes it is the more honest and more ambitious goal.

What this requires of leaders is clarity about purpose. We must be able to articulate, with conviction, not just what a function does but what it is ultimately for. That clarity is the anchor that allows everything else to be questioned.

Guardians of Knowledge, Not of Process

Another panelist shared, “We are guardians of knowledge, but we do not have to be guardians of our processes”.

Academic libraries have a deep and legitimate commitment to preservation, access, and the long arc of the scholarly record. That commitment is worth protecting fiercely. But the specific methods, platforms, workflows, and organizational structures through which we fulfill that commitment are not sacred. They are instruments, and instruments should be evaluated on whether they still serve the purpose for which they were designed.

This requires us to change our mental models. The assumptions that worked well in a stable environment become constraints in a volatile one. When we operate inside a fixed mental model, we optimize within it rather than question it. Chris Argyris called this “single-loop learning,” in which we adjust our actions to fix errors without examining the assumptions that produced them in the first place. “Double-loop learning” goes deeper, interrogating the governing values and frameworks themselves.

Libraries that will thrive through VUCA are those that can distinguish between what they do and why they do it, and remain willing to redesign the former while protecting the latter.

Building a Culture of Innovation

Whether we are stopping things, redesigning them, or doing both at once, none of it is sustainable without the organizational culture to support it. That is the work of building a culture of innovation, and it deserves serious attention alongside the operational decisions we make.

Research on innovative organizational cultures consistently points to a cluster of shared characteristics. Psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson has documented extensively, is foundational. People must believe they can raise questions, flag problems, and propose unconventional ideas without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Without it, the status quo is always the safest option, and no one will surface the honest assessments that strategic decision-making requires.

Innovative cultures also tend to share a tolerance for productive failure. Not recklessness, but a genuine understanding that some experiments will not succeed, and that the learning embedded in those experiments has value. This is easier said than sustained, particularly in public institutions with limited budgets and real accountability to stakeholders who may not share that view. But the alternative, an environment where no one proposes anything unless success is guaranteed, is not cautious leadership. It is organizational stagnation. I am reminded here of a quote I first heard from former Princeton University President, Shirley Tilghman, “An institution that stands still is an institution that gets left behind.”

Shared vision matters too. Teams that understand not just what they are doing but why they are doing it, and who see a compelling picture of what success looks like, are more likely to generate novel approaches and more willing to absorb the discomfort of change. This is where leadership communication becomes a strategic act, not just an administrative one.

Finally, innovative cultures tend to distribute decision-making closer to the work. Frontline staff often know before anyone else which services are failing, which processes are wasteful, and which opportunities are being missed. Creating structured channels for that intelligence to flow upward, and actually using it, is one of the most straightforward things a leader can do to accelerate a culture of innovation. Skip-level meetings, discussed here previously, can be one such mechanism.

Embracing AI Without Surrendering to Fear

No conversation about the current landscape of academic libraries would be complete without addressing artificial intelligence, if only minimally.

There is real anxiety in our profession about what AI means for library work and for library positions. That anxiety is understandable. It is also, I would argue, not the most useful lens through which to engage the technology.

The Drucker principle applies here with particular clarity. If we are spending time and human effort on tasks that AI can perform well, and those tasks are ones we should not be doing with expensive professional attention anyway, then AI is not a threat to our work. It is permission to do our work better. And when stopping outright is not the right answer, AI is also a powerful tool for doing things differently, compressing the time and effort required for certain functions so that human capacity can be redirected to higher-value work.

Routine metadata processing, certain literature search functions, repetitive data formatting, and some aspects of interlibrary loan workflow are likely candidates for augmentation. Not elimination, augmentation. The goal is to redirect human capacity toward the work that genuinely requires human judgment, human relationships, and the kind of contextual intelligence that no model can replicate. Reference librarians who build trust with researchers over time. Collection curators who understand the intellectual trajectory of a discipline. Instruction librarians who can read a classroom and adjust in real time.

The framing that I find most useful is that AI is not coming for our profession. It is coming for our busywork. And if we can release that busywork with some grace and clear intention, we will be better positioned to articulate and demonstrate the irreplaceable value of what human library professionals actually do.

That requires us to be honest about what we have been protecting. Sometimes the resistance to AI adoption is not really about professional values. It is about the same thing the resistance to stopping any service is about: identity, habit, and the discomfort of change. Naming that honestly is the first step toward moving through it.

A Leadership Imperative

The VUCA panel at ALA reminded me that the challenges facing academic libraries are not temporary disruptions on the way back to stability. This is the environment. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are the conditions under which we will lead for the foreseeable future.

That means the question is not whether we will need to change, but whether we will lead that change intentionally or allow it to happen to us. Deciding what to stop, determining what to do differently, supporting people through the transition, shifting our mental models, cultivating genuine innovation, and engaging AI as a tool rather than a threat: these are not separate initiatives. They are facets of the same leadership challenge.

We have an opportunity to model something important for higher education right now. Not just efficient management of decline, but principled, creative, human-centered leadership through genuine uncertainty. I believe libraries are capable of that. I believe the profession has the values and the talent to rise to this moment.

The permission to stop is also the invitation to begin. And sometimes, it is simply the invitation to do the same important work in a better, more efficient, more honest, and more sustainable way.

The Defensive Leader: Why Openness to Feedback Is a Leadership Superpower

29 Monday Jun 2026

Posted by tadawes in Development, Feedback, Leadership, Reflective leadership

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Feedback, Growth and Development, Leadership, Leadership Development

We all make mistakes. If we have even a modicum of self-awareness, we acknowledge those mistakes and, ideally, learn from them. But there are times when we don’t recognize or acknowledge the errors, and so real learning never has a chance to take root. And sometimes, we find ourselves working within genuinely challenging environments where the mistakes aren’t even our fault. It is precisely in those moments when self-awareness becomes most critical.

When someone calls you on a mistake, the right response is not defensiveness. It is to listen, acknowledge, reflect, learn, and then respond. That sequence matters. Notice that “respond” comes last, not first.

Defensiveness is understandable. It is a deeply human reaction, rooted in our instinct to protect our sense of competence and identity. But in anyone who influences others, whether by title, tenure, expertise, or simply the force of their presence in a room, defensiveness is also deeply corrosive. When the people around you see that raising a concern or offering a critique will be met with deflection, justification, or counterattack, they stop raising concerns. They stop offering critiques. And the person now insulated from honest feedback becomes less effective over time, often without realizing it. You don’t need a title for that dynamic to play out. You just need to be someone others are watching, and in most organizations, that is nearly everyone.

Feedback Is a Gift, Even When It Doesn’t Feel Like One

At my organization, we distributed copies of Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen’s Thanks for the Feedback to all staff. The decision was intentional: there is an art to both giving and receiving feedback, and we want everyone in our community to be thoughtful and deliberate about how they do both. The book’s central insight is that receiving feedback well is a learnable skill, and one that pays compounding dividends throughout a career.

That framing is worth sitting with. Receiving feedback well is a skill. It is not a personality trait you either have or lack. It is something you can develop, practice, and improve. And, like most skills, it requires awareness, effort, and a willingness to be uncomfortable in the short term for the sake of long-term growth. That is as true for the newest member of a team as it is for the most senior person in the room.

What I Look For in Candidates

I will share a pro tip for anyone who might one day apply to work with me. My favorite interview question is this: “Tell me about some feedback you’ve received about your job performance that has resulted in a change in the way you work.”

I love this question because it does several things at once. It invites genuine self-reflection. It asks candidates to demonstrate not just that they received feedback, but that they actually acted on it. And it reveals a great deal about a person’s relationship with their own growth and development. This question is not intended to identify future managers or directors. It aims to identify people who are willing to grow at any level within an organization. Candidates who can answer it thoughtfully and specifically, without either dismissing the feedback they received or catastrophizing it, tend to be people who will continue to grow on the job. That matters enormously to me.

Candidates who struggle with the question, or who reframe every piece of feedback they ever received as a misunderstanding or someone else’s problem, tell me something important too.

A Developmental Tool, Not a Verdict

When I use the word “leader” in this post, I am not referring exclusively to people with titles or positional authority. I mean, anyone who shows up, does their work, and interacts with other human beings in the process, which is to say, everyone. We all influence someone. We all model behaviors, whether we intend to or not. And we are all capable of either reinforcing or undermining a culture of openness, depending on how we respond to feedback.

The upshot is this: don’t be defensive, and practice being open to listening. That is easier said than done. It can be genuinely difficult to hear critical things about yourself, especially when you care deeply about your work, as most people do. The discomfort is real, and it deserves acknowledgment.

But learning to receive feedback with openness and grace is one of the most valuable professional skills any of us can develop. When we treat feedback as a verdict on our worth, we become defensive. When we treat it as a developmental tool, we become better. The choice, ultimately, is ours to make.

What kind of colleague, teammate, and yes, leader, do you want to be?

Trevor A. Dawes

~ Librarian, Educator, and Consultant ~

When “You Own It” Means You Own It: Closing the Gap Between Empowering Words and Empowering Action

The say-do gap

Unaware or narcissistic?

What the gap does to trust

Where the ideas go

Becoming more self-aware

How those who report to the leader can help

Structures that match authority with responsibility

Steps toward a more inclusive organization

Looking ahead

Suggested readings

Why Am I Talking? When One Voice Fills the Room

What colleagues in the room can do

What the person who dominates meetings can do

Further reading

The Question Nobody Answered: When Managers Can’t Deliver Bad News

Why Managers Avoid the Answer

The Trust Cost of Silence

It Comes with the Territory

What Better Looks Like

Closing Thought

Suggested Readings

The Permission to Stop (or at Least to Do Things Differently): Leading Libraries Through VUCA

A Quote Worth Thinking About

The Service Trap

Why Stopping Is So Hard

A Different Path: Doing Things Differently

Guardians of Knowledge, Not of Process

Building a Culture of Innovation

Embracing AI Without Surrendering to Fear

A Leadership Imperative

Suggested Readings

The Defensive Leader: Why Openness to Feedback Is a Leadership Superpower

Feedback Is a Gift, Even When It Doesn’t Feel Like One

What I Look For in Candidates

A Developmental Tool, Not a Verdict

Further Reading