Most of how work gets done in libraries—especially academic libraries—is through collaboration. From a small cross-unit team hammering out a workflow to a library-wide strategic planning initiative (and everything in between), teamwork is the infrastructure that undergirds library work. While libraries have a variety of types of committees, the standing committee are the ones who bring people together with shared expertise to share information, build policies and practices, and manage shared workflows.
Committees are made up of people, which I am already on record as saying is a good thing. People bring their expertise and lived experience to the work and we can solve bigger problems and build better things together than we ever could on our own. But the longer a committee (especially a standing committee) works together, the more likely it is that the people on the committee will struggle with collaboration at some point. Members of committees can become unsure of their purpose, which can lead to mission drift. People are unsure who the person is with whom the buck stops, so decisions don’t get made. Members of the committee agree to do something and don’t follow through, so nothing gets done. And nobody is responsible for ensuring that things get done, so nobody knows what has been done or what needs to be done.
The people on a committee that is struggling know why it’s struggling, but nobody wants to talk about it. So I’ll talk about it and offer you a few ideas for how to get things back on track.
1.) Your committee has gone past its expiration date
Working groups and task forces are useful because they are brought together to solve a specific problem or build a specific solution and (usually) have charges that have narrow scopes and a defined timeline. When the group meets the goals enumerated in its charge, it knows that it’s time to disband.
Sometimes the solution that a working group or task force builds requires cross-functional care and feeding. And that’s usually when a working group or task force transitions into a standing committee. But standing committees are always born from working groups or task forces. However them come to life, a standing committee usually brings together people who have expertise on a topic. Maybe your library has a standing committee of all of the department managers in the library or a standing committee of everyone in the library who deals with the library’s inventory management system.
The longer a standing committee goes on, the more likely it is that members of the committee have turned over. At some point, it’s possible that nobody who was on the standing committee when it was created. And even if documentation about the committee and its history exist, the circumstances that brought the committee together in the first place may not exist anymore. If nobody knows why the standing committee is coming together, it’s difficult to get anything done and the group may turn to sharing information in their areas of mutual concern.
In this case, I’d recommend that library leadership ask the standing committee to review its charge if one exists. What items in the charge are still relevant, and which ones have been resolved through either the committee’s efforts or the passing of time? The standing committee should also think about the larger landscape of the library. Have new strategic priorities emerged that the standing committee could bring its expertise and attention to bear upon? Are there emerging priorities for the college, university, or community that the library serves? After the standing committee has review its past and considered its future, its members can decide whether the standing committee can be sunsetted or whether its charge should be revised in a way that focuses its attention on these emerging priorities.
2.) Your committee has issues with role clarity
A challenge that standing committees often face is understanding the roles and responsibilities of the committee and its members. A big question for most standing committees is: Are we a body that decides or one that recommends? Committee members don’t necessarily understand whether they are empowered to make decisions whose impact extends beyond their own functional area. And if the committee needs to bring recommendations to someone above them on the organizational chart for review and final approval, the committee doesn’t always know who that person is.
Another challenge related to role clarity is understanding the roles of the people on the committee. Sometimes a standing committee has a chair whose job is largely to collect agenda items for the meeting and to send out meeting notes after the meeting. That’s not always the case, though, and sometimes responsibility within the group for convening falls upon whoever remembers that it’s been a month since the group met last and sends out the dreaded ‘hey, do we need to meet this month?’ message. Neither of these is ideal.
If your standing committee has a chair, that person often doesn’t have positional power of anyone in the group. There isn’t any real oversight mechanism for someone on the committee who doesn’t do the thing that they said they would do. We’ll talk about that more in the next bullet point. For committees where leadership is unclear, it becomes even more difficult to assign action items to group members because there’s no real sense of who’s in charge. In both cases, committee members usually default to letting the chair (or some other eager volunteer) take on the work and attending meetings to find out what that person has done.
In this case, I’d recommend that the committee review any pre-existing documents related to committee composition and procedures that might exist. After reviewing those documents, what questions do committee members still have about how the committee is supposed to function? If such documents don’t exist, make some choices about how the committee should function and document it. How will the committee decide who should be chair, and what responsibilities does that chair have? How often will the committee meet? Where, in the library’s document management system will the committee’s organizing documents, agendas, and meeting notes live? How will the committee assign action items, and who will follow up to ensure these action items are completed by the next meeting? If someone in the library’s leadership is responsible for oversight of the committee, bring them into the conversation to ensure that everyone knows what is being decided and who, ultimately, has decision making power for the committee.
3.) Your committee suffers from a lack of trust that is based on a lack of accountability
This point is related to the one above it.
Even when the roles of standing committee members are clear, lack of accountability can be at the center of the committee’s rot. I would imagine that most people have been on a standing committee with someone who says they will do something and then doesn’t. The group convenes for the next month’s meeting, and nobody asks whether that action item has been completed. Or if they do, the person who hasn’t done what they said they will do offers some excuse for why the action item isn’t done. The action item not getting done is often holding the group back from making progress on something. And people on the standing committee leave the meeting feeling some kind of way about the person in the group who never follows through.
This may not be the exact scenario you’re facing, but you probably have your own lack of accountability situation that you can easily bring to mind. Whatever the scenario, lack of accountability causes a lack of trust among members of the group that ends with a lack of engagement. People’s time, attention, and energy are the most precious commodities they bring to work, and the moment you waste one of them, they stop being willing to be an active participant in the work of your committee.
An even bigger challenge with lack of trust is how difficult it is to talk honestly within a committee about this lack of trust. While you might not be besties with your coworkers, it’s likely that you have some baseline of cordialness with them. You may feel pressured to go along to get along, especially if you have a minoritized identity, because you don’t want to be labeled as a difficult coworker. I think this is why people are more likely to gossip with their work friends about how dysfunctional a standing committee is rather than addressing the issue directly. But work gossip is an additional cause of rot within a standing committee.
In this case, I would recommend that the standing committee work with a facilitator that is not usually part of the group. This could be someone in your library who has been trained as a facilitator, someone on campus or the community, or an outside consultant. Either way, it is useful to work with someone who can remain objective because they aren’t part of the committee. One of the best activities I’ve used as a facilitator to get people talking about rotten group dynamics in an open and respectful way is a team building activity called 9 dimensions. It’s one of the awesome things in my facilitator toolkit.
In 9 Dimensions, you chose dimensions of group dynamics you want people to consider, like role clarity, accountability, or communication. You can tailor the dynamics you use to the issues you want to consider as part of the exercise. You put pieces of paper up on the wall, one for each dimension, and give participants a sheet of stickers. I’ve had the most success with red, green, and yellow dots. Each sticker has a different meaning. A green dot means “we’re crushing it!” A yellow dot means “there’s room for improvement.” And a red dot means “we’re not doing great!” Everyone puts one dot on each of the dimensions, and when everyone has put their dots on the wall, you have a very easy visual way to take the temperature of the room on each area of group dynamics. The conversation that follows can be respectful and doesn’t have to call any specific person out. If we all agree that there’s a problem with trust, we can start by talking about the link between accountability and trust. If we all agree that accountability is the reason that trust is broken, we can talk about how to improve accountability.
Working as part of a team can give us great results, but it’s also useful to make space in our committees and teams to do the work of diagnosing why things aren’t working as effectively as they one did. The library is made up of people who work together to solve problems and build cool solutions. Giving them the tools to operate effectively in teams is one way that we build better libraries!
