LISNews: Librarian Blog Since 1999

Whether you graduated from college just a few years ago or many, the likelihood is that most of what you learned is hazy at best or gone completely. Such is the case with much of my college experience, but every so often I recall something memorable. One course in particular, the exact name didn’t make it into my long-term memory, dealt with the theme of individualism versus collectivism in American culture. Through literature and history we explored how our nation grew from a mix of rugged individualism and collective action. On one hand we celebrate the lone frontiersman who forged paths into the wilderness taming it along the way, while we also portray ourselves to the world as the great melting pot experiment in which our many cultures blend and work together to create a great union. It is a unique dualism to be sure.

The themes from this course are memorable owing to their simple truth, but also because the evidence of the tension between the individual and the collective surrounds us and constantly emerges as a source of strain in our lives and dysfunction in our organizations. We want to be free to pursue our own interests, but we have commitments to our families. We seek individual attention, but we understand the importance of giving credit to the community. And in our libraries, as individuals or departments we occasionally want to do what we want, and sometimes we forget that we are part of a larger collective we call “the library”, and that we have a responsibility to put the larger entity ahead of our personal satisfaction. In order for the collective to succeed each individual must take personal responsibility to make sure the greater good is served.

Every library has something that’s broken. If everything works flawlessly at your library, call me, I want to come see it. For the rest of us it’s important to pay attention to what’s broken and to fix it. Too often however, things stay broken because everyone is too busy doing something else to bother with what’s broken, and we take it for granted that someone else will fix it. But what happens all too often when individuals evade personal responsibility is that the collective suffers. This becomes a significant problem when library workers become so accustomed to these broken things that they no longer notice what’s broken, from a malfunctioning pencil sharpener to large-scale technology that fails at even simple tasks. The people who use the library do notice though, and when too many things, people and processes are broken those people go elsewhere for their information services and content.

True story. A colleague went to a large, metropolitan public library to obtain several books, equipped with printouts from the library catalog. A few of the books were in a closed stack area. Approaching the desk to request the books, she was told that in order to retrieve the books a printout of the records signed by a librarian was required. The printout she held in her hands was of no consequence. So she trudged over to the librarian who sat dutifully at a desk. Thinking of saving time for both of them my colleague showed her printout and asked to have it signed. To her disbelief the librarian insisted on searching the books again, further wasting time. Why? Because that’s what the rules required. The library workers know their rules-based culture is broken, but the response is a lack of individual responsibility and collective failure. Repairing what’s broken requires someone who will say “this is broken” and take personal responsibility to see that it gets fixed. That’s a form of library leadership any library worker can take.

Here’s an example, from higher education, of the difference personal accountability can make. Chicago State University has a 160-acre campus in a low-income, urban neighborhood and it has a large portion of at-risk students. For many years the campus was poorly maintained, and the institution was a small deficit away from collapse. But a new President turned it all around with a simple change in culture. It took an act of leadership to create an environment of personal responsibility that made the difference. Now other administrators pay attention to broken windows or plants that need replacement, and students are more conscientious about taking care of the campus. With an improved physical plant the administration was able to turn its attention to fixing more complicated systems such as those for enrollment and registration, while encouraging top faculty to take responsibility for more core courses. As the author of a Chronicle of Higher Education article about Chicago State University put it, you can talk all you want about standards and accountability, but all “jargon moves from abstraction to reality when you see the price students pay for inattention.”

The tension between the individual and the collective can be seen at the departmental level as well as the individual one in our libraries. Rather than thinking and acting as a collective, too often our units act as silos pitting themselves against each other. Has this ever happened at your library? A new problem rears its ugly head. Rather than taking individual responsibility each department points at the others, insisting that the problem is not their problem and that another department is the responsible party. It’s possible that the departments are short on staff, and understandably reluctant to take on one more problem with which to deal. The finger pointing solves nothing and ultimately detracts from the library user experience.

So what can we do in our libraries to bring the individual and the collective into balance, and instill the value of personal responsibility that can lead us to fix what’s broken? Of course we want to encourage individualism that brings innovation and thoughtful initiatives to our libraries. None of this is to suggest that library leaders should have all staff walking in lockstep. But when there is too much individualism and too little collectivism no one may be paying attention to simple quality-of-life services that make a library worth using and enjoying. A new book from the Heath brothers, Dan and Chip, may offer some solutions, because this lack of personal responsibility and failure to fix what’s broken is, at its essence, about change. The Heaths, authors of the must read Made to Stick, focus their new book on the simple idea that change is hard. In their new book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the Heaths offer ideas and examples of how to “flip the switch” and make change happen. Through their study of positive change, they found one key was to find the small successes and then build on them. When individuals see that as a collective their small efforts contribute a larger change for the good, it will stimulate them to repeat that behavior.

That seems like a fairly simple idea, one that many of us could implement in our libraries. We all have successes to point to, and rather than forget them we should be doing more to use them as launching pads for other initiatives. And if we have too few successes we need leadership to create them, and one way is to start with the low-hanging fruit. What about those pencil sharpeners? How long have they been sitting there broken? Is it possible that no one individual or department will take responsibility for the problem, that everyone thinks he or she is too busy or important, or that the other department is supposed to deal with this? But instead of having the boss who’s now fed up with this problem just force one unlucky library worker to deal with it, take the opportunity to create a small collective out of one representative from each department to tackle it. No pointing fingers or evading the task at hand. Just accept personal responsibility as an individual and commit to finding a solution as part of the collective.

And once the pencil sharpeners are working again, the result of a group effort to figure out how to get it done, the library now has an example of a collective success. What was once broken is now fixed. The reality is that our libraries and community members will suffer if we fail to pay attention to what’s broken. But getting started on solving this problem is manageable. In many cases new funding isn’t needed. High-tech gadgets aren’t the answer. It certainly doesn’t need a committee. What it requires is a commitment to accept personal responsibility. That is the path to achieving collective success.