How Leaders Can Stop Chasing Shiny Objects (Challenge #73)

I belong to a few online communities of library and educational leaders, partly for fellowship, mostly for professional development, and occasionally because a particular question or conversation sparks an idea for an episode. Well, recently a question popped up that stopped me scrolling cold. The anonymous poster asked: How do we handle a library director who has shiny object syndrome and keeps proposing new projects before more quickly than they can even determine whether the previous great ideas are worth doing, much less handle the boring stuff that has to be done to keep things running day in and day out?

And let me tell you, as someone who jumped onto second life in 2008, unironically used the phrase library 2.0 for several years, launched Oklahoma’s first Embedded Librarian program, and overdid her first year as a dean so catastrophically that she started a podcast to help others avoid her mistakes, I felt very, very seen by that post. So how can we rope in our impulses to explore every cool innovation we see before our teams have to ask for anonymous support on social media to get us to chill out? I’ll teach you in today’s episode.

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Welcome to the Kind Leadership Challenge, the podcast that empowers leaders to heal their organizations in ten minutes! I’m Dr. Sarah Clark, founder of the Kind Leadership Guild, where I use my PhD in Higher ed leadership and nearly 2 decades of experience in academic libraries to coach a community of educational and library leaders who are working to build a better world without burning out. 

Kind Leaders aren’t perfect, which is actually as it should be. In our unique ways, we make tough decisions without becoming jerks. We create impactful and burnout-proof systems for our organizations. And we know that once we stop controlling and start collaborating, even the most ambitious vision can become effortless. Kind Leadership’s pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. So if you’re up for a challenge, stick around as I teach you how to create a resilient, thriving legacy that will strengthen your community long after you’re gone.

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 So, just to reassure you, I gave the poster some advice, basically to have the “how should we prioritize this among the 6 other shiny objects we’re looking into for you?” conversation. As always in this group, others shared some great advice as well. But frankly, the more I thought about it, the more I was frustrated that this librarian was even HAVING to discuss this with their leader.     

One of the things you don’t get to do anymore once you're The Boss is chase after cool projects in your team’s area of expertise. My first boss in the library world was so great at delegating shiny objects or more often facilitating my own crazy ideas that I didn't even realize that he was intentionally stepping back to make room for me and the rest of the team to step up. Now this is not to say I don’t still go after interesting projects or big problems, but the nature and number of my initiatives have shifted. As a department head, library director or other middle manager, this season of your career is less about climbing the ladder than it is about helping ease others’ climb. In addition, cool initiatives are now less important than smoothing out the less glamorous obstacles that stand between our teams and a job well done. So, how can you lead your team to new heights without getting in the way or loading them down with unnecessary projects?

Well, the first order of business is to set boundaries on your impulse to chase after every shiny object you see, especially if your organization is overworked, understaffed, or both. Just because you hear about a cool initiative does not mean you have to run out and tell your team to go implement it right now. The cool thing about working in libraries and education is that although our work is quite important, it’s rarely all that urgent. More often than not, when a cool new technology or approach hits the scene, the best approach is to watch the early adopters for a bit and see how things play out. Then you van make an informed decision based on your organization’s needs and workload about whether it makes sense to investigate further.   

Next, and I say this with all empathy as someone who so enjoyed growing as a librarian that I now rarely get to be one anymore, You need to stop focusing on what your team should be doing, and refocus on how you can help remove obstacles and create shortcuts that will empower your organization to do better. Remember when I mentioned a few episodes back that I am on the steering committee for my university’s next accreditation self-study? Well, that’s the kind of shiny object a leader SHOULD chase after. I get to talk about the library to stakeholders across campus and beyond, many of whom may not deal with us all that often. And on the other side of the coin, I get to learn how I can make other areas’ lives easier. That enables me to see how my organization can best serve our big goals, and forge new alliances with other campus stakeholders, all the while helping move forward one of the university’s most mission-critical projects. And hey, I get to learn more about accreditation, which makes a lot of folks’ eyes glaze over, but Is the sort of big-impact project that I find oddly fascinating. 

 And speaking of shiny objects leaders find oddly fascinating, I want to give one last suggestion to my fellow explorers and innovators. There are probably some common themes in the innovations and projects that catch your eye. And there is likely some wisdom to be found in those common themes. I, like a lot of librarians who entered the profession in the mid-aughts, was obsessed with wikis and tagging and all the bright shiny objects that emerged in the web 2.0 era. Some of that was because I was and am a tech nerd, but I also on some level feared that the profession I had just spent two years getting a master’s degree for would be rendered obsolete by google. That’s not saying that my shiny objects were bad projects to chase after, but with almost 20 years of hindsight, and now seeing history rhyming with all the fevered discourse about AI and Large Language Models, I can understand that my chasing after every bright shiny object was about reassuring myself and my organizations that my job was still important. And that motivation wasn’t a bad thing—I just think that if I’d understood it better, I might have stressed a little less and gone down fewer dead ends.

So with all that, here’s this week’s kind leadership challenge. How can you refocus your energy from finding shiny objects to creating a culture where you are empowering and protecting your team to innovate, both with the big flashy projects and the little process changes that make things run more smoothly?

Thanks as always for listening to the kind leadership challenge. Before you go, here’s a quick way you can spread the word of kind leadership. I’d like you to take a moment to think of one friend or colleague who could most benefit from this week’s challenge. Got their name in your head? Good. Open your app or head over to kindleadershipchallenge.com/73 and share this episode with them. Add a friendly note as well. Never doubt that day by day, you’re building a better world, even if you can't see it yet. So until next time, stay kind now.