An ENFJ woman does not manage a unit; she constitutes one, and the condition she maintains cannot be documented, handed on, or moved to a different reporting line. Every reorganisation destroys it and every reorganisation is defensible, and the attachment that is the whole of her value is the standing reason she keeps getting moved.
The Eastside branch had a staff of six when Nella Pelkey took it in 2004 and one of them would not speak to another one, which is a thing that happens in a building with six people in it and no way out.
I was not there. I came to this system five years later, from the city budget office, and I have reconstructed that period from people who were.
Vergie Stroh, who has been a clerk at Eastside since 1996, tells it this way. Nella arrived, and for about two months she did nothing anybody could see except learn everyone’s business, and then one afternoon she put a card table in the workroom and started eating lunch at it, alone, at the same time every day.
Inside a month there were three people at that table.
Inside a year the two who would not speak were running the summer reading programme together, and the branch’s circulation was up nine per cent in a neighbourhood where the population had gone down, and Eastside had a Karen collection because Nella had noticed who was coming in and had spent a year and about two thousand dollars building one.
Nella came to this system in 1997 at twenty-four, as a children’s librarian. She is a tall, quick, extremely warm woman who remembers what your mother’s surgery was for. She talks with her hands and stands too close and neither of those reads as anything except what it is. She is late to internal meetings and never late to anything a patron is at. In twenty-nine years she has not once raised her voice inside this organisation, which I have come to understand is a different matter from never being angry.
The Tarnow Public Library serves a hundred and eighty thousand people out of a central library and twelve branches. There are two hundred and six of us. The system is funded by a dedicated levy that has passed six times and failed once.
I came in 2009 as deputy director and I have been the director since 2014.
This system has had a sentence for Nella Pelkey for a decade. I did not coin it. I have carried it into the room where carrying it decided things.
She’s a builder, not a runner.
The consultant’s recommended structure goes to the board next month. It moves her again. And two weeks ago she asked me for one thing, which she has never done in twenty-nine years, and I have not answered her.
Colm Deeds, who ran technical services for eleven years, had a way of closing out a personnel discussion.
“Well, that department’s very loyal.”
The Collection
A branch collection is an accumulation between one person and one place, built over years, rather than a set of books, and it is the only part of this business that cannot be bought.
Somebody selects. For a long time in this system that somebody was the branch manager, working off a budget line, ordering against what she knew: who came through that door, what they asked for, what went out and never came back, what sat. A collection built that way is legible if you know how to read it. You can stand in a branch and tell what the neighbourhood is.
At Eastside in 2012 you could stand in that building and read the following. A Karen collection, because of resettlement. Two shelves of automotive repair manuals, because the men from the shops on Delacourt came in on their lunch. A spinner by the door with commercial driver’s licence study guides and high school equivalency materials, because the workforce office was two blocks away and sent people over and half of them would not go past the front third of the building on a first visit. Twelve copies each of about forty paperback westerns, because of the sober house on Ninth. Tax forms, in quantity, in a rack, because Eastside had the only branch staff in the system who would sit down with somebody and read a form out loud.
In 2014 we centralised selection.
It is the correct decision and I would make it again. One selection team, system-wide, buying against circulation data across twelve branches, gets better prices, better turnaround, less duplication, and fewer of the idiosyncratic purchases that a manager makes because a patron asked. The consultants who recommended it were right about every number in the report.
Every branch in this system has a meeting room that gets used for something the branch was not designed for, and at Eastside it is a diaper bank on alternate weeks, and the real service that building provides between eight and ten in the morning is a clean bathroom, and everybody who works in a public library knows this and nobody puts it in the annual report.
I have not read a novel for pleasure since college. I said that once, in a staff meeting, in 2010, as a joke about myself, and it has followed me for sixteen years and I have earned that.
Constituting
What Nella does is not team-building, which is a phrase for an afternoon with a facilitator.
She does not manage a unit. She constitutes one.
A group of people who work near each other becomes, under her, a group with a shared condition — where the people in it start operating on each other and not only on the work, where somebody covers a desk without being asked and somebody else notices that a colleague’s kid is sick and the schedule quietly changes. That condition is what produces the circulation number. It is the whole mechanism.
The second thing supplies the shape. She looks at a branch and sees what it could be to a neighbourhood in eight years — not what the system needs from it, and not what it was — and then works backward. Eastside’s Karen collection did not come from a needs assessment. It came from a woman standing at a desk in 2005 doing arithmetic about who was going to be in that neighbourhood in 2013, and being right.
A shelf is what finally showed me the thing about that mechanism that shaped her whole career.
It is not transferable to a structure.
It lives in a specific set of relationships between specific people, and it cannot be documented, handed to a successor, written into a service model, or moved to a different reporting line — because it is a condition somebody maintains rather than a practice. Stop maintaining it and it does not degrade slowly. It stops.
Which means every reorganisation destroys it, and the destruction is invisible, because what disappears is a condition and the building is still there.
I saw the mechanism once, at Riverbend, in about 2018, and did not know what I was looking at.
A page had quit and the schedule was short and the branch had a programme that night, and I was there for a facilities walk and stayed because I wanted to see how she would cover it.
She did not cover it. She went out to the desk and said, to three people, “We’ve got a hole at six.”
Nobody volunteered. There was about nine seconds of nothing.
Then Dilnoza said she could stay until seven, and a clerk whose name I have lost said she could take the last hour, and the third one — who had a reason not to and everybody knew the reason — said he would come in early tomorrow so Dilnoza could leave at four.
That took forty seconds. Nella said thank you once and went back inside.
I have run that in my head against about nine hundred meetings I have chaired, and what I come back to is that she did not ask anybody for anything. She stated a fact to a group that had been arranged, over four years, to be the kind of group that does something with a fact like that.
Roald Bess has run the central children’s department for eighteen years and does something close to it. About Roald it is said that he has built the strongest department in the system and that we should give him whatever he wants. What has been said about Nella, by four different people including me, is that her departments are very loyal. What the identical building costs a man in this profession, and why what he loses goes to the market rather than to an org chart, is counted on the page facing this one.
Two hundred and six staff. Eleven at manager level or above. Six are women.
Colm Deeds asked me a question at a conference in about 2015, after he had left us, and I let it go by.
“You ever notice she’s the only manager here who’s never had a grievance filed against her?”
I said I had not noticed.
“Twenty years,” Colm said. “Not one. Everybody else in that building has had at least one.”
Five Times
Nella Pelkey has been moved five times in twenty-nine years, and I signed off on all five, and three of them were my idea.
Children’s services to Eastside, 2004. That one was a promotion and she wanted it.
Eastside to manager of adult services at central, 2013. Presented as a step up. It was a step up in classification and a step down in every other respect and she took it because I asked her to.
Adult services to Riverbend branch, 2017, in a restructure that dissolved the adult services position entirely.
Riverbend to coordinator of community engagement, 2021, in a restructure that created a new function and needed somebody to build it.
Community engagement to the Fifth Ward branch, 2024, in a restructure that folded community engagement into programming.
Five units. Mean tenure, three years and six months.
In the same period this system promoted six people into positions above branch manager. Every one of them had held one assignment for at least six years.
Now here is the part I ran in the spring, and I ran it because of a shelf, and I will get to the shelf.
Eastside’s circulation peaked in 2015, two years after she left it. Riverbend’s programme attendance peaked in 2022, two years after she left it. The community engagement function’s outside grant revenue peaked in 2024, the year after she left it. In each case the peak was reported under the name of the person who was there when the number came in, and in each case that person had been in the seat under two years, and in each case I signed the report.
And in each case, four to six years out, the number is below where it was when she arrived.
I did not put those three facts next to each other until this spring, because they were in three different annual reports, each of which I read once, in the year it came out, looking for the number I would be taking to the board.
They Answer to You
In 2012 Colm Deeds came to my office about Eastside.
The complaint was procedural and it was not stupid. Eastside was doing things its own way — a different opening routine, a different holds workflow, a local arrangement with the workforce office that had never been through anybody, a purchasing pattern that made technical services crazy. Colm had a system to run and Eastside was not in it.
And what he said, sitting in the chair across from me, was this.
“It isn’t that they’re difficult. It’s that they answer to her and not to the structure. Whatever we decide here, if Nella doesn’t buy it, it doesn’t happen out there. That’s not sustainable and it’s got nothing to do with whether she’s good.”
Every part of that was correct. I have never once thought otherwise.
I moved her the following year.
I told her in this office, and I had prepared it, and it went well.
“Adult services,” she said.
I said it was a grade nineteen and that the system needed her at the centre.
She looked at the wall a moment. “Who’s going to Eastside?”
I said Trevor.
“Okay.” And then, “Can I have three months to hand it over properly?”
I said we needed her at central in six weeks.
She said okay, and asked whether she could keep buying for Eastside until the end of the fiscal year, and I said that was really Colm’s call now, and she said okay again. Adult services at central was a real job and a real classification bump and I sold it to her as the system needing her at the centre, which was also true, and I believed both things at the time and I would say that I still do.
What I did not do, then or in the thirteen years since, is tell her that the conversation had happened.
She has never known that the reason she left the best work of her career was that a peer told me a department answered to her. She thinks it was a promotion. I have watched her, for thirteen years, be gracious about a series of moves whose actual cause she has never been given, and be gracious the way a person is gracious when they have decided to trust that there is a reason.
I have had that sentence in a drawer since 2012 and it is the only honest document in this whole account, and it is not a document, it is a thing a man said to me in a chair.
Trevor
He took Eastside in 2013, is the manager at central circulation now, and is a decent man.
He said something to me this spring, in a corridor, about something else entirely, and then said it.
I had mentioned that Eastside’s numbers were soft.
“They’ve been soft since about 2017,” Trevor said. “Everything that worked when I got there was already running. I didn’t build any of it. I had two good years off her setup and then it started coming apart and I never worked out how she did it.”
I said he had done fine.
“I did fine at the job. The job I did isn’t the job she was doing.” He was holding a coffee and he was not being self-deprecating; he was reporting. “I asked her once, in about 2015. She talked for twenty minutes and I understood every sentence and I couldn’t do one thing with it.”
I asked what she’d said.
“She said you have to know what each of them is for,” Trevor said. “I still don’t know what that means.”
Eastside
I went out to Eastside in the spring because a boiler quote needed a signature and I like to be in buildings.
It is fine. It is clean and staffed and the people are pleasant and the desk is covered.
Vergie Stroh walked me around, which took nine minutes, because she has known me since 2009 and does not care what my title is.
The Karen collection is about a shelf and a half and most of it is from before 2016. The automotive manuals are gone. The spinner by the door has bestsellers on it. There are three paperback westerns. There is no tax rack; there is a sign with a web address on it.
I said something about the collection looking tighter.
“Nobody took anything out,” Vergie said. “It just doesn’t come anymore.”
I asked what happened to the Karen material.
“It doesn’t circulate enough to make the list.” She was straightening a shelf while she talked to me, the way people do. “There’s about ninety families. Ninety families doesn’t get you on a system list.”
I asked whether anybody had asked for it.
“They asked me,” Vergie said. “For a couple of years. Then they stopped asking.”
That is what I actually walked into, and it is not anybody’s fault and no memo did it and nobody at this library made a decision to remove a single item. Centralised selection buys against circulation across twelve branches, which is correct, and a section serving ninety families in one neighbourhood does not circulate, which is arithmetic, and a thing that was built over eight years out of one woman’s attention to who came through a door was gone in nine years without a single deliberate act.
I stood in that branch and understood that I had been looking at the wrong object for seventeen years. I had been looking at buildings and calling them branches. A branch is a thing somebody is doing.
The Handout
The library ran an adult programme series on work and careers from 2013 to 2019, and one session in it was a workshop on personality types, and Nella facilitated it.
She did it eleven times over six years and it was, by attendance, the single most successful adult programme this system has ever run. People came from three counties. We had to move it to the auditorium.
She took the instrument herself the first time, to prepare, and filled in a sample worksheet as a demonstration to project on the screen, and that worksheet is in the programme file because we document programmes for the annual report.
It says ENFJ.
The material worth reading sits on the back of the participant handout, behind a profile paragraph about warmth and vision that is written to be agreeable. The back says the letters are a running order — whichever habit leads, the one supplying it, and two more so far down that a person reaches them only on purpose, and slowly. Which habit sits where, for her, is spelled out under the heading this type is given, from the sixteen that workshop was built on.
At the front is the constituting of a group. Not reading it, though she reads it — making it into a thing with a shared condition, by adjusting what each person is to the others, in the open, continuously, for years.
Behind it is the destination: what this place could be to these people in eight years. Worked backward from, not toward.
Behind those two sit the pair that would have let her hold on to any of it.
The first is the immediate concrete present. She is, and says she is, mediocre at the actual desk — the physical operational detail, the workflow, the thing directly under her hands. Colm was right about the holds workflow and she will say so herself.
The other is the impersonal analysis. It is what would have let her sit down with three annual reports, put the peaks next to the transfers, and hand me a page showing that builder, not a runner is a description of five decisions I made rather than a property of her. She has never done that. It has not occurred to her to do it. Every faculty she has points at other people, and the one that would point at her own record is the one she has least of, and so the only person in this building who could have made that page is me, and I made it in the spring, and I made it because of a shelf.
The plain part, because I signed all five. If you are moved off a unit, ask in writing for the stated reason and for what it was based on, and ask separately, also in writing, what that unit’s results were in the two years after you left — because that second number is the only thing that distinguishes she builds but cannot run from we kept ending the period, and nobody will ever compute it for you. And if a decision about you rests on a colleague’s objection, you are entitled to know that an objection exists even where you are not told whose it is. None of that turns on anybody’s temperament. The people for it are your supervisor, then whichever complaints route exists where you work, then a lawyer you have hired yourself.
The workshop’s own facilitator guide describes the instrument as an aid to understanding yourself, warns in terms against using it to choose an occupation, and notes that when the same people fill it in a month afterward, close to a third land in a different box.
The workforce office two blocks from Eastside sent people to that workshop for six years in order to choose an occupation, and this library counted them in the annual report under workforce development outcomes, and I wrote the paragraph.
Five Years
Two weeks ago Nella came in and shut my office door, which she does not do.
She said she knew the structure was going to the board, and she said she had one thing to ask, and that she had never asked me for anything and would not ask again.
She asked to be left at Fifth Ward for five years.
I asked her why five.
“Because four isn’t enough,” she said. “You get a year of them working out whether you mean it, and a year of building it, and then it starts running, and then somebody moves you in year three and everything after that is somebody else’s number.”
I said that was a fairly specific analysis.
“I’ve had a while,” she said.
Not the title, not the classification, not a bump. Five years in one building.
I said I would think about it, which is what I say.
Two things worked loose on me this year.
The card table in 2004, first. That story has gone to two state conferences with me, a charming illustration of how a manager fixes a broken branch, and the card table gets the laugh every time. What was happening in that workroom was a thirty-one-year-old spending two months learning six people well enough to know what each of them was for, and then building, deliberately and slowly and in public, a thing that did not exist in that building before her and has not existed in it since she left. Charm is the wrong word for it entirely. It is the most valuable capability in this system and we have no line for it, no title for it, and no way of holding on to it, and I have moved it five times.
Then Colm’s chair in 2012, and they answer to her and not to the structure. I have carried that for thirteen years as a fair governance concern, which it was. It is also a complete and accurate description of the mechanism by which she produces every result she has ever produced, offered to me as a reason to stop her, and I agreed, and I have agreed four more times since, and each time the reason was different and each time the underlying fact was that one.
What that worksheet left out. Her sister does her taxes and her renewals and has since 2003, and half this staff knows it; she has kept every branch key she was ever issued, in a drawer, including for two buildings that are gone; and about one former deputy director of this system she goes flat in a way that has twice made a room rearrange itself.
The consultant’s structure has her at the central building, in a role called manager of branch services, with no branch. It is a good structure. I have been through it four times without finding the flaw in it, which is the whole of my problem.
Dilnoza Rakhimova came to us in 2019, was built by Nella at Riverbend, and is now the best branch manager I have. She wanted to know last week whether the new structure moves Nella again.
I said nothing had been decided.
She said, “Because we’d all go with her, if that helps.”
I said that was exactly the sentence that has cost Nella Pelkey five jobs.
Dilnoza thought about that for a moment and said, “Then somebody should write down what it’s worth.”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.