Decisions don’t just determine outcomes. They shape how work is organized, how responsibilities are shared, and how people experience their place within the organization. Here’s how leaders can engage a team in decision-making with fairness, clarity, and care.
What do you do when a proposal aligns perfectly with your mission, but stretches your staff too much? Or when you no longer have the budget to run a beloved program, even though students rely on it?
Most academic library leaders know the feeling: more expectations, more ideas, and less capacity. We must respond to external demands while also imagining new ways to contribute to teaching, research, and engagement. We support more forms of learning, scholarship, and public-facing work; serve more audiences; and provide more kinds of expertise, often without corresponding growth in resources. In this context, tough decisions are not an occasional leadership challenge. They are the baseline condition of our collective work.
And these decisions do more than determine outcomes. They shape how work is organized, how responsibilities are distributed, and how people experience their roles in the organization. Over time, patterns of decision-making translate into culture.
I have come to see decision-making not simply as management, but as organizational design work that inevitably reflects both priorities and values.
To make judgments consistently and fairly, I rely on a decision-making rubric developed in practice over time and used with many teams and partners. Rather than producing quick answers, the rubric is designed to slow decisions down just enough to surface and validate what is often implicit, especially when prioritizing among existing programs or making difficult reductions.
The process has five phases that include relevant prompts for discussion. Used in a transparent, participative way, these prompts do more than rank projects or greenlight proposals. They make tradeoffs visible. They acknowledge that every “yes” reorganizes work elsewhere. They clarify responsibility rather than diffusing it. And they invite the expertise of those closest to the work into the decision itself.
Clarity of Purpose and Impact defines the problem or the promise of a proposal. This stage tests whether an intriguing idea or cherished program truly advances meaningful outcomes by examining its intended impact. Questions include:
Capacity and Commitment turns to resourcing, which includes financial commitments as well as staff time, infrastructure, and leadership attention. The prompts introduce organizational realism: many proposals that appear promising become more complex when viewed through this lens. Importantly, this discussion comes after the impact conversation. The goal is not defensiveness, but sobriety: understanding what the desired impact will actually require and whether we are prepared to provide it. Questions include:
Strategic Positioning considers the library-specific value-added factors that shape our contributions and asks how the library and potential initiatives fit within the university’s broader ecosystem of teaching, research, and student success. Rather than treating the library as an island, this phase examines where we can lead, where we can partner, and where another unit may be better positioned to carry some or all of the responsibility. The library value-added lens is central and discussed further below. Questions include:
Sustainability and Sequencing asks what happens after the initial enthusiasm fades. If the work succeeds, what ongoing responsibilities will it create—not only for the library, but for any partners? Sustainable innovation requires more than initial alignment; it requires coordinated capacity. If a program creates trade-offs with other priorities, we must acknowledge what will be deferred and who will carry the burden. If the timing is wrong but the idea remains sound, we can identify what conditions must change and how to prepare or sequence the work responsibly. Questions include:
Finally, Meaning asks: will this work feel meaningful, energizing, or sustaining for the people involved? Not all initiatives that go forward will provide meaning, but creating opportunities for energizing and sustaining experiences should remain a priority. The aspiration is work that offers routine moments of joy, even amid constraint.
Importantly, the process helps ensure that the reasoning behind decisions is understood after they are made. Even when the final call rests with the leader, stakeholders can see the tradeoffs and the care taken in weighing them.
This framework does not replace familiar management tools such as risk analysis, cost–benefit analysis, or cost-effectiveness assessment. Those approaches remain essential for evaluating financial, operational, or strategic implications. Instead, the rubric complements them by broadening the conversation to include questions of organizational capacity, partnership, timing, and human sustainability. In practice, many leaders will move between these approaches: using analytical tools to assess feasibility while using a participative rubric like this one to ensure decisions are aligned with institutional roles, values, and the realities of how work is actually carried out.
In total, this approach also normalizes an important truth: not all good ideas—or long-standing programs—should move forward unchanged, at least not now. Prioritization is not a failure of imagination; it is an expression of support. Using a values-based rubric to evaluate which actions to pursue, when, and how grounds optimism in realism and care and creates a condition for sustained innovation.
When academic libraries talk about “value added,” the conversation often focuses on advocacy: how to explain our importance to stakeholders or justify investment. In a campus environment where we compete for resources, articulating our unique value added in situationally appropriate terms is critical for a library leader. While that external framing is essential, I have found value propositions to be just as important internally, as tools for priority-setting (as discussed in the Strategic Positioning phase of the rubric).
Libraries combine academic, research, student-success, and community-engagement infrastructure with the expertise of librarians as information professionals, making us distinctive institutional actors. Here is an incomplete list of library value propositions that distinguish us from other campus partners:
Libraries serve across disciplines and degree levels. We connect students, faculty, alumni, and the public. Our programs and platforms foster the convergence of digital scholarship, open publishing, research data services, and emerging forms of scholarly expression. In this sense, libraries operate as shared research infrastructure, providing tools, expertise, and environments that enable knowledge creation as well as access.
Our spaces are the crossroads of academic, cultural, and civic life. We are open when other academic spaces are not, and we function as access points for technology, support, and resilience. Above all, libraries are built on trusted relationships.
Librarians deliver specialized knowledge in information organization, discovery, scholarly communication, research support, digital stewardship, and the critical assessment of information. As information professionals, we also contribute expertise in privacy, intellectual freedom, and the ethical use of knowledge. In an era increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, these capacities are more critical than ever and position libraries to serve as trusted partners to faculty, students, other campus units, and community groups.
These value-added characteristics do not oblige us to do everything. They help us answer a difficult and recurring question: which opportunities or existing commitments are fully aligned with the library’s role, responsibilities, and capacity, and which are better owned elsewhere or revisited?
Used this way, value propositions are boundary-setting tools that support the responsible stewardship of limited resources and attention—both when launching new initiatives and when reassessing existing programs in periods of constraint or budget reduction.
When my university’s writing center proposed relocating into the library, the opportunity aligned strongly with our value propositions: cross-disciplinary service, student success infrastructure, and trusted partnerships. But alignment alone was not sufficient. Hosting the Writing Center required reassigning space occupied by seldom-used reference materials, substantial faculty deliberation about deaccessioning, and significant processing labor from technical services and stacks staff.
The rubric made these tradeoffs visible. Faculty were invited into transparent conversations about space stewardship and collection strategy. Staff labor requirements were surfaced explicitly rather than absorbed quietly. The decision ultimately moved forward—not because it was easy, but because the process clarified positioning, capacity, and long-term responsibility.
A more difficult illustration involves the elimination of a popular laptop loan program. For years, the service had been deeply valued by students and sustained through considerable staff effort. It provided important access support, particularly for students with limited personal technology. After the loss of a library staff position, however, the technical maintenance and troubleshooting required to operate the program became unsustainable without undermining other commitments.
The decision-making rubric required us to confront several hard questions. While the program clearly addressed student needs, was the library uniquely positioned to provide this service? Technology lending and device management were not inherently library-specific strengths; other campus units were plausibly positioned to absorb or administer such a program. Continuing to operate it within the library meant allocating scarce technical labor to work that did not fully leverage our distinctive cross-disciplinary or scholarly expertise and hindering library programs that did leverage these assets.
Ultimately, although another unit did not absorb the program, the framework clarified that sustaining it would require disproportionate effort relative to our capacity and positioning. Those who actually did the work could explain just how demanding the technical requirements to sustain the program were. We communicated the decision transparently, acknowledging both the program’s value and the tradeoffs involved. The outcome disappointed many, but the process made labor, alignment, and fairness visible. The decision reflected not indifference to student need, but disciplined stewardship of limited capacity.
What grounds this approach is that it aligns decision-making practice with five forms of justice:
These types of justice are often described as abstract values. In practice, they are felt through very concrete experiences: whether the decision-making process is consistent, who is invited into conversations, how tradeoffs are explained, whether concerns are acknowledged, and whether people see their contributions reflected in outcomes. Even when individuals disagree with a decision, the presence or absence of these types of justice shapes whether they remain engaged and committed.
The same framework guided both the decision to host the Writing Center and the decision to eliminate the laptop loan program. In one case, we said yes with clarity. In the other, we said no with care. In both, the work of decision-making was less about preference than about capacity, positioning, and fairness. What makes both decisions durable is not simply the rubric, but the way the processes addressed the deeper principles of organizational justice.
Decision-making determines whose expertise is activated, whose labor is extended, and whose work is deferred. Over time, patterns of decision-making influence burnout, innovation, and an organization’s ability to adapt. In environments of constraint, it is tempting to prioritize speed or efficiency. But decisions made quickly and privately often externalize costs onto staff and partners, eroding sustainability even as short-term goals are met. By contrast, participative and justice-informed processes help distribute responsibility more thoughtfully and align work with what the organization can realistically sustain.
Importantly, the approach described here does not ensure consensus or eliminate conflict—or even guarantee the right decisions. Tough decisions remain tough. What it does offer is a way to make those decisions better by ensuring that people understand the reasoning, see their expertise respected, and recognize the care taken in balancing opportunity with capacity.
The goal is not perfection, but durability. Organizations adapt when people experience decisions as fair, transparent, respectful, and meaningful. Shared ownership becomes possible not because everyone agrees, but because the work feels coherent and worth sustaining.
For academic libraries navigating uncertainty, decision-making shapes more than outcomes. It shapes whether people can continue doing good work together. The future of academic libraries will depend not only on innovation, but on the fairness, clarity, and care embedded in everyday decisions.
10.1146/katina-032626-1
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