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I have just passed my first anniversary at the new job. It seems to have come around faster than I expected although, considering everything else going on in the last 12 months, that may hardly be surprising. There have been a number of changes that I had to negotiate, not all anticipated.

Bad Advice

It would be fair to say that I have changed jobs a number of times. After awhile, you get accustomed to some of the upheaval in the first year. When I was first starting out as a law librarian, I was given a lot of advice about what to do when starting a role. Most of it is has turned out to be wrong, including:

  • Find quick wins. I don’t think this is true or at least not the way that I have heard it. The impression I always got was that these were intended to reinforce the decision to hire you: “you’re great, look at what you’re achieving so quickly!” That focus can be at odds with developing the relationships you need for success. Unless you are walking into an actual disaster or you have been given a reason to create one (a burning platform), I have found it’s better to just listen. You will find things that need fixing and these small things will provide you with leadership opportunities. You can delegate and see how your team responds, or you can shine a light on some processes that aren’t working and have led to tasks or projects going undone or left incomplete. Opportunities will come. You do not need to create them.
  • Make No Changes for [3 | 6 | 9] Months. First, this contradicts the previous rule so if someone gives you both, you know to ignore it. Second, any rule with that sort of specificity ignores the unique situation each role presents. There is no role that I have taken where I thought, “oh, this is EXACTLY the same as my last one” or had the first year unfold in exactly the same way. I have never gone into a role that did not have something that needed to be improved; I can pretty much guarantee I have never left a role that someone else didn’t also have to improve after I’d gone. It’s just not how operations work. When I go into a new role, I try to make sure I am informed and don’t rush things but it is almost always better to make the decision at the moment of need, rather than to wait for some arbitrary future. In particular, I have noticed that personnel-related decisions may need to be made within days or weeks of starting; any kind of delay can lead to much more negative outcomes for everyone involved.

On my most recent job search, one law school dean raised the number of places I had worked and confirmed he was concerned about what it meant. I think the diversity of my roles is an asset; he was not persuaded. It is good to poke at that in an interview; if there is concern about your mobility or some other aspect of your path, they may not be a good fit for you and you may find yourself in an “not invented here” world. Someone will value that breadth of experience and, if nothing else, your own perspective will benefit from it.

People also told me as I graduated law school that I’d regret taking the bar exam. Ummmm, no. In fact, I have found not having been licensed has made no difference in my career. It just goes to show that people speak with concern sometimes without speaking with understanding.

The people that gave me this advice meant well. But the reality is that a lot of people who give advice have different experiences from you. They may have a different management style, have had different emergencies or tests in their careers. Some people will share the same job title as you but stayed at a single organization their entire career, perhaps limiting their experience with other environments. If anything, I have found it to be more true that, despite your title or how long your organization has existed, you may be facing a situation that is novel for your role and the people around you.

Imposters

I have come to view imposter syndrome as a healthy level of skepticism about one’s own abilities. As long as it doesn’t start to hinder you from progress or growth, it seems like a totally natural experience. We know experts are often wrong and it can lead to overconfidence bias, a certainty in our own experience and perceptions. My colleagues may disagree but I try to be somewhat humble when it comes to new experiences and information. I don’t know what I don’t know.

This natural feeling was magnified in ways I had not anticipated when I came to the law school, though. Academic law libraries and courthouse law libraries only rhyme. The edges do not align and it was there that I ran into a lot of unexpected experiences this year.

To be clear, I am entirely persuaded that someone with operations experience in a different kind of law library can run a law school library (and the other way around as well). That was my hypothesis when I got started on this last job search. Many of the experiences that I have had in the past year mirrored exactly the sorts of operational challenges I have had elsewhere: vendor issues, login issues, content delivery problems, payment and licensing, personnel.

As with so much else of management, it is less the academic component than the organizational component. My colleagues who have managed unionized employees would find my setup completely normal with a mixture of civil service and non-civil service roles. Any law librarian who has dealt with government money (public law libraries, judicial libraries, etc.) will understand the funding challenges surrounding the fiscal year when money disappears—poof!—at the end of the twelve month.

This familiarity anchored me. As I have mentioned before, mine is a split 51% faculty, 49% operations role. This has been tricky from a time management perspective but it was also the culture shock. I’m a middle career manager 49% of the time but I’m a cub professor 51% of the time.

It has been endlessly funny to me to be referred to as a member of the “junior” faculty, meaning tenure-track but not tenured. It’s sort of like that difference that dual-degree law librarians have, with years of additional education and an advanced degree more than most lawyers. I think this can be a bit daunting, as someone with experience coming into this situation may feel as though their previous actual experience isn’t valued.

That had been an illuminating discovery when I was early on in my search. The two books I’d written, the peer-reviewed articles I’d authored and had published, none of it mattered. My tenure-track slate was as blank as that of any brand new law school graduate. My blog? “That’s nice, dear.” Talk about “not invented here”! I’m not sure if it’s because faculty are often early career when they get on the tenure track and so lack a lot of experience or output or if it’s because there’s a “but what have you done for us”, valuing new activity over built and displayed experience. The universality of this approach did make me wonder whether I wanted to continue to steer into academia.

The upside has been that I really didn’t know what I didn’t know. This gave me, as the senior junior member of the faculty, almost limitless horizons. I am not sure how some of the things that I’ve done align with the typical junior faculty member’s approach. It never really occurred to me to ask anyone—frankly, it wasn’t clear to whom or about what to ask—once I had been tasked with getting on with the promotion steps. When I finally had a discussion with someone, they seemed fine with my choices so I continued on my path.

I think this would have been much much harder if I had been an earlier career librarian. The imposter syndrome would have been harder to shake off. The academic law school caste system (doctrinal, clinical, library, and so on) can be hard to crack if only because, no matter how welcoming colleagues are, you may not really get what it is they are doing. They almost certainly don’t understand what you are doing. The single most helpful thing here was to start teaching, which I did in my second semester, because it gave us a shared experience that they could value or at least measure.

I still don’t feel entirely as though I really belong on the faculty side, although I feel settled in the organization. But I am also not bothered by it. If anything, whether it’s unique to my role or is common in academia, I seem to be able to operate pretty freely in my own channel. I feel as though our leadership has given me a lot of latitude and trust, which has been a huge help. While this relative isolation is unusual based on my earlier roles, it’s not a hindrance now that I know it’s part of the environment.

Talk What You Know

One struggle I had not anticipated was being asked to teach things that I didn’t know anything about. I have worked with a lot of really smart people and one of the benefits of that is that you get to stay in your own lane. I have had incredible experts on my teams and the last thing they needed was me second-guessing them. We developed rapport and respect by each of us working on our strengths and not pretending we were magically subject matter experts in everyone else’s area.

Not so in the legal profession, where “I don’t know” can become a source of embarrassment and so there can be a commitment to pretending to know everything (or, worse, being confident you actually do). I remember someone commenting that there was nothing like a lawyer to go to a 2 day weekend seminar on someone else’s specialty (might have been marketing or trademark law) and think that they were now a master in that area on coming away from the event.

When I was asked to teach bar essay writing, I did not feel qualified. Not because I haven’t taught and not because I don’t know how to write (your experience reading this blog notwithstanding). As I mentioned up top, I have not taken a bar exam. I don’t think that, even had I done so last century, that it would have been portable to what the students needed to learn. (No, I am not considering taking a bar exam just to get the experience. Shoot me now.)

Two things helped me to navigate this class. First, my partner was a teacher and very good at it. They asked me whether I wanted to be an expert in the subject matter or if I wanted to be a teacher. If it was the latter, they felt, then I would be able to communicate the information in an effective way even if I had not actually passed through that particular process myself.

The second was to go through the course and come out the other side. In fact, the way the course had been designed was very much not the way I would have taught it. It had been designed by someone else and there was no way to get into their head to understand why they had made the choices they made. There was a substantial emphasis on substantive law that seemed wrong to me in a writing course. Given this, I started with the learning objectives and rewrote most of the materials for the course so that they were more in alignment with what I felt I could achieve to get them to the same outcomes. This rewriting and rethinking process accelerated my own confidence that I did, indeed, have some idea of what I was doing from a teaching standpoint.

There is a “fake it ’til you make it” school of thought. I am not sure I would be that bold but I do think that there are areas where you can present with confidence even if you are not entirely certain of your expertise. There are definitely times when I have given a continuing education session knowing that I am not an expert in the topical area. However, I am more of an expert than the audience and that was enough to achieve the learning goals we had. Even so, I try to be clear about what I know and where my expertise ends.

As many law librarians know, we are often a translation layer between expertise and information seekers. That translation layer can take a variety of forms and sometimes it is in formal teaching. Sometimes we also carry the expertise but it is not unusual for us to mostly be translating the expertise (from a court, from a publication’s author) for the benefit of someone for whom it is out of reach.

I’ll be teaching legal research and writing this fall. It’s smack dab in my comfort zone, even though it’s not a course I’ve taught before. Unlike bar essay writing, I feel much more able to take my own experiences—having written dozens of law firm research memoranda and knowing my way around legal research—and communicate them with some confidence.

Time will tell whether I am able to stretch beyond that to teach things that I do not know as well. It is sufficiently contrary to how I operate in half of my current role as a law library director that I am not sure how to maintain that balance. It feels inauthentic to pretend expertise.

An Even Keel

One thing that seems strange to me still is the way time passes in academia. I feel as though courthouse law libraries are much more on an annual cycle. This may be a reporting year or a fiscal year but I felt that it was a much more legato style to operations. Although I think most law firms are, shall we say, more dynamic, I would expect them to be the same. The arc may be driven by KPIs or fiscal considerations but it will be more coherent.

The impact of semesters (perhaps because I am teaching?) and then the emptiness of the summer feels very jarring. It is a bit like sailing, where you sail then you tack, then you sail then you tack back, usw. and zigzag down the lake. It is not at all, for me, like the ebbs and flows of projects. In fact, the project timelines I was operating with flowed over and past these other time periods. It makes me think of a bit of the scene from The Music Man where the “Pick a Little” song goes into parallel with “Goodnight, Ladies”: one runs fast, one runs slow, but they run concurrently. #MashUp

One thing that I did with deliberation was to not sweat the small stuff as the year went by. Perhaps more than anywhere I’ve worked before, I felt like I would need a complete year to get a feel for how the organization worked. It may take you longer or shorter but, for me, I knew the fiscal year cycle and the school year cycles would continue to create surprises until I had gone through an entire one of each.

If you find yourself getting stressed out about feeling continually surprised, or finding that you are learning new things that undermine your confidence in yourself, remember that you need to give yourself time in a new role. It doesn’t matter how many years you have been doing it. Unless your new manager can guarantee that everything was done perfectly before you joined AND the role is identical to one you have already had (I don’t think identical roles exist, fwiw), you have to assume that you are going to have learning to do. It is not a reflection of your ability, so keep your imposter syndrome in check.

Things break. They break when a hand off is omitted or when information is shared but is incomplete. In some cases, they just break for reasons beyond anyone’s control. I had a contract that I had to renew and, for whatever reason, this was the year the state decided it wanted an updated license from the vendor, a vendor we have used for decades. It might have been that it needed to be updated, or that the accounting rules had changed in the intervening time. You can’t anticipate everything that you will need to manage and all the expertise in the world will not prepare you for everything you will face.

One year is under my belt. The second year will layer on top and, I hope, will lead to more things becoming familiar. As they do, I will feel more confident in embracing new change or new opportunities. But, perhaps more than any role I’ve had, I am going to be deliberate about watching a longer arc before I grow frustrated with my own expertise. While there is no more to learn about this job than any other job I’ve worked at, it will take longer for the patterns to appear before I feel as though they are completely familiar. It will remind me that patience is also a leadership skill and a place to grow.