Tag: teams

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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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Communication: Leadership’s Binding Agent

You’ve hired people with all the right skills, talent, and experience and you’ve given them the tools they need to perform their functions. And yet, patron services just aren’t clicking. Project pieces don’t fit together. And unresolved friction is the norm. Maybe patrons aren’t complaining, but the library’s image isn’t exactly shining either. In the end, some of those valuable people on your team-that’s-not-a-team leave, and you discover they aren’t necessarily leaving for better positions. They just want to work someplace else.

Where do you begin looking for the root cause behind the disfunction on a library team (or any team)? How do you know what to fix?

A good place to begin is communication, and look to yourself for figuring out what to fix. Let’s face it, survey after survey shows that librarians completing the Myers-Briggs personality profile (or almost any other personality profile) score high on introversion. That’s neither good nor bad. That’s just a fact, and as a library leader it’s something that you need to be aware of and work on, especially in your own communication.

Good leaders need to be good communicators in three ways:

      1. Outbound communication: Enlightening and listening to higher level management, the board, or the larger community, including patrons.
      2. Direction oriented communication: Talking to peers and staff about what your team’s overall objective is and how success will be recognized.
      3. Day-to-day communication: Staying on top of progress on tasks and coordinating problem solving.

These are interrelated communications, of course. Problem solving, for example, will always be conducted in the context of objectives. Weakness in any of these levels of communication, however, could spell failure.

A library team that does not listen to the larger community (especially listening to people who do not currently use the library) cannot possibly expect to meet the needs and interests of the community at a high level of satisfaction because it simply will not know what those needs and interests are. Library leaders are responsible for making sure that the community is heard and understood. Otherwise, the library will miss opportunities or produce services that few in the community want or need.

Similarly, library leaders need to coordinate library or department activities with their peers within and outside the library. They also need to make sure that the people who work with them understand what the goals are and why they are important. Workers who are disconnected from the finished product are not likely to care whether they do their work well or efficiently, but team members who know why they are working on a project will derive greater satisfaction from doing the job well. People are far more likely to care about how well they do their jobs if they understand the consequences of both doing well and doing poorly.

Finally, operations can quickly get bogged down in minor unresolved issues. Leaders need to empower team members to quickly make decisions by communicating and coordinating with each other, but leaders also need to make sure that team members are resolving the problems. Without at least some oversight, some problems may simply be ignored because each person thinks it’s someone else’s problem – or at least that it’s not their responsibility. It’s a basic management skill required of leaders at all levels to stay attuned to the emergence of issues within their team and the need to resolve them. How they are resolved (within the context of the team’s objective) is less important than that they are resolved and that everyone affected by the resolution is aware of it and why it worked out the way it did.

Ultimately, I would argue that having a team with a perfect balance of skills or having a team on which everyone is friendly and gets along is less important than having a team that communicates well. It is possible to fill most skill gaps and to get past many personal awkwardnesses, if the team can communicate well professionally. Communication is the tool that binds teams together and makes them strong. Assuring the team can and does communicate is your responsibility as the team leader. If communication is a problem on the team you lead, address this first and many other problems will take care of themselves.