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The Good Lie: Belle da Costa Greene

Earlier this month, on Sunday, November 3rd, I spent a short 4 hours perusing the Belle da Costa Greene exhibit at The Morgan Library and Museum. Belle Greene is one of my favorite people – a professional hero.

For those who are not familiar with her story, at the age of 25 in 1904, Belle was hired by J.P. Morgan to run his library. At the time, he was just completing construction of his $1M (in 1905 dollars! $32M today) personal library building. Morgan already owned a substantial collection of illuminated manuscripts, original manuscripts of great works, and Renaissance art.

Within a few years of hiring Belle, Morgan trusted her to make (in current terms) millions of dollars in purchases of rare books and art without his direct involvement and to freely manage the cataloging, maintenance, restoration, and storage of the collection. From 1905 until 1924, on the basis of J.P.’s trust and subsequently the trust of his son and heir Jack Morgan, Belle ran the library as a private family library, expanding the collection until it far surpassed any other collection in the world in size and quality of rare books. In a field dominated by men, she herself was unrivaled and highly respected. She exposed frauds, drove hard bargains, negotiated unorthodox/complicated deals, and collaborated with museums, collectors, and dealers around the world.

In 1924, at Belle’s urging, the Morgan family agreed to “spin off” The Morgan Library and grant access to the general public. To Belle, the library’s collection was far too important to be hidden away from the public. Between 1924 and 1948, Belle continued as director under the supervision of a Board of Trustees instead of the Morgan family. During these years, the library grew both as a physical plant (new wings) and as a collection.

Belle da Costa Greene is a testament to the power of intellect, good humor, hard work, and vision. Interestingly, she is also a testament to the significance of racial prejudice by showing what is possible when race is removed as a factor in personal and professional relationships. Belle was black passing as white in a time when “even one drop of blood” was the deciding factor between a white person and a black person. She grew up black in a black neighborhood in Washington DC, but when she, her mother, and her siblings moved to NYC, under her mother’s guidance, they began passing as white. Morgan would never have given Belle the freedom and responsibility that he gave her if he had known she was black and yet she exceeded even the Morgan family’s expectations.

The year 2024 is the 100th anniversary of Belle’s founding of The Morgan Library as a public institution, and the library has organized an exhibit in her honor. It is well worth a visit.

 

Two books about Belle:

The Personal Librarian is a novelization of her life that came out in 2021.

An Illuminated Life is a proper biography that came out in 2001. There are other biographies but I have not read them.

 

Some quotes from Belle da Costa Greene:

“It is that exact divergence between my characteristics and everyone else’s that makes me the perfect candidate for the Pierpont Morgan Library. My relative inexperience means that I do not arrive with any staid, old preconceptions that hamper what the Pierpont Morgan Library can become; instead, my vision and ambition for the library are limitless.”

“Just because I am a librarian doesn’t mean I have to dress like one.”

“I just have to accomplish what I set out to do, regardless of who or what is in my way.”

“My point is that there are certain books which have a standard value and which are necessities to the [researcher]… When the price of these volumes is raised, you injure the general public.“

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Seven Complements for Each Criticism

Many years ago, someone who works as a professional therapist, told me that one key to maintaining positive relationships is to properly balance positives and negatives. She also made clear that because negatives register more readily than positives, a proper “balance” is at least seven positives for each negative.

As a boss, it’s easy to dish out negatives. In fact, some people seem to believe criticism is part of a boss’s job description. Superficially, it makes sense. The manager’s responsibility is to make sure everyone is doing their job properly, and to do so you have to tell them whenever they make a mistake or whenever they could be doing something better.

With a little further thought, however, it also makes sense that people do not enjoy being criticized and, if all they hear is criticism, they are not motivated to do their jobs well, but just to do their jobs.

Furthermore, in an environment that is subject to change or in an environment that is supposed to benefit from innovation and creativity, the fear of consequences that come from making mistakes inevitably stifles risk taking and innovation.

In other words, in a work environment that requires everything to function like clockwork and employees must follow rules carefully and precisely (eg: a McDonalds or a passport office), a boss who criticizes mistakes regularly may be valuable. However, in a work environment in which change and innovation are valued or customer satisfaction is a priority (eg: any work environment subject to technology change or a retail business), a boss must successfully balance any necessary criticisms with public recognition of even minor accomplishments.

Criticism discourages risk taking and innovation. A high criticism department in which the number of criticisms is the same as or even exceeds the number of complements is only effective in rigid, rote function work environments and creative, innovative, service oriented environments must both tolerate mistakes and provide high levels of positive reinforcement for work done well.

Of course, it’s not enough just to notice positives. As a leader, you have to articulate the recognition, ideally publicly but at least privately.

Positive acknowledgements can be simple, like these examples:

    • “Thank you for a good day’s work.”
    • “Closing went smoothly tonight, don’t you think?”
    • “That memo you wrote was helpful.”
    • “The suggestion you made jives nicely with other ideas we’re working on.
      We’ll see how it goes.”
    • “I’ve noticed that you’re (always on time / always in a good mood /
      supportive of your teammates / etc) and that makes my job a little
      easier. Thanks.”
    • “I heard you gave Jill some flowers when her dog died. That was nice.”

Net positive work environments are more flexible, more satisfying, and ultimately more productive than work environments in which criticism dominates.

Perhaps understandably, public libraries used to operate more like the rigid structures of a McDonalds. With their strict cataloging systems, infamous rules about keeping quiet, and monopoly on information access, public libraries did not need to worry about change or customer service. In the age of the Carnegie library building boom, “If you build it, they will come” was an accurate description of the wider environment in which libraries operated. As such, the emergence of rigid work cultures that emphasized following procedures and rules, criticizing staff who made mistakes, and resisting innovation and change is hardly surprising.

However, the environment in which public libraries operate has changed. Dramatically. With the advent of the internet, ebooks, and other rapidly evolving means of preserving and disseminating information for their communities, public libraries need to update their work cultures. Libraries that seek out change, embrace experimentation, and emphasize positive reinforcement will find that their communities will embrace them as part of the future rather than view them as anachronistic representatives of a dead or dying past.

To that end, library leadership needs to publicly reinforce desired behavior (experimentation, a willingness to take chances and make mistakes, a willingness to bend the rules to support the patron). Leave the hard-nosed rules in the passport office. From Circ to Youth Services, embrace change. It’s a different sort of leadership requiring different skills, but they are all trainable. They are all learnable. Find and complement seven positives for each negative.

Simon Sinek said it well:

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The Thrill of the Hunt: Networking Practice and Principles

For some, the following account about work related networking is boringly ordinary. For others, especially introverts, the mere idea of doing such things is terrifying. For still others, the activities seem obvious, until they try to network themselves – and then the required activities are suddenly intimidating. At one point or another in my life, I have fallen into each of those categories. Today, “the hunt” is still a nerve wracking process. I do not look forward to networking. However, like stage-fright, overcoming the fear is just another challenge that, in the end, heightens the sense of accomplishment.

I have the honor of being president of the Executive Board for the Omicron Chapter of Beta Phi Mu (BPMO). Beta Phi Mu is the international honor society for librarians and the Omicron Chapter is the chapter associated with Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Communication and Information where I got my Master of Information in Library and Information Science in 2022. BPMO is a small group and the Board raises money for scholarships, organizes events and activities, and recruits members from among the most promising students as they graduate.

The Board was preparing for BPMO’s Annual Meeting and we needed a speaker to draw a big turnout from our membership. Our mission is to bring in speakers and organize programs that are of strategic, even existential, importance to libraries. For this year’s meeting, the selected topic was “The Role of a Library When Its Community Faces a Crisis or Emergency.”

We chose the topic in part because we understood that a faculty member at Rutgers Graduate School of Communication and Information was interested in the subject and might be willing to talk about their research to our members – or would at least suggest an alternative speaker. Recruiting a speaker seemed like a straightforward process. Unfortunately, the faculty member did not respond to queries.

Since the easy solution for finding a speaker did not produce the desired result, it became necessary to dust off my rusty networking skills and put them to work. The best networking, of course, is done through people you already know who are also broadly connected. However, I don’t like to turn too often to the same trough because if you drink too often it runs dry. Therefore, I determined to search every way I could on my own before asking for help.

The first thing I did was a simple Google search for recently published articles on the subject by anyone. I immediately found a nice essay “Library Workers as First Responders” in Booklist about one person’s personal experience with a public library that responded well to the pandemic emergency, substantially raising his perception of libraries. While this essay underscored the value of libraries responding well to a crisis, the author was a library patron recounting his personal observations of a single instance, which is not an adequate basis for a substantive presentation to a professional audience.

I turned to American Library Association publications and found a promising article titled “Even in the Worst-Case Scenario.” The article appeared in Public Libraries Online in 2020, which made it recent enough to be relevant. In it, the authors assert,

“When crisis strikes, organizations can flounder: they may respond to the unexpected or unprecedented with fuzzy thinking, emotionally freighted reactions, or injudicious implementation of rehearsed or routine responses inappropriate to the situation…. Yet crises can also offer possibilities to learn, adapt, and renew the institution’s mission and value for the community it serves…. [W]hat can other communities’ crises teach us about the changing social role of libraries?”

The authors were speaking my language. The lead author is Matt Finch, who was, at the time he co-wrote the article, a research fellow at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. I started with him. In the age of the internet, Australia is not that far away from New Jersey. Perhaps he could Zoom into our meeting or he might know someone who could speak on the same subject.

First, I had to locate his contact information. All I had was his university affiliation. I dug through the usual sources: LinkedIn,  directories at his university, and Google. It took a couple of tries to find current contact information because Matt had moved to Oxford University in the meantime. Ultimately, I found his personal web site and used that to contact him.

His interests had shifted so, after a brief email exchange, he referred me to Zindzi Cresswell, who is also at Oxford and is specifically interested in disaster response by public institutions. So Zindzi and I Zoomed. The conversation was insightful and we commiserated on the subject, but we also agreed that someone who is both in the USA and working in the library field would probably suit BPMO’s needs better than someone in the UK. ZC offered to explore her network for me.

Being a good networker, I established LinkedIn connections with both Matt and Zindzi.

I also continued to look for additional options.

Remembering the story of the Ferguson, MO public library staying open during riots in 2014, I reached out to Ferguson Library director Scott Bonner. I was a little fearful that Scott might have moved on after 10 years. I also worried that he might be burned-out on public speaking, since librarians are not known for gregariousness. But you cannot second guess yourself when networking, so I decided to try.

Scouring the Ferguson Municipal Library’s web site, I found no current mention of Scott. Being a public institution, however, there was a phone number so I called and quickly got transferred to Scott. Scott was very nice and supportive of the topic, but he quickly confirmed my expectations about being burned out on the public speaking thing and declined the invitation. “I stopped doing that,” he said. As feared, dead end.

Next, I turned to the EBSCO database of journal articles that is available through the library. I was looking for any academic or professional discussion of libraries supporting their communities through crisis or emergency. EBSCO responds well to a well constructed boolean search, so I was confident I would find something.

Here I found references to the Los Angeles Public Library as part of a coordinated disaster response system that includes the LA Police Department, the LA Fire Department, and several other municipal and county organizations as well as the LA Public Library. A little more digging turned up a phone number for the office of the “City Librarian,” who is, apparently, the “top dog” in the 72 branch library.

I dialed the number and found myself talking to Loretta, a very nice assistant who listened attentively to what I had to say and asked excellent questions clarifying some points and confirming others – the perfect reference interview. She assured me that someone would call me back.

By this point, I was running low on time. I had started the search with almost two months until the meeting, but between work, family distractions (the good kind), and waiting for responses first from faculty and then from contacts around the globe, the process outlined above had taken about three weeks. The Board needed a speaker so we could send out a newsletter that included an announcement about the Annual Meeting. We also needed to send invitation emails to members to various constituencies and promote the event on social media. In short, although I had two irons in the fire thanks to Zindzi and Loretta, I could not afford to wait for replies that might not come.

Therefore, I took a deep breath and drank from the trough. I reached out to Doug, a rising star in NJ library circles who had been helpful in the past when looking for a speaker. Doug responded a few hours later with a couple of names and email addresses for people who might know someone who would be appropriate to our topic.

Generally, for initial contacts, I prefer email because it gives the recipient time to absorb the contact request, consider the question, and respond at their own convenience. However, given that (a) time was short, (b) phone calls are more personal than emails, and (c) it’s harder to ignore a phone call than an email, I decided to call the people on Doug’s list. It took a little digging through LinkedIn and organizational web sites, but I was able to chase down a phone number for the first person on the list.

As it turned out, I struck gold. This is the value of personal networking through high quality personal connections. The contact from Doug, named Michele, works at the NJ State Library and speaks specifically on the role of libraries in emergencies and crises. She trains library directors, library boards, and community leaders on how libraries can make a difference in an emergency, either sudden emergencies (eg: a hurricane) or systemic crisis (eg: poverty or opioid abuse). I reached Michele on the first try and we had a good conversation. She agreed to our proposed meeting date, time and other arrangements. In the end, everything came together quickly and smoothly.

Of course, I added Michele to my LinkedIn network as well.

Once I had a speaker arranged, I followed up with my other contacts and let them know where things stood so they would not waste time seeking introductions for me.

What are the networking principles I put to use for this search?

      1. Know exactly what you’re looking for. Whether it’s a person, a service, or a product, be able to narrowly and clearly define your desired outcome and explain it to other people.
      2. Look for people who closely fit your needs.
      3. You never know where leads will come from. Use whatever resources might be useful. Think outside the box.
      4. Don’t be afraid of the cold call. Be prepared to briefly introduce yourself, the reason for reaching out, and what you’re asking for. Most people respect that and will be flattered that you found them.
      5. Don’t be afraid to ask for names and contact information for other people who might be able to help with your search.
      6. Don’t be discouraged by dead ends. If one series of leads fails to bear fruit, try another.
      7. Pursue several options at the same time.
      8. Maintain your connections by following up. Don’t just ask for a favor and disappear. Be considerate and maintain that human connection.

 

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How Do We Know What We Don’t Know

When I first moved to Japan right out of college, I heard or read somewhere an aphorism that went something like this:

People who visit Japan for a week or two at a time go home and write books about Japanese culture and society; those who spend more time here – a few months now and then – go home and write articles about Japanese culture and society; but those who have lived here for a few years tend to go home and not talk or write much about Japanese culture and society. They sit quietly and make no attempt to explain.

First, I think this observation could be applied to any culture or society, not just Japan. It happened that I was in Japan at a time when everyone was trying to figure out how Japan worked, so many westerners crowned themselves as experts and wrote about their observations and opinions, but those who wrote the most and had the strongest opinions did not spend much time in Japan – or learn the language.

Second, this observation could be understood in a number of ways. I chose to interpret it as alluding to the challenge of communicating the complexities and nuances of a substantively different system of thought to people who have no basis for understanding that system. Recent neuro-biological research has shown that, indeed, the more you know the more you can know. So if you have spent most of your time in one culture it is hard to learn about a new culture unless you spend a good deal of time in it. I would posit, however, that in addition to neuro-biological influences on learning something new, there are socio-psychological factors that affect one’s ability to learn new things.

First and foremost among them is an awareness that one has an information gap.

Isaac Asimov once ruefully commented that people think that education is something that ends, that once we graduate from school we know as much as we need to know, so once we graduate from school we no longer benefit from seeking out new knowledge. As students in school we are aware that we don’t know everything and there are still things to learn but, as Asimov points out, after we graduate we tend to lose sight of the fact that even everyday life is full of information gaps that need to be filled.

This is as true for wisened scholars at elite universities with their PhDs as it is for high school dropouts working as a deckhands on a ferry. Furthermore, this is as true when it comes to considerations about politics and social policy as it is when it comes to making appliance purchasing decisions.

However, when we sit down with friends and neighbors in our social groups and we start discussing religion, politics, and other complicated subjects full of opinion, how do we know where our information gaps are? How do we know what we don’t know?

I think the answer is rather simple: We can’t.

Therefore, we owe it to ourselves and to the world we live in to assume we know very little. In the grand scheme of things, whether the subject is nuclear physics or political science, even the experts have imperfect, incomplete knowledge. We may not know specifically what we don’t know, but we should look, listen, and read not only for new facts but for new or reinforcing insights in the opinions of others. There will always be more to learn, so we should start with the assumption that our information is incomplete and actively seek to discover, and fill-in, the gaps.

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The Thrill of Exploring the Unknown

My daughter recently shared with me a meme that said this:

Some dream of fame.
Some dream of traveling to space.
I dream of having a secret door in one library that leads to another, hidden library.
– Elliott Blackwell

I immediately had two reactions. One was, “Yes. I get this.” The other was, “Why such a dream?”

The why question, predictably, turned into a bit of a rabbit hole. Why do some of us thrill at the very idea of a library in the first place? And then, why would the idea of a secret door in a library be exciting? And even more, why would a secret library behind that hidden door inside a library be even more exciting?

I imagine psychologists would have fun with this series of questions, but I think the answer is fairly simple: Humans are curious. Around the world, in any culture I’ve ever been exposed to, people want to add to their knowledge and understanding. Not for everyone, but for many people this is fundamentally true.

That curiosity explains the James Webb Telescope.

It also explains Q-Anon.

Knowledge, especially forbidden or hard-to-find knowledge, is thrilling.

Libraries are full of information – knowledge waiting to be explored. Much of what we find in libraries is ordinary knowledge – facts and theories that have already been vetted and tested, if not perfectly proven. Another big chunk of it, especially in public libraries, consists of the imaginings of people who want to explore humanity and the possibilities of the universe (we call this “fiction”).

When we visit a library, whether we read fiction or non-fiction, we expand our awareness and our ability to process what we know.  (We do the same thing when we travel and immerse ourselves in other cultures, but that’s another essay.) Over time we learn how to distinguish between amazing facts (eg: images from the James Webb) and absurd beliefs (eg: Q-Anon), and both contribute to intellectual growth.

The idea of a secret library suggests knowledge and growth beyond the ordinary. The appeal of rare or hidden knowledge is manifest as a recurring theme in the Harry Potter books, the recent Netflix series “Wednesday,” and other teen / young adult literature. Young people appreciate this appeal instinctively.

The appeal of hidden knowledge is also the driving force behind scientists searching for gravitational waves, elementary particles, and the inner workings of biochemistry.

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Change – And Communication Required by Change

We’ve all seen it or experienced it: A substantial new change is introduced by a colleague, a boss, or some outside consultants and the people who are expected to actually implement the change stumble and make mistakes. Why does this keep happening? Here are four explanations (which are not necessarily mutually exclusive).

    1. The people making mistakes are dumb. This is a surprisingly common explanation from the people who design and roll out a change. However, because change associated errors are so common, it could only be true if most people are dumb, and that simply is not the case. People only appear dumb because that which is obvious to the designer is not always obvious to the people who have to learn the change, regardless of how bright or dumb they are. In the vast majority of cases, blaming the people who have to carry out the change simply makes no sense. Blame is neither accurate nor productive.
    2. The change is poorly explained. Despite thorough instructions, in many cases people simply may not have understood or remembered their instructions. Here’s why:
      • Not everyone learns the same way. Some people learn well through written instructions. Other people learn well through verbal instructions.   Still others are highly visual and need to see a demonstration of what they are learning before they can remember anything. If instructions are provided in only one form, learning preferences for some portion of the people who need to execution on a change are likely to be missed. When a change is complex, it’s a good idea to provide instruction both in writing and verbally. Also, keep in mind that some people, no matter how well they understand instructions, can’t really master something new until they do it. Surprisingly, this is particularly true of bright people who think in abstractions – like Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Steven Spielberg. It is usually best to allow someone who is learning a change to practice it; showing them is fine, but having them do it is better. Of course, having them do it is slower and requires vastly more patience on the part of the instructor, but the reduced error rate in later actions is well worth the time and tolerance.
      • Sometimes the instructions are not clear or complete. This goes back to the earlier point that what’s obvious to the creator is not always obvious to the users. In the early days of computer programming, first iterations of products were designed by engineers who could not understand why users didn’t automatically understand how to use their products. This phenomenon also appeared in the early days of PC software, again in the early days of the internet, and then again in the early days of mobile devices. The industry’s quite brilliant and imaginative engineers understood how to use their products because they had designed them; the users, however, were flummoxed. The same thing can happen with process changes in any work environment.
    3. People aren’t accustomed to change and habits are hard to break. In some work environments, especially environments in which people are expected to work robotically and follow the same patterns all the time, workers sometimes fall back on old habits and patterns. When tasks are reduced to mindless repetition, people who have been mindlessly following those patterns cannot be expected to quickly and easily abandon them. One way to avoid this problem is to reduce the expectation for robotic function in the workplace. People who routinely experience change and are routinely expected to be flexible find it easier to adopt change. In other words, the more change people experience, the easier it is for them to adapt to it when it happens.
    4. The people who are affected by the change weren’t involved in developing or rolling out the change.  People always find it easier to implement a change that they have had a hand in developing. For one thing, they understand why the change is designed the way it is. For another, they have probably been able to affect the design of the change so it suits them. Perhaps most importantly, however, they have had the opportunity to learn the change over time so, when it comes time to implement the change, the change feels familiar. In the end, if the people who are affected by a change have been involved in the development of the change, even if the change is not exactly as they would have designed it themselves, at least they are prepared to accept it and implement it as it is.

A final point about change and mistakes: sometimes mistakes reveal problems in the change itself, not in the people who are implementing the change. When a change is introduced, if people have trouble implementing it, perhaps the change itself needs further modification. People designing change should be prepared to change their changes as appropriate. Think of change as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Here a few suggestions for avoiding problems when rolling out a change:

    • Early in the process of planning a change, involve the people who are affected by the change. Help people become familiar with the changes so the changes are already familiar when they are rolled out. Listen to what the people have to say so you can adapt the changes to accommodate their needs.
    • Provide both written and verbal instructions.
    • Ideally, let people practice. At a minimum, provide them with supervision the first time they have to work with the change.
    • Make change routine. A series of small changes may be easier to accommodate than a single big change.
    • Allow for mistakes. As Alexander Pope said, “To err is human.”
    • Learn from the mistakes people make. How can the changes be improved to avoid further mistakes? How can future changes be designed and rolled out such that they result in fewer mistakes?
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In a Team, Two Kinds of Communication are Essential

Do a Google search on “essential components of teamwork” and you’ll get a long list of articles on the subject. Teamwork is complicated and takes effort, but it can be much less complicated and take much less effort if the team communicates well.

There are two kinds of essential communication in teams. The first is vertical communication (top down and bottom up) and the other is horizontal communication (between teammates).

As obvious and intuitive as the above statement may be, poor communication probably causes more team failure than any other factor. Well-led teams are successful communicators in all directions on an ongoing basis.

Top down communication has to do with setting direction. Defining the goal. Everyone on the team must be working towards the same objective and each member of the team must prioritize that goal above self-interest. Top down communication is also how task assignments are determined, although this can, in good teams, be delegated to the team members to work out for themselves.

Bottom up communication is how team leaders get all kinds of information.

      • How well do team members understand the objectives and how committed is the team to achieving them? How efficiently is the team working? Are problems brewing?
      • How could the team work better? What improvements can be made so the team has a greater likelihood of success? What changes would result in less effort or lower costs?
      • What are customers saying about the product or service? What ideas do they have? How are their needs or interests evolving?
      • What could the team leader do better to ensure success of the team?

Horizontal communication may be the most important form of communication. This is the communication that allows team members to coordinate their actions in furtherance of their shared objectives.

When I was setting up a small US startup/subsidiary for a large Japanese company, we had a very aggressive time frame for achieving a set of goals. My VPs (software development, creative, operations, finance, and sales/marketing) and I would meet regularly to go over priorities and near term action items. Budget, labor resources, and skill sets in their respective departments had to be juggled to meet a series of milestones required to obtain further funding. Every time we encountered a problem or a change, we worked through those changes and the ways a change in one group’s output or activities would affect the other groups and their contributions.

Of course, each of the department heads had needs. Everyone was working against a tight schedule with limited resources, but by the time we ended each meeting, each team leader (and management team member) understood why resources were being allocated they way they were. Each VP understood what tradeoffs had been made and why. My role was not to make all the decisions, although imposing a decision was necessary from time to time. I talked as little as I could. My role was principally to guide the process, keep things moving (push for decisions), periodically remind everyone of the larger objective, and trust them to listen to and work with each other. We rarely achieved universal happiness over decisions, but everyone came away understanding why each decision was made and committed to executing with it. Working with that team was among the more enjoyable and rewarding experiences of my life.

Libraries rarely operate under the time crunches that early stage companies face, but, like early stage companies, libraries have to achieve objectives with limited resources. Building teams that communicate well so everyone understands what is being done by whom and how their work affects everyone else is essential in any organization that aspires to efficiency and effectiveness in achieving goals. Including libraries. Building a culture of open, complete, and ongoing communication at all levels of the organization is essential to building a winning team.

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In a Team, Everything You Do Affects Someone Else

One of the first things I tell any new staff member at the library is, “Remember, each task you perform is affected by the way someone else did their tasks and will, in turn, affect someone else. You may perform your task alone but the task sits in a long chain of cause and affect. So perform your task knowing that how you do it affects a colleague or a patron.”

Henry Ford famously introduced the assembly line to automobile manufacturing. Each worker had a specific task that he (usually it was a “he,” until World War II came along) repeated again and again as part of a long chain of assembly. Economists and sociologists associated this atomization of tasks with a disconnect between workers and the products they produced, resulting in a steady erosion of quality because workers didn’t notice or care about the end product. Craftsmanship gave way to mechanical production and efficiency, and workers no longer knew or cared how the work they did affected either the work done by their fellow workers or the finished product that landed in the hands of customers.

Work in contemporary libraries can often result in the same disconnect. Staff hum along at their jobs simply going through the motions and passing along the results to the next person in the chain without thinking much about what the next person does or how their own work affects that person’s job. My admonition to new staff often seems to come as a surprise because we don’t think about our work as impacting others. Here are a couple of examples I have run across.

    • Inter-library loans (ILLs) coming in from other libraries sometimes have little slips taped to the cover of the books with the name of our library on them. Undoubtedly, the slips helped the staff or volunteers at the sending library know in which bag or box to put the item so it would come to us. Very useful for them. However, the tags serve no purpose to us or our patrons who are borrowing the item. By leaving the slip taped to the item, the sending library is offloading the task of removing the slip (and perhaps damaging the cover of the item) from themselves onto us. Yes, it’s petty. I agree. But I hope you see the point.
    • When putting returned non-fiction items onto shelving carts, some staff are careful to put the items in order as they load them onto the cart. Others are imprecise and just toss returned items onto the shelving cart in approximately the right order. By taking an extra second or two to be sure the items are in the correct sequence, one staff member would save other staff the time and trouble of  first noticing and then fixing the error. In addition, such carelessness can compound the added work created because subsequent items added to the shelving cart may be placed incorrectly even if this staff member is making a concerted effort to be careful. When the cart goes out for shelving, the staff member or volunteer has to take the time and trouble to fix the errors. Another petty example, but the lack of consideration shows poor teamwork and reflects a culture of indifference to teammates.
    • Back to the subject of ILLs…. Processing ILLs (packing outgoing and unpacking incoming ILLs) used to be a task assigned to adult volunteers who would come mid-day to do the job. The decision was made to switch to high school volunteers. High school students are only available after school, so ILLs get packed in the late afternoon. This has a couple of consequences.
      1. Outgoing ILLs are pulled from the shelves in the morning and the ILL driver picks up outgoing ILLs in the early afternoon. However, since ILLs don’t get packed until late afternoon, outgoing ILLs don’t get packed until the driver has left, so they sit in our library waiting to be picked up for more than 24 hours after they have been pulled from shelf. As a result, patrons in other libraries have to wait an extra day for the items they requested.
      2. Similarly, incoming ILLs are not unpacked until well after they have arrived and the staff who need to check them in can’t do their part of the work until the students are finished unpacking. Sometimes this puts the staff in an awkward time crunch to get their work done before the end of a shift. Also, notifications to patrons could be delayed since the notifications go out in batches and late processing means that notifications don’t go out until close to closing time or the next day. Late unpacking, therefore, is also an inconvenience to our patrons. Managing volunteers is a tricky business since they are doing us a favor and we need to accommodate their schedules, but for time-sensitive tasks the volunteer manager needs to put in a little extra thought and consideration in choosing volunteers and making arrangements. Or the staff has to do the job. The timing of these tasks affects patrons as well as other staff and that’s important.

These examples have relatively trivial consequences, but collectively they can have a substantive impact on the library’s work culture and the quality of patron services. Two relatively straightforward changes will facilitate repair of these broken systems and prevent similar issues from arising in the future.

    1. Create an environment in which staff are aware of and care about the impact their work has on other people, including staff and patrons.
    2. Cultivate an openness to change and communication about ways to improve. Avoid blame or finger pointing. Focus on process and consequences.

You’ll notice that both of these are driven by organizational culture. If staff feel that change and improvement are normal and healthy, then they will be less resistant to it. If they feel that other people are being considerate of them, they will be more welcoming of suggestions on how to better accommodate the needs of their colleagues and the patrons.

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Use Library “After Action Reviews” for Successes as Well as for Challenges

I grew up calling them “post-mortems.” You know, those horrible one-off meetings that are often held after something goes badly (eg: a grant application is denied or turnout for an event is abysmal). The objective is to figure out what went wrong and fix the mistakes. No one likes post-mortems because they mean facing failure and everyone comes away discouraged. The very name (“after-death”) is a turn-off. And libraries rarely have them.

And yet, I have always believed that constantly reviewing actions is essential to a healthy, productive organization. Such reviews are important both when something goes badly and when something goes very well indeed, thank you. I also believe they should be held for all sorts of events, large and small.

So let’s start with a name change. After Action Review (AAR) sounds more neutral and is a widely used term.

And let’s stop thinking of them as long, boring, discouraging meetings. Quick surveys and short, two paragraph reports posted on groupware for discussion are usually more useful forms of AAR than sit-down meetings.

I was pleased to hear a discussion of AARs as a core element of strategy on a recent episode of The Library Leadership Podcast. When learning becomes a core element of ongoing strategy, After Action Reviews can be seen as positive rather than negative exercises. Through them, the organization can learn from the community and from each other. Instead of resisting, staff and management embrace the practice and incorporate assessments into the organization’s culture. In addition to encouraging an outward looking orientation, AARs stimulate communication and idea sharing that is not merely reactive to negative circumstances but rather positive and forward looking.

Perhaps most importantly, AARs encourage constant change. Instead of doing things the same way every time year after year even as technology, community needs / interests, and staff skills change, AARs facilitate steady evolution from mediocre to good to excellent. They also make it possible to face failure when that happens (and it will) because staff will have the sense that positive outcomes outnumber the failures and failures are merely additional opportunities to learn, change and improve.

After an event, ask participants to quickly fill out a short survey. What did they like; what didn’t they like; what could be better? Get specific where you need to (speaker quality, etc), but make it easy for people to reply. After an event, ask staff to submit a short report on what went well and what could have gone better. Ask everyone for suggested improvements. Staff reports and summaries of surveys should be posted publicly on groupware so others can see, learn, and discuss as well.

For example, an AAR for response to a power outage might look something like this:

Management should make a point of reading AARs (another reason for keeping them concise) and responding. This way staff realize that the reports matter and can make a difference. We have all worked in environments in which suggestions and reports are requested or even required but no action is taken. Management sets the tone, so step up and interact.

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The Everywhere Library

Back when the 19th Century was becoming the 20th Century and Andrew Carnegie was funding the construction of libraries in communities across the United States, information came in the form of books and the best way to store and access books was in buildings.

That was over 100 years ago and the world of information has changed. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely still need libraries and libraries still need buildings, and one of things found in those buildings should be books (lots of books).

However, printed pages are no longer the most widely used means for storing and presenting information. Therefore, libraries need to be more than buildings with books in them. There is no reason libraries should be confined to one place. There is every reason for libraries to be ubiquitous.

Libraries should be part of the local diner, local philanthropic organizations, the kitchen table, and the local park bench as much as they are part of that wonderful building many of us turn to for a good book. Digital access to library books and magazines, digital access to library programs and services, and library programs and services themselves can and should be found everywhere. We have the technology; we just need the imagination and the willpower.