Head Tale

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.