Head Tale

I’ve been trying to write a post summarizing some of the various tips, pieces of advice, koans of wisdom that I’ve collected over the years – mostly from my time in libraries but from other workplaces, reading of books articles and just talking to knowledgeable people I respect.

As that post grew and grew, I thought it might make sense to try to do it as another “Theme Day” post – in this case, “Wisdom Wednesday” where I share one favourite nugget per week.

Here we go…

Probably the single best manager I ever knew during my fifteen years at RPL wasn’t even my direct manager.

But I worked closely with her on a number of projects and training initiatives at RPL and found her to be one of the most insightful, level-headed, fair people I’ve ever know (huge loss to RPL when she left!)

She’s going to appear in this series a few times but this one came out a conversation where she said “At the end of the day, every rule, every guideline, every policy we have is just words on paper.  A different board, a different director, a different manager could come along tomorrow and change everything (and as our policies changed back and forth during Covid over the past few years, I’ve seen this firsthand!)

So, at the end of the day, ask yourself “What are you doing to help solve the problem of the person standing in front of you?” and the vast majority of the time, you’ll be doing the right thing.

This has become my “go to” mantra for how I approach my practice of librarianship.  It’s not about rules, it’s not about “What does the policy say?”  (I’ll have more thoughts on the role of policy in another post) – it’s about finding ways to help people to have problems overcome them.

They need access to a computer but don’t have ID?  Get them on a computer!  They need a book that’s not available in the library?  Find that book somewhere and get it to them!  A young girl is trying to put MP3s on their player they got as a gift and look crushed when someone says “We don’t do that here?”  Help them get those MP3s on that player!

I was gratified (vindicated?) a few years ago when RPL did systemwide customer service training for all staff and a core message of that training was trying to move from “rules-based thinking” to “values-based thinking.”

As they gave examples of what this meant during the presentation, one of my staff members who was in the workshop with me leaned over and said “This is the stuff you’ve been talking about for years!”

Yep.  But I didn’t come up with it.  Thanks Barb!