PVLD Director's Blog

Eureka!

This past week I had the honor and pleasure of serving as a mentor for the first Eureka Leadership Institute - a weeklong, intensive leadership development program for emerging library leaders in California.

While my official role at the Institute was "mentor", I think I learned at least as much as the participants.  It is a rare gift to be able to spend a week thinking about leadership and what it means in a library context and I came away reinvigorated (despite the 12 hour days!) and with plenty of food for thought about both how to improve my own leadership abilities and how to lead PVLD towards the future.  I also came away with a whole new network of relationships with people I might otherwise never have had the opportunity to really get to know (or possibly even to meet) and with a renewed sense of optimism about the future of public libraries in California.

I'm looking forward to continued involvement through the Eureka blog, follow-up webinars and meetings, and reunions at ALA, CLA, etc.  I'm also looking forward to working with PVLD Department Managers Eve Wittenmyer and Jennifer Addington who participated in the Institute as they work on their leadership project over the next year or so.

It would ruin the experience for future participants if I write too much about the content of the Institute.  Suffice it to say that I will be encouraging more PVLD leaders to apply, and am hoping that I will have the opportunity to again serve as a mentor in future.

Now its back to the "real world"!

Customer Service, Ritz Carlton Style

The Ritz Carlton has such a reputation for customer service that it offers management training to other organizations. Last Friday I had the opportunity to attend a ½ day version of this training at pre-workshop for the California Library Association annual conference. Even that brief session gave some great insight into the organizational discipline required to provide the highest possible level of what they call "customer engagement". The whole focus is on meeting customer desire for:

• One-of-a-kind experiences
• Fast access to knowledge and wisdom (make me feel smart!)
• Convenience and respect for their time
• Utility and TOTAL lack of hassles
• "WOW" stories that they can tell their friends (e.g. the trainer's stories about how staff help set the stage for marriage proposals)

It would be a VERY long post if I included everything I learned, but a few things really leaped out:

1. The process starts with hiring people who have the right behaviors and attitudes. Their initial employee interview is conducted by telephone to save everyone time, and is focused on hiring people who will fit the culture. The interview is conducted by someone from outside the hiring department to ensure the focus is on culture, not skills. Using a carefully designed, standardized set of questions candidates are rated on things like work ethic, self-esteem, persuasion skills, team-orientation, empathy, and positivity. They are only interviewed in person by the hiring manager if they pass this initial telephone interview.
2. Every employee goes through a mandatory, two day orientation before they spend ANY time on the job. The goal is to immerse them in the Ritz Carlton culture as well as do initial training in core skills and address "housekeeping" issues like timekeeping, paydays, parking, uniforms etc. There is a big focus on expectations – what the company expects of employees and what the employee can expect of the company.
3. Every employee signs an agreement clearly stating expectations – both general cultural expectations and department/job specific expectations. This is signed by both the employee and the manager.
4. Every new employee is teamed up with another employee who has demonstrated a high level of performance and acts as a mentor and coach. There is an "operational certification" that the employee can do the job after 21 days of employment, and a 60 day probationary period. Employees who choose to leave during probation are eligible for re-hire.
5. There are very clear and specific performance standards. For example, no employee is allowed to point to give directions. All are required to take the customer to where they need to go. There are also very specific rules for how to answer the phone (must answer within three rings, must introduce yourself, must use the customer name, etc.). Each employee is required to carry a small fold-out card with key concepts such as the Ritz Carlton credo, motto, and service goals at all times. There is a strict appearance policy. There are random audits and failure to perform to any of the standards results in disciplinary action. Employees are also required to use the same standards when dealing with colleagues as with external customers.
6. Each hourly employee participates in 250 hours of learning each year, it goes up to 320 hours for salaried employees. Much of the training is self-directed through workbooks or online courses..
7. There is a huge emphasis on feedback and a culture of seeking feedback at every opportunity. Gallup contacts 300-400 guests per hotel per month and surveys at least 33 of them. The survey includes questions such as "Would you return"? "Would you recommend this hotel to your friends?". They also poll employees. Results of the various surveys are input into the performance management and reward and recognition systems. All salaried employees also participate in a quarterly performance review which is based on a self-assessment that is reviewed by the manager.
   Hourly employees are reviewed six-monthly. As the trainer said "Keeping score is important".
8. There is also a huge emphasis on communication. Each hotel has a "Daily Lineup" All employees gather in a circle for 10-15 minutes. They get news of what is going on at that hotel that day, information and status reports on company-wide activities such as the opening of a new hotel, discuss quality and service topics, and recognize birthdays and service anniversaries. Employees who attend are held accountable for passing the information down to later shifts. There is also a weekly newsletter that is emailed to all employees, and they also use podcasts.

There was much more…but this gives some sense of the level to which PVLD needs to improve its processes if we are to come close to delivering the Ritz Carlton level service our community expects.

Discipline, courage, and management – or why I’m proud of PVLD’s Managers

I've blogged before about the Classification and Compensation study that PVLD has undertaken, and some of the management challenges that are resulting. This week the joint "employee – management" team that has been working with our consultant to complete the study met with the PVLD Board of Trustees to educate them on the methodology we are using and review the draft report prior to rolling out the report to employees in a few weeks.

As we talked about the proposed new classification and compensation structure it became painfully apparent how many of the deficiencies in our current "system" result from tweaking and bending the system to avoid having to address issues with employee behavior and performance or to put patches on parts of the system that probably should have just been totally redesigned. I use the word "system" very loosely because over the years it has been tweaked to the point that there is nothing systematic about it.

For example, in our Circulation Department at Peninsula Center our current system has very narrow and rigid classifications that limit flexibility and create staff coverage and workflow headaches. So as a general rule "Senior Pages" sort books and oversee the sorting area – but don't return books to the shelves while" Pages" shelve books but don't sort them. We don't know exactly how these demarcations came about, but one version of the story is that (like most libraries) at one time we only had Pages who both sorted and shelved books. There were issues because the Pages would congregate in the sorting room and chat. Rather than having the management discipline to deal with the behavioral issue, the classification of Senior Page was created as a quasi-supervisory position to oversee the sorting room. Now we have organizational confusion because it can feel like you have as many "Chiefs" as "Indians" and inefficiency because of the inflexibility of the structure.

We also have examples where employees whose behaviors made it difficult for them to get along with colleagues were transferred to different jobs or other departments rather than addressing the behavioral issue. Sometimes the jobs were "created" as a solution to the behavior problem even though the organizational need for that position had not been previously identified, and sometimes they brought with them a rate of pay that was higher than that of the new position, creating inequities.

Classification and compensation system aside, we also have been dealing with legacy issues where employees were allowed to elect work schedules that really don't meet the needs of the library and aren't fair to their colleagues because it is hard to tell an employee "if you can't work when we need you, then maybe you need to work somewhere else"; interpersonal friction that is getting in the way of productive work; and employees who don't like certain parts of their job and have been allowed to get away with not doing them.

Dealing with behavioral and performance issues in a disciplined way that is fair to both the organization (i.e. supports effective and efficient operations) and to employees (and not just the employee with the undesirable behavior) is HARD! It takes courage to set clear performance and behavior expectations and then hold people accountable.

This week I have been particularly proud of some of our newer Managers as they have stepped up to the plate to address some of these issues in their departments – not by "tweaking the system" but by having the difficult conversations about expectations and behavior. On the whole our PVLD management team is young and relatively inexperienced so as the District Director I have been curious to see how they would handle some of these issues – the answer is firmly, fairly and with a demonstrable commitment to making PVLD both a high performing organization and one that is a great place to work.

To the taxpayers, volunteers, and donors who support PVLD - you can rest assured that the various parts of the library district are in good hands.

To the PVLD Managers who are reading this – thank you!

Becoming By Being

I was painfully shy as a kid (to the extent that I wouldn't answer the telephone at home!) but had to learn to come out of my shell when my mother remarried when I was 11 and moved us from Southern California to the small city of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Talk about a shock to the system – I knew no one other than my mother, sister, and step-father (and him not well) and everything about the kids in Brandon was different – from their clothes to their food to their slang to their recreational activities. I survived by learning to "fake" an outgoing personality which in turn enabled me to make friends, join clubs, and run for student government. My acting was so successful that today most people do not believe it when I tell them that I am really an introvert who is just able to do a great job of faking extroversion. (Most people – but not my mother who still can't really believe that I have the job I have) I still find socializing, giving presentations, and all those other activities for extroverts exhausting.

My experience has been that leadership is somewhat the same. I think I made it through my first management job on sheer bravado – it surely wasn't on the strength of innate management talent. That's why I love this description of leadership from Andy Grove -

"Well, part of it is self-discipline and part of it is deception-deception in the sense that you pump yourself up and put a better face on things than you start off feeling. But after a while, if you act confident, you become more confident. So the deception becomes less of a deception."

Today I saw this quote from O.H. Mower on the Execupundit blog ( http://www.execupundit.com/ ) - "It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action."

Sometimes you just have to screw up your courage and BE what you want to become - as a leader, or in life in general!

Why I'm glad I work at PVLD!

I spent part of the day yesterday facilitating a strategic planning workshop at the County of Los Angeles Public Library's staff development day. 

With 84 libraries COLAPL is one of the largest library systems in the nation.  It is perennially under-funded and serves some of the poorest communities in our region.  I have some knowledge of the library system through professional relationships with County Librarian Margaret Todd and her staff, and because my husband manages one of the 84 libraries.  As you might expect it has a well-entrenched culture, a somewhat cumbersome bureaucracy, and it's share of employees who are reluctant to change. 

I have observed Margaret's efforts to transform this behemoth with admiration, and was pleased to be asked to assist in her plan to use the use COLAPL's annual staff development day to engage all 650 or so full-time employees in refreshing the library's strategic plan.  My impression was that this is the first time there has been an effort to get input on this scale.

I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours with COLAPL's facility maintenance staff getting their ideas for the strategic plan.  This small team of 21 people performs the day to day maintenance for all 84 libraries and also works on restoration projects.  The COLAPL libraries stretch from Catalina Island to Lancaster - and area larger than some good-sized eastern states - so you can imagine the challenge of maintaining all of the buildings with a staff of only 21.  This group was energetic, enthusiastic, and full of ideas - a delight to work with.

Despite the enjoyment I got from working with the maintenance staff, I came away even more grateful than usual that I work at PVLD.  While it has not always been the case, in recent years we have been blessed with healthy revenues and tremendous community support.  We also have the advantage of serving a small and relatively homogeneous community, and as a special district we can be nimble and make decisions with a minimum of bureaucracy. Our staff is small enough that I can know everyone's name, and for the most part embraces change and actively engages in improving our services. 

This was further reinforced last night as I worked on my monthly report to our Board of Trustees. I was amazed at how much was accomplished despite staff turnover, vacations, illnesses and other disruptions.  Our Summer Reading program is heading for another record enrollment, the special kids events at all of the libraries are drawing huge crowds, we managed to put on more than half a dozen outstanding and well-attended adult programs and plan for many more in the fall....I say it all the time and I'll say it again - this staff is amazing!

I admire Margaret...but I'm sure glad I'm wearing my shoes, not hers!

99 ways to be a better leader

Thank you to Stephen Abram for sharing this link to an incredibly rich source of information about leadership  http://www.10e20.com/2007/07/12/become-a-better-leader-tips-ideas/

I've got it saved to my desktop but I suspect it will take some time before I can read and absorb all that it contains!

More on leadership

Ever since the Infopeople question I posted about last week the subject of leadership has been on my mind more than usual  - maybe because it is also performance review season here at PVLD (starting with mine last week)....or maybe its because we are dealing with some real leadership issues in one of the organizations I volunteer for.  Anyway, I thought the following had some good insights on what makes a successful supervisor -

http://blog.threestarleadership.com/2007/07/12/how-the-great-supervisors-do-it.aspx

A tough assignment on leadership

A few days ago I got an email from Holly Hinman of Infopeople (A terrific organization that provides training to the California library community) with a really tough assignment.  As part of the wrap-up of an intensive leadership development program (in which a number of PVLD's up and coming leaders have been participating) a number of library leaders in California were asked to answer the following questions:

1. What do you regard as the three most essential qualities of a leader?
2. Please list up to three resources (books, magazines, articles, websites, videos, etc.) that you think would be helpful to anyone interested in developing their leadership potential.

Given a subject as broad as leadership I had to think long and hard to consolidate my thoughts into just 3 responses to each question...this is what I ultimately came up with:

3 essential qualities of a leader:

1.  Ability to listen and really hear what is being said.  This includes listening to yourself and the tiny voice inside you that sometimes has trouble being heard over the clamor of daily activity (or is telling you something you'd really rather not hear).

2.  Courage. To do what you believe is right - for yourself and for the people and the organization you serve...even when everyone else says it is wrong.  Also to try new things and not be afraid to take risks.

3.  Self-awareness.  Knowing the limits of your knowledge and abilities and being able to ask for help.

Three resources:

1.  "Love and Profit:  the Art of Caring Leadership" by James Autry.  William Morrow and Company, 1991.  This is a small book of poetry and reflection by an experienced manager that had a big influence on me early in my management career. (Note that this is not currently in the PVLD collection - but I have asked that it be ordered!)

2.  The Slow Leadership blog - http://www.slowleadership.org/ - tips and techniques for being an effective leader in our increasingly hectic world

3.  "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" by Judith Viorst...because sometimes you just need a reminder that "some days are like that...even in Australia"!

I hope Infopeople will share the responses they receive...I'm very interested to hear what my colleagues have to say on this subject.