This advice is based on something that was inspired by the nicest compliment I have probably ever received as a librarian, only six short months into my career.
The context was that I was doing a probation review with my first boss in libraries and he asked he what my strengths were.
“I’m a real people person!” I answered enthusiastically and, in his extremely blunt style, he replied “Don’t say that! Everybody says that!” He went on: Do you want to know what your biggest strength is?”
“Uhm, yes?” I said not sure where this was going (and what was wrong with being a people person – that seems like a pretty good skill!).
“You have the best ability to see the big picture and make the right decision given limited information of anyone I’ve ever worked with.”
(Now, my boss had been a librarian for 30+ years at this point and had worked with numerous librarians over the years including some who had gone on to be high level managers and even directors. Pretty heady stuff to hear as a kid who was in library school only a few months earlier!)
A couple years later, I was taken by an a doctor and aspiring political leader named Ryan Meili who used the “Parable of the River” to say essentially the same thing – “Most people focus on pulling people out of the river to save them from drowning. But eventually you have to go upstream to find out why people keep drowning in the river.”
I often shorten my version of this lesson to a very simple analogy – “When there’s a problem, you can solve it or you can take a giant step backwards to try to *understand* the problem.”
My boss saw that so many people see a problem and try to fix it. But they don’t realise that often only fixes that problem one time and doesn’t do anything to ensure it won’t occur again.
I’ll give an example that hopefully shows what I’m talking about.
At one time, some programmers were notorious for checking out books they wanted to use in storytimes and just keep renewing them over and over again so that no one else could take them out – other staff or patrons.
The way that the problem was solved was telling programmers that they couldn’t do this anymore and if they were caught still doing it, they would get in trouble.
Problem addressed, problem solved, right?
But what if the person had taken a giant step back to see what the real problem was – not that programmers were bending the rules to keep books longer than allowed which is what had been addressed. But what if instead, someone tried to understand that the real problem was that staff felt they didn’t have access to the resources they needed in a timely, guaranteed fashion.
And instead of taking a more punitive approach to “solve” the problem, what if a one-time offer was made to purchase dedicated resources for children’s librarians across the system? Or an annual budget was created to do this? Or a system was put in place to create a shared professional collection internally? (Those are just three ideas off the top of my head and probably not really demonstrating the skill my boss complimented me on!) 😉
That’s a pretty basic example though I see other examples like this on an almost daily basis where people sincerely try to solve problems but rarely seem to understand and address the underlying cause of the problem in the first place.
…to encourage my daughter to become a kind, empathetic, supportive human being.
(Too bad the parents of many of the current Sask Party MLAs didn’t share similar lessons with their kids before they became regressive, reactive bullies.)
Got offered some last minute tickets to the Riders game tonight. Free tickets and between parking, food, drinks, and souvenirs, I think I spent $300 LOL!
I was so proud of my mom getting her lifetime membership in the Sask Union of Nurses ten years ago. Great speech and you can see where I got a lot of my personal values about supporting workers and treating others with empathy and respect.
This was a lesson I learned from my first manager at RPL (who also happened to be the Manager of HR so had tons of great insights into managing people, dealing with conflict and so on.)
The context was that I was in a very unique role as Organizational Development Specialist, responsible for all staff training but also for a more nebulous “change management/organizational culture” work as RPL was heading towards some major changes – a staff reorganization and joining a province-wide library consortium.
I had proposed something that I thought would help staff with change management as we moved towards these huge organizational changes and though my immediate manager thought it was a good idea, it got shot down by a senior manager who didn’t think it would work. (“Find Ways To Say Yes/Why Not Try It?” is going to be a future post!) 😉
I was venting to my manager that the rationale for shooting it down didn’t give much credit to the RPL staff – I said that most RPL staff were friendly, outgoing, customer-service oriented people but the senior manager saw them as very rule-based and suspicious of change.
He thought about it for a second then said “What if you’re both right?”
I didn’t really know what he meant at the time but it became clear when we did one of our quarterly “Librarian Forums” and put the assembled librarians from across the organization (about 30 of us at the time) through the True Colours personality test.
Like Myers-Briggs, these tests aren’t heavily scientific but can provide a useful shorthand for interacting with others who see the world differently.
And when we got our results, it was exactly what my boss had said.
Only a couple librarians had Green as their dominant trait – analytical and data-driven. Only a couple librarians were Red/Orange as their main trait – creative and imaginative. Of the remaining librarians, there was an exactly equal split between the Blues – people pleasing and Yellow/Gold – rule-based and deferential to authority.
It was a good reminder that it’s not always about “you’re wrong and I’m right” but more that people have different approaches and different personalities and if you want to reach someone, sometimes it helps to understand where they’re coming from.
(I also remember one of the only two Reds in the room saying that if she wanted to get buy-in from her boss who happened to be one of only a couple Greens, she would send a spreadsheet instead of a written document since she knew he was analytical and data-driven.)
