Not long ago, I found myself in a familiar leadership moment—navigating a decision that needed to move forward quickly, with limited time and competing perspectives. The instinct, as it often is in higher education, was to decide, communicate, and implement. But what was missing wasn’t information—it was alignment.

What does a university look like when its community members are truly flourishing — and what is the cost when they are not?

I recently wrote about leadership accountability and blame-shifting, and the silent supervisor, exploring how leaders deflect responsibility when things go wrong or are non-communicative with their colleagues. That pattern of avoiding accountability often manifests through the communication dynamics I will examine here, the subtle ways our messages can undermine rather than support, even when we mean well.

In a previous post, I explored how communication and trust form the bedrock of effective leadership. But what happens when leaders undermine that foundation by refusing to accept responsibility for their own decisions? And more troublingly, what does it reveal about their leadership when they attempt to shift blame onto those with less power, namely their direct reports, frontline staff, or mid-level managers?

Higher education organizations often speak about belonging. Strategic plans reference it. Conferences center it. Leadership programs aspire to cultivate it.

We talk often about calm leadership. About steadiness. About modeling composure.

I’ve been reading Mary Clearman Blew’s This Is Not the Ivy League, a memoir about teaching at a small, open-admissions college in 1970s Montana.

Technology failures in libraries don’t just interrupt services.They generate sustained, invisible labor.

Academic libraries often pride themselves on being collegial, service‑oriented, and deeply relational spaces. That ethos is one of our strengths—and it’s also where things can quietly go wrong.

Academic libraries are very good at sustaining what already works.

Academic libraries are institutions of continuity.

Academic librarians often talk about shared governance as something that happens “out there” — in faculty senate meetings, departmental politics, or provost-level decisions.

Resistance to change in higher education is rarely loud.

Academic libraries often talk about innovation, experimentation, and risk-taking—yet our organizational structures frequently make these aspirations difficult to realize. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, particularly the chapters on structural holes, power-law distributions, and what he memorably calls “failure for free,” offers a useful lens for understanding why.

Academic libraries—and the broader higher education ecosystem—are built on the flow of information. A single decision can influence instruction schedules, access to resources, student learning pathways, and cross-campus collaboration. When those decisions arrive without context or explanation, the people responsible for delivering and sustaining academic services are left navigating a landscape of half-understood directives and unspoken implications.

Some supervisors lead with vision, others with collaboration, others with consistency. And then there are supervisors who lead from the center of a storm—always reacting, always scrambling, always one emergency away from unraveling. Their days are filled with urgent requests, shifting priorities, and last-minute decisions. For employees, this mode of leadership doesn’t inspire action—it disrupts it.

Hidden disabilities are often discussed in the context of privacy, autonomy, and personal choice. And in healthy workplaces, employees should be able to decide what they share—and what they don’t—without fear of consequence. But in toxic or unsafe environments, the decision becomes far more complex.

Academic libraries often pride themselves on collaboration, curiosity, and supporting diverse learners. But even in mission-driven environments, neurodivergent library workers frequently find themselves misunderstood, misinterpreted, or mislabeled—especially when their identities are invisible. Neurodivergence, like queerness, chronic illness, mixed-race identity, or trauma history, often operates as an invisible marginalized identity. Dannie Lynn Fountain’s Harvard Business Review article describes such identities as “walking like you have dynamite in your pocket”—a vivid metaphor for navigating spaces where your difference is real but unseen.