One of the great ironies of the working world is that we often questions like the one above in interviews of new staff but then hire people who don’t feel empowered to actually go “above and beyond” to help people.
This can be for a variety of reasons – too time-consuming, confusion or mixed messages about what they can and can’t do within the scope of their jobs, some people think they’re customer-service oriented but really aren’t, things that may fall in legal grey areas, etc.
I had an amazing interaction today to help both a mother and daughter with separate issues, going to lengths that I suspect very few in the org would go to to help someone.
I won’t go into details as I share those same worries about being told you’re doing too much (hi to everyone reading this from RPL!) but it involved helping a young girl get music on the new, very inexpensive MP3 player she got for her birthday (broke my heart to hear her say “I’ve only been able to listen to the radio on it since we don’t have a computer at home”) Then I went above and beyond to help her mom with a separate issue.
Anyhow, sorry for being so cryptic but sometimes you get a problem that seems almost insurmountable but you put your mind to solving it, no matter how complicated and/or how many steps the solution might take. And when you succeed and leave someone beyond happy, you know you’re doing what the library is really for.
(Still haven’t gotten around to it but want to do a post about the best advice I’ve gotten from various managers over the years – one tip on that list will be “Lots of people think we’re in the book business in public libraries but we’re not; we’re in the helping business!”)
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