PVLD Director's Blog

Honored

This has been a week when I've had more than ample occasion to be grateful for and proud ofthe people I work with. 

The week kicked off with our fourth Staff Day, where the library was closed so that we bring the entire staff together for some learning and some fun.  Our 85 employees, many of whom are part-time, are stretched across three libraries and an Annex with a combined 159 hours of operation each week.  This means that many employees never get to meet colleagues who work at other locations or on different shifts.  Staff Day gives us a chance to address that.

The day is organized by a team of staff members who volunteer for the task, and they did themselves proud on a shoestring budget.  We had an excellent and thought-provoking presentation on teens and how to serve them by Dr. Joni Richards Bodart in the morning, then got on buses provided by County Supervisor Don Knabe and rode over to the Miraleste Library for lunch and some fun and games before heading back to Peninsula Center Library for a tour of some of the libraries hidden places followed by a social hour in the Annex.

Since what happens at Staff Day stays at Staff Day I won't go into the details of our activities, but we had a lot of fun.  Dr. Bodart joined in as an enthusiastic participant, and before she left told both me and Louise Beebe of the organizing team that she has been in a lot of libraries and worked with a lot of different library staffs, but she has never seen a group that had come so far in breaking down internal barriers and hierarchies.  What a great reminder of what a terrific team we have here at PVLD!

The next day I spent the day wth colleagues from across the State talking about "Blue Ocean Strategy" for libraries and the State Librarian's vision of creating an "incubator" to foster library innovation and take ideas to implementation.  The day was informative if tiring, but it also made me realize how fortunate we are here at PVLD in having the resources and the environment to try new things and "incubate" new ideas without relying on external support.  If someone has an idea that is legal,seems worth trying, and we can figure out how to pay for it..we just do it.  I don't think many other libraries can say that.

And then today our "First Team" (the Department Managers and Assistant Managers from across PVLD) met, as we do regularly, to talk about how we work as a team and how we can continue to improve communication and grow the level of trust and honesty within the team and throughout PVLD.  Today consultant Cheryl Gould (no relation!) visited our meeting and we had a really good discussion about how far we have come as a team, and where we want to go.  The commitment all of our leaders have to making PVLD a vital institution in our community and to spending time and energy on the "soft" but extremely hard issues of communication and teamwork that can get in our way made me so proud.

We're now looking forward to a year of working with Cheryl to grow our ability to work together and I think great things are ahead. 

PVLD staff - it is an honor to work with you.

Politics and Performance

Sometimes "politics" is viewed as a dirty word, but as Michael Wade of Execupundit points out in a recent post:

It is important to understand that in a great many jobs, good performance involves various political skills, such as:

• • Pleasing community groups.
  • Avoiding any complications with the board of directors.
  • Not engaging in interdepartmental wars.
  • Keeping staff members within certain boundaries.
  • Using constant discretion in language and actions.



 

Staying out of the news.




Giving and sharing credit.

Fumble any of these and all other performance achievements may be neutralized. Some points may seem minor, but they have the potential to become major within seconds. They can be simply summarized: Be a solution, not a problem.

This surely is true for Library Directors!

Doing second things first

As expected, I've been too busy to blog thanks to a combination of ongoing family challenges and a very busy summer at work.  I expect things to calm down a bit as August unfolds, but in the meantime I am focusing on this advice via Execupundit.  As much as I find blogging rewarding, lately it definitely meets the definition of a "second thing" -

The reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our time doing second things first.

- Robert McKain

 

Want to make a policy? Learn to shrug

Thank you to Designing Better Libraries for this great post on Punishing Everyone for a Single Transgression.  It's great articulation of the folly of punishing everyone for one person's bad behavior or mistake...something that we here in libraries find ourselves tempted to do all of the time.

The video by Derek Sivers is great, and rings as true for libraries as it does for commercial businesses - double click on the video, or click here, to see the uncropped version.

 

Teamwork

It's Performance Review season at the Palos Verdes Library District, so I've been busy getting ready for my own upcoming review as well as for those of the 12 people who report to me.  In reflecting on the past year, one of the things that has really struck me is how the level of collaboration across departmental boundaries has increased.  We've been talking about a "One District" model of operations for the entire seven years that I've been here, but it's only this year that I really feel that we are getting traction in making it a reality.

I'm sure a number of factors have contributed to this acceleration in our effectiveness as a Leadership Team including the talent and energy of the team members and new District-wide planning mechanisms such as our Marketing Committee, but I think this article  referenced in Bob Sutton's Work Matters is on to something, particularly with regard to "Misperception #2"

Misperception #2: It's good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members' misbehavior.

Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.

Our Leadership Team has now been together, without any changes in membership, for a full two years.  It's not a huge amount of time, but it's the longest stretch of stability in the team in my tenure here, and I have to think that just the fact that we have some solid experience in working together is part of what is driving our success.

Given a talented team of ambitious people and a small organization with limited opportunities for promotion I know that the current team won't be together forever, but I am looking forward to seeing what we will accomplish as long as we are!

Work and Life

Nearly 8 years ago, when I was considering whether to apply for my current position, I attended a panel discussion called "So You Want to Be A Library Director" at the California Library Association annual conference.

The key message conveyed by the panel of distinguished Library Directors is that being a Library Director is not a 9-5 job.  They emphasized that successful Directors attend library and community events on many evenings and weekends anmd participate in community and professional organizations ...and that is in addition to the 40+ hours/week it takes to fulfill the internal leadership and managerial responsibilities.

The job of Library Director is amazingly rewarding, but it is also one in which the lines between "work" and "life" can get pretty blurry.

If you believe  many magazine articles and self-help books that is a bad thing, but my own experience leads me to believe that today's post from Nicholas Bate is closer to the truth - 

"...remember that great work-life balance is more about removing the distinction than fire-walling the difference."

I'm not advocating that your work become your entire life, but if you feel the need to totally segregate what you do for a living from the rest of your life maybe its time to think about a different career?

 

 

 

Put that on the list

Ever since college I have lived my life by "to do" lists, to the point where if something important doesn't get written on the list there is a high probability it will fall through the cracks. 

I started out using little spiral bound books of lined notecards on which I would write my list every day, tearing out the previous day's list each morning, copying uncompleted items from the previous day into a new list, and adding new items as the current day unfolded.   When I discovered Daytimers and their equivalents I was in heaven - one place to keep all of the information I needed to run my life!

Over 15 years in the mining and manufacturing industry reinforced the value of lists.  Manufacturing operations are governed by production lists, keeping equipment running depends on PM's (Planned Maintenance activities that are essentially lists of recurring activities such as oil changes, filter changes, etc. that need to be done on a schedule) and a key element of every quality improvement program from Total Quality Management to Lean Manufacturing is standardization of activities via checklists. 

As copmputers became a more entrenched part of my daily worklife I began using task lists in Microsoft Outlook, and now that PVLD no longer uses Outlook (we use Google Apps for email, calendar, etc.) I have discovered Toodledo, which allows me to manage tasks on any computer via the Internet as well as via an app on my Iphone with seamless synchronization, forward emails to create tasks, and do cool things  like create sub-tasks, categorize and prioritize tasks, create recurring tasks, and more.

I still sometimes use paper for specific lists - like things that need to get done before a trip - that my husband I both need to see.  Somehow it is easier to put a yellow notepad on the counter so we can both add and check-off items than to try to manage a shared list digitally.

I guess you could call me a "to do list" geek, but honestly I don't know how I would juggle all of the competing demands in my life without my lists, which I sometimes call my back-up brain.

That's why I read this post by Nicholas Bate with a sigh of recognition:

On Check-lists

They sound a pretty dull topic. Not exactly break-through productivity material. But...

Next time you're waiting on the tarmac for take-off you can be sure everyone of the airline's team is working his/her way through a meticulously prepared and thoroughly polished check-list to ensure nothing is forgotten. Your lawyer will have a check-list of basic questions when you go and see him/her about a dispute. Your doctor has a check-list of standard bio-markers s/he wants to measure before any kind of diagnosis. Professionals rely on check-lists to cover the fundamentals so they can use their critical thinking and their reflective thinking for the diagnosis, the odd surprise and the necessary innovation.

Too often in business we're still scrabbling trying to run a decent meeting, wondering why we forgot our phone charger and why we never have time to think.

In a word: check-lists

Amen!

What don't we see coming?

Words of wisdon from Nicholas Bate...as true for libraries as for commercial entities:

...The key to business success is agility as you will not have seen it coming, it is not in your plan and you cannot buy your way of the problem.

Wonder what the next curveball will be?

Recharging your batteries

Have you hit the point of diminishing return...."When you are spinning your wheels yet things aren’t getting done in the timeframe they should? Your head is fuzzy and your body is heavy? Your children [or in my case dog] don’t recognize you?"

I know I have, so  I'm working on doing what this great blog post on Four Ways to Recharge Your Batteries advises.  What about you?

 

I wish someone had taught this to ME in the 5th grade!

Thank you to Cultural Offering for sharing these great tips on "what to do when you can't figure it out" from 5th-grade teacher Rob Firchau...and for introducing me to Rob's wonderful blog The Hammock Papers .

 

What it says?

What to do if you can't figure it out:

1.    Take a deep breath and refuse to be confused; go back over the problem one step at a time.

2.    Organize what you know.

3.    Act the problem out in your mind.

4.    Doodle - move things into new combinations.

5.    Make a graph or a table.

6.    Work the problem backward.

7.    Solve part of the problem.

8.    Look for a pattern.

9.    Ask "What if. . .?" and follow that reasoning through.

10.  Brainstorm.  Even silly ideas can lead to a helpful solution.

11.  Don't give up.  Don't ever give up.  "If you think you can't, you're right."