‘The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.’ – Vidal Sassoon, Entrepreneur

1. Shifting organisational culture/culture of empowerment

2. Generational differences in the workplace

3. Strengthening the spirit of teamwork

4. Coping with the entitlement mindset

5. Initiating major change

6. Fostering a culture of outstanding customer service

7. Impact of technology – to assist in breaking down silos

8. Fostering cross-functional skill development

9. Coping with the impact of the retirement boom

10. Establishing career management and succession management systems

Issue 1: Shifting organisational culture/culture of empowerment

There is a very significant fundamental shift occurring within libraries, as well as many other organisations. In some cases, this shift has been underway for several years. For others, it may be just beginning. This shift is bringing about a dramatic change in the organisational culture of many organisations.

This shift is characterised by a swing:

FROM:

TO:

To bring about this shift libraries will need staff who possess a sense of personal empowerment – someone who is ready to use a ‘take charge’ attitude to see that customers are satisfied. This does not spell anarchy. Libraries will still have rules, policies and procedures, but for empowered staff these will serve as guidelines for finding ways to meet the needs of their customers. They will not be used as reasons or excuses for not being able to do certain things.

This sense of empowerment will spill over into the day-to-day management of the library as well. Staff will need to feel that:

The notion of empowerment is not a new one – it has been around the field of HR for many years. It began to receive a lot of attention in the late 1980s, following the publication of Peter Block’s bestseller The Empowered Manager: Positive Political Skills at Work. Since then, this notion has gone through various stages of acceptability. At first, like so many new management principles, it was embraced by many organisations and touted as the best way to create an engaged workforce. Then, as people discovered that it was much harder to install in an organisation than was first thought, it fell into disfavour because it was considered to be too esoteric. Then, as it became clear organisations would have a very difficult time achieving their success goals unless they helped to build an empowered workplace, the notion was resurrected and organisations started to become more serious about making it work from the inside out.

In his book, Block describes empowerment thus:

He goes on to describe the entrepreneurial cycle he referred to and to show its impact on empowerment.

These three points make it very clear that unless an individual takes a strong personal stand about their own life within an organisation, empowerment is not an achievable goal. From an organisational context, leaders and managers can only foster the notion and then work to ensure that the organisational culture supports an empowered workforce. True empowerment can only come from within the individual employee.

I had the opportunity to work with Peter Block a few years after his book on empowerment was published. We had arranged for him to spend a couple of days with the senior executives of the Provincial Government of Saskatchewan as well as the senior HR Directors of the various departments within the government. I asked him if he had any second thoughts about the book that was just published, given that the concept was so hard for many organisations to grasp. His response caught me by surprise. He said: ‘If I could do it over again, I would title the book “The Empowered Employee” not “The Empowered Manager”.’ His point was that the notion of entitlement could not stop at the managerial level – it needed to permeate the entire organisation if it was ever going to be successful.

The challenge for any library then is to work diligently to create the corporate culture in which the spirit of personal empowerment can survive and thrive. This requires some bold changes in the way the library is managed day to day.

In his presentation at ‘The Academic Librarian: Dinosaur or Phoenix?’ conference in Hong Kong 2007, Ian Smith, who is the Manager – Library Human Resources at La Trobe University, Australia, stated:

Smith then goes on to describe ways in which a bold approach is needed to manage the people resources of libraries, if this challenge is to be heeded. Only when this type of bold approach to people management becomes the norm can we expect to create an organisational culture in which empowerment will flourish.

Library leaders and managers cannot issue a mandate for the establishment of staff empowerment. What they can do though is to set the stage properly – so that those employees who are up to the challenge and are ready to play a more engaged and empowered role can and will do so. You can only facilitate this change – not force it or demand it. Remember … the word ‘facilitate’ comes from the French verb facile – ‘to make easy’. Ask yourself what you can do, starting tomorrow, to make it easy for staff to want to become more empowered within their library. By implementing each of the ideas that you feel will help to bring this about, you will become a facilitator for contributing to the creation of an empowerment culture.

Issue 2: Generational differences in the workplace

The issue of generational differences in the workplace is one that appears to be impacting all types of organisations in many different parts of the world. In fact, we would propose that at every point in history, the workplace has always been made up of people who represented different generational groups. What makes this issue so different in today’s world of work?

With workforce mobility operating on a global level and with recent sociological and legislative changes to the age at which people want or need to retire from the workforce, we are currently faced with a workforce scenario that has as many as four different generational groups working together in the same organisation. This appears to be the first time that we have encountered this many different groups working side by side in organisations – and it brings with it some inherent difficulties. These difficulties are further compounded by the fact that the educational experiences, the socialisation experiences, and the changes in family structure and parenting practices have magnified the differences between successive generational groups. This creates some significant differences when you examine the full spectrum of employees currently operating in Workplace 2010.

Over the past few years, demographers and social scientists have attempted to assign labels and characteristics to each of these four generational groups. However, because these demographers and social scientists are unable to agree on many of these points – labels, age groups or characteristics – there is a level of controversy about the true value of this type of labelling of groups of employees within the workforce.

This point was highlighted in a 2007 publication of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) called Workplace Visions in an article entitled ‘Generational differences: myths and realities’:

A descriptive outline of the basis for establishing this type of generational grouping was provided in a paper presented by Richard Sayers at the Academic Librarian: Dinosaur or Phoenix Conference. He cites the following rationale based upon the work of Zemke et al. in their book Generations at Work.⁶

In this paper, Sayer highlights the importance of the Gen X and the Gen Y groups for the success of libraries in the future.

This point about the importance of professional development will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter, under one of the other Top Ten HR Issues.

There is one point that needs to be made about this topic of Generational Differences in the Workplace, before we dig into the intricacies of each generational group. This approach to categorising employees is not an approach that can be applied universally, because the proportional populations for these age groups can be quite different from one country to another. Jennifer Schramm made this point very clearly in the article noted earlier:

So, although these generational groupings can be very useful, we need to remember to keep the local context in mind. Regardless of the demographic profiles of the workforce in any country, various generations will be driven by a different set of values which reflect what was going on in their world, as they were growing up and formulating their own personal values. This was discussed in some detail in Chapter 3.

From the authors’ experiences as senior managers (and for one, as both an internal and an external consultant to organisations over the past 30 years in a variety of sectors and industries, in several different countries around the globe), we do believe that there is some value in developing and utilising this type of classification process. We do believe that it provides some insights from the generalisations that are set forth.We have noticed some very distinct differences in the various age groups of employees with whom we have come into contact. So, we do believe that it has some merit – as long as in the designation of labels and characteristics we do not allow ourselves to become blind and to apply these labels as generalisations to everyone.

Individuals are just that – individuals. The qualities, characteristics or traits of one group of employees cannot be universally applied to all employees of that age group. We need to be able to recognise and value the differences of each group and each individual.

So what differentiates these four generational groups from each other? More importantly, what impact is created within the library? Let’s look at what the experts have to say.

In the field of organisational consulting, one of the most respected professional resources that we make use of is a series of reference books that have been published annually since 1972. These Annuals contain contributions from professional consultants, training practitioners and academics in the field of organisational development. These contributions fall into three different categories:

In the 2007 Pfeiffer Annual – Training Volume, there was an experiential exercise entitled ‘Four Generations: Exploring Generational Diversity’. In this exercise, the authors presented the generally accepted characteristics for each of the four groupings we have been looking at – Traditionalists, Boomers, Generation X and Generation Y – although these authors use a slightly different age categorisation for these groups than those presented by Zemke et al. After looking at the characteristics of each group, they also identify what each group is looking for within their workplace. Not surprisingly, they don’t all expect the same things.

The following notes are an adaptation of the original material presented in the 2007 Pfeiffer Annual. They have been provided in full on the next few pages because we believe that they provide very valuable insights for understanding how to deal with these generational differences in the workplace in a way that will enhance staff relationships and improve productivity and performance. The characteristics described for the four generations are representative of individuals living in North America and must therefore be considered in that context.

Traditionalists (or the Silent or Matures) – born before 1946

Characteristics:

In the workplace they …

Boomers – born between 1946 and 1964

Characteristics:

In the workplace they.

Generation X – born between 1965 and 1980

Characteristics:

In the workplace they.

Generation Y (Millennials/Net Generation) – born between 1981 and 2000

Characteristics:

In the workplace they …

As you may note, three of the four groups have 14 characteristics identified, while the fourth one – Generation Y – has only 13. The one not listed for this group is that of their thoughts on retirement – it is so far away for this age group that it doesn’t even register.

The issue of generational differences will not disappear. Successful organisations are those that learn how to work with these differences to build a stronger staff team rather than let the differences become barriers to workplace effectiveness.

Issue 3: Strengthening the spirit of teamwork

This issue represents a part of the changing organisational culture that we see occurring throughout the evolving workplace and the changing world of work. In our discussion of the last issue, we noted the differences between the ‘four generations’. However, when you look deeper into their workplace expectations, there is a common theme that shows up for three of the four groups.

That means that the three groups that represent the bulk of the workforce over the next five to ten years all have an expressed interest in working in some form of team setting within the workplace. This is a very encouraging situation. From our experience with a very large variety of organisations in different businesses and various countries, it is apparent that the way in which most significant work is accomplished in the workplace is through teams.

Organising work to be conducted through teams has become a very significant organisational structure tool because:

The problem that many organisations encounter – and we suspect that libraries are no different on this point – is that many managers, leaders and executives talk about the importance of teamwork and sincerely want to create a spirit of teamwork, but they often don’t have a sound understanding of what it takes to create a spirit of teamwork within their organisation. Creating a spirit of teamwork takes a lot of work. It also requires some guided thinking about the principles, practices and techniques that are needed to build strong teams that can function effectively.

A group is not a team. In order for a group of individuals to become a team, certain criteria are needed and certain ingredients need to be inserted into the equation. What are these criteria and ingredients for successful teams?

In the field of organisational development, the volume of material that has been published about teams and teamwork is overwhelming. From my own personal experience, the two authors who provided the greatest degree of clarity for me about what it takes to create high-performance teams were Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith. Their book The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization has been recognised by many consultants who specialise in the areas of teams, teambuilding and teamwork as a seminal piece of work and one of the best contributions to this field. They define a team as:

This definition incorporates six primary characteristics that form the basic elements of a team. The authors expand on these six characteristics by posing six primary questions that need to be considered in determining whether or not a group is indeed a team:

In addition, a series of specific secondary questions are provided in each of these six primary areas that enable you to clearly identify areas where some help or support may be needed to enable a team to improve its overall performance. To assist organisations with this type of analysis, we have developed an assessment questionnaire based upon the comprehensive set of questions posed by Katzenbach and Smith. We often use this assessment tool at the outset of a consulting assignment where we are asked to help dysfunctional teams improve their operational effectiveness.

The purpose of providing this type of information is to point out that there are specific tools and techniques that you can use to help ensure that teams are properly established from the start and that there are sound procedures available for identifying those characteristics of a team’s operation that may be creating a negative impact on their performance capability.

When it comes to the ‘spirit of teamwork’ we are talking about something a bit different. The spirit or mood created within a well-functioning team environment is one of the desired outcomes of a well-designed and well-instituted team structure. If you don’t have a planned, focused approach to establishing and operating within a team culture, the spirit of teamwork will be elusive.

We have seen far too many examples of organisations that inject periodic ‘teambuilding activities’, such as white water rafting outings, rock climbing exercises or adventure hikes in the hope that these events will help to improve team performance. The premise seems to be that ‘if we engage in an activity that has a limited level of risk and we need to work together to complete it safely, we’ll be a better team’. That may apply during the adventure event, but its carry-over value back in the workplace may be very limited. The same results may occur in those situations where an organisation may ask a consultant or a trainer to come in and ‘do some teambuilding’.

Teambuilding exercises can be a very effective tool in helping teams to improve their operational efficiency and effectiveness. However, there are some basic steps that need to be followed in order for any teambuilding exercise or activity to achieve its intended goal. Among these are:

When this sequence of steps is carried out, almost any teambuilding exercise can provide a positive, long-lasting impact on the team, its members, the way they interact and the team’s overall performance. The type of activity, the level of difficulty of the challenge and the location where it is held are dependent on the team and the skills and knowledge of the consultant or trainer. Therefore, there are an unlimited number of activities that teams can engage in, as an experiential exercise to help them learn to operate more effectively.

The skill of being able to help establish a team culture and a strong spirit of teamwork is one that is needed by strong, effective managers and leaders. It is a fundamental skill of good business practice.

The research study conducted by the 8Rs Research Team and their 2005 report on ‘The Future of Human Resources in Canadian Libraries’ highlighted several key issues that can be related to the readiness and capability of libraries to establish a team-based culture. When they examined the realm of Competency Demand–supply Match they uncovered some intriguing facts about the current competency skills of library staff regarding their leadership, management and business skills.

Most of the relevant indicators suggest that at least some libraries are experiencing difficulty meeting their management requirements.’¹²

The 8Rs Report goes on to draw some very important conclusions.

‘To summarize:

If you look at the critical role that leaders and managers must play in order to facilitate the formation of a team-based organisational culture, and if you acknowledge that the employees who will be filling the vast majority of all library positions over the next 5–10 years are all expressing a desire to work in an organisation where teams are utilised, then the message from the 8Rs Research Study conclusions is a very sobering one. Leaders and managers in libraries will be under ever-increasing pressure to help strengthen the spirit of teamwork within their libraries. This is not a skill that one acquires by osmosis. Like most leadership and management skills, it requires focused attention and practice, with the coaching and support of professionals in the fields of leadership development, management development and organisation development. If the opportunities to learn these skills are not provided through the librarian’s formal education process, then they need to be provided by various professional bodies. If this is not available, then each library leader and manager is left to his or her own devices, which implies that they must learn how to establish and build effective teams through trial and error.

There is an irony to this scenario. In outlining some of the benefits of installing a team-based culture, we noted that team members can learn a lot about the overall management of the business of the library when they participate on library teams. In order for the future library leaders to overcome the type of competency deficit cited in the 8Rs study report, it seems that moving forward with the establishment of teams as a step towards building a team-based culture will help the organisation as a whole, will help the current leaders to learn this vital leadership skill in an on-the-job learning format and it will also help to build the internal competency among future library leaders. That sounds like a very effective way of making some strategic moves towards strengthening the spirit of teamwork in any library.

There is one final word of caution that we would like to offer on this subject. If you decide to move forward to initiate or to expand this type of team-based organisational culture, it is important to recognise that all of your related support systems will also need to be adjusted to reinforce your initiatives. We learned this lesson in a very vivid way with a client some years ago. This example was noted earlier in Chapter 2, but because of the nature of this specific issue, it warrants a bit of expansion here.

We had worked with an organisation to develop a new strategic plan. Through this process, they agreed that they did want to build a stronger team-based culture within their organisation, so they established a specific core strategy to work on this over the next two years. After about eighteen months of effort to make teams the norm for their organisation, we got a call for some help, because they had run into a block. It seemed that although all staff heartily endorsed this new initiative they found that when the pressure was on, staff tended to revert back to their own individual task assignments and the team initiatives were overlooked.

After spending a short while with this organisation to assess the situation more closely, we asked what we thought was a fairly simple question: ‘How are people rewarded for their contributions to the team initiatives as opposed to their own individual initiatives?’ In consulting language this is often referred to as a ‘good, dumb question’. Their answer to this simple question unlocked the problem for them. It seems that although they strongly advocated team activity and team performance, all of the organisation’s rewards and recognition mechanisms, including salary adjustments, were based upon the performance of an individual in completing their assigned duties. Staff members are not dumb. They know that ‘what gets rewarded gets done’. So, when the pressure was on, they automatically reverted to those activities that were being reinforced – and the team initiatives took second place, every time. By looking at this situation from a systems perspective, we were able to help the client see that when they changed their organisational culture, they also needed to change all of the related systems that were tied to the new culture. This meant that their recruitment system, their performance management system, their compensation system, and their career progression and promotion system all needed to be modified to include the importance of working within a team culture. Once these supplementary changes were made, they made great progress at building the strong team culture that they wanted for their organisation.

Remember that when you introduce a change within a system, it will always have a ripple effect on all of the other parts of your system. It is important to maintain that ‘big picture, holistic view’ to ensure that all of the parts are working in a synchronised and synergistic way.

Issue 4: Coping with the entitlement mindset

There seems to be some confusion about this concept. To many people, entitlement is their inherent right to something. To others, we become entitled to something once we have earned the right to it. In the one case, rights should be given to us freely and in the other, rights should be given to us only when they have been earned. That is quite a difference in perspective. Without some clarity on this point, there can be a great deal of confusion within any workplace about who is entitled to what.

The New Webster’s Dictionary gives the following definitions:

Building from the notion of ‘granting a title’, we can see how titles of royalty or aristocracy are passed along to younger members of a family, merely because it is their birthright. In this context, all one had to do to earn the right is to remain a valued member of the family. A disgraced family member or one who freely chose to renounce or reject the connection to a family was giving up their right to the title of the family. Although this practice works well for this class of society, it does not fit well within an organisation.

I first became intrigued about the whole notion of entitlement within an organisational context in the early 1990s. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work with Judith Bardwick who wrote a book entitled The Plateauing Trap, which described how there were often more people aspiring to senior executive positions in an organisation than there were positions available. As such, people were feeling that their careers had reached a plateau and their future looked grim if they remained within this organisation.

I had arranged to have Judith Bardwick spend a day with the senior executives of the Government of Saskatchewan to discuss these very issues as they related to our efforts to generate career development opportunities for young, ambitious staff members. However, just before she arrived to work with us in spring 1991, her new book Danger in the Comfort Zone was published. The subtitle of this book was ‘From Boardroom to Mailroom – How to Break the Entitlement Habit That’s Killing American Business’.

During her working session with us, she shared a story that was captured in the introduction of her newest book. She recounted how she had been working on a project in a major oil company. One day, one of the managers whom she had developed a working friendship with during the project approached her with a problem. He was a well-paid middle manager who was divorced and was spending about forty per cent of his salary on his teenaged daughter, to ensure that she had everything she needed to grow up and be successful – private school, private tennis lessons, ritzy summer camp, etc. He was distraught over a recent phone conversation with his daughter because she had called to remind him that her sixteenth birthday was coming up and that he owed her a car for her birthday. I suppose this was because all of her wealthy school friends were given cars for their sixteenth birthday, so she figured it was her right too. The manager’s primary concern was that he did not know how he was going to be able to afford to buy her this car. This mindset produced an eruption from Bardwick and she asked the manager a point-blank question: ‘Where is it written that a child is entitled to a car for their sixteenth birthday – and that the parents are expected to provide it for them?’ Bardwick goes on from this story to outline what she considered was best characterised as the Psychology of Entitlement.

In this book, she describes three psychological states and describes how these occur within an organisation. These three states are:

Her position is that we have, as a result of strong economic success over many years, reached a stage of complacency in which the entitlement mindset is deeply entrenched in our organisations and in our societies. This mood is replaced periodically, when we hit an economic rough spot where fear takes over as we worry about the possibility of layoffs, in order to weather the economic storms. Once the storms have subsided, we may well slip back into complacency. True progress and growth within an individual, within an organisation and within a society occurs when we learn from our past experiences and decide to advance to the stage of earning the benefits and privileges that we receive.

We can certainly see this in our families, where each generation of parents tries hard to make life as easy as possible for their children, so that they don’t have to experience the same hardships that they faced – regardless of how tough or easy those situations might have been. This is also carried forward into our educational systems and later into our organisations. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this spirit of generosity and concern for the welfare of the younger generations. They may find it impossible to deal with true adversity in their adult life when it hits them, because they have never learned how to address it in smaller doses, as they grew up.

Employers today frequently speak of this phenomenon when they are talking about the pressures of trying to deal with the different generational groups in their organisations, as noted earlier in this chapter. Younger employees do have a certain sense of entitlement, especially when it comes to the speed with which they believe their careers should advance. This is because they are a very intelligent and technologically savvy group of employees, and have been told over and over again by their parents, teachers and society that ‘there is nothing that you cannot achieve’. Some of them show up in the workplace, fresh from college or university, with the expectation that they should make it into a senior management position within a couple of years. If it doesn’t happen that quickly, they move on to another organisation, because their old organisation obviously did not understand what they could have done for them.

The frustration that follows is felt by both parties – the young, energetic individuals who leave and the frustrated, perplexed managers who remain. The educational background and the personal skills that an employee possesses do entitle them to an opportunity to advance within an organisation. Their specific job skills, relationship skills and practical business experience are what earn them the right to a promotion.

Younger employees are not the only ones who demonstrate this sense of entitlement. There is a whole group of middle-aged and older employees who can also display these same tendencies. I have seen this in many public sector organisations where I have worked and in highly unionised workplace environments. The protections that are provided for employees in these types of situations are often misconstrued as ‘their rights to employment’, regardless of the results they produce. While their membership in a representative union or in a publicly funded organisation does generate certain protections, if the specific responsibilities that go along with each employment right are not kept in mind, it is very easy to slip into a world of entitlement, which prevents us from ever achieving a workplace environment where individuals earn their opportunities based on what they contribute.

There is a fundamental life lesson built into this situation: for every right there is a set of contingent responsibilities. You are not entitled to the rights without accepting the responsibilities that go with them. It is the duty of every leader and manager in an organisation to ensure that this notion is well understood and practised meticulously within the organisation.

As a final thought on this issue, we need to be clear that there is a distinction between the two notions of ‘equal’ and ‘equitable’. The distinctions are embedded in a clear understanding of what is fair. Equal is a situation in which all individuals are treated in exactly the same way. Most of our pay grade systems, and our employee benefit systems are structured around this principle. By contrast, equitable describes a situation that is fair but may not be equal. The differences may lie within the personal circumstances of the individual in question.

To illustrate this point, a recent client had created a project team of employees to consider ways in which their employee benefits system could be enhanced, which would make this firm more attractive to the young generation of bright graduates entering the workforce. When the issue of work schedule flexibility came up, some members strongly resisted the development of options for flexibility in the standard work schedule where employees are expected to begin work at 8:00 a.m. and work until 4:30 p.m. from Monday to Friday. Others felt that staff should be able to start at various times of the day and work until various times of the evening, or on days other than the standard five-day week, as long as they got their work completed properly and on time.

During the ensuing debate, several key considerations could be heard by the parties involved in the discussion, including:

As the project team finally began to look at all of the various situations that were present within their workforce, they quickly realised that it was not possible to come up with a solution that was equal for all employees. However, they also recognised that they could establish some standards and practices that made it equitable for all employees as well as made it fair and reasonable for the employer as well.

They reached an agreement that:

Through this type of open, candid dialogue, along with reasoned, rational thinking, they were able to create a set of employment conditions that were both fair and equitable for all parties concerned, without having to make it equal for everyone. Built into this arrangement was a clear understanding that in exchange for these rights and opportunities, individuals had the responsibility to self-police their schedules and their contributions to ensure that the overall productivity and effectiveness of their work teams was not compromised. This also meant that both parties – the employee and the employer – would from time to time have to adapt to the unexpected needs of each other. By working better together, the firm was able to create an ideal workplace culture where there was no room for the psychology of entitlement to exist.

Entitlement can only thrive in an environment where it is tolerated and nurtured. Leaders need to be prepared to challenge the entitlement mindset when they encounter it. Leaders must ensure that staff fully understand and appreciate the value of rewards based upon meaningful contributions and efforts. It is very short-sighted to expect one generation to accept the principles and expectations of another generation, without some degree of tension or disharmony. You also need to provide healthy forums in which meaningful discussions can be held on these issues in order to find some common ground that will be acceptable to all parties.

Issue 5: Initiating major change

The issue of change in the workplace is as old as the concept of work itself. Since the beginning of time, humans have been in a state of constant change. Since birth, each one of us has been in a state of constant change – and this will continue until the inevitable ‘last day’ when we will be facing one of the greatest changes yet.

Despite the constancy of change, many hold the belief that change is something to be feared and to be avoided if at all possible. That is possibly the result of hearing about so many examples of changes that have been introduced as a result of problems or issues that were not resolved in the early stages and as a result required huge changes, within an environment of crisis and disaster. Rosabeth Moss Kanter made reference to this very point in her book The Change Masters:

This observation echoes the points being made in Chapter 5 when we examined the A-B-C-D-E Systems Thinking Approach, which begins by defining and describing what the ideal future will look like once the situation at hand is functioning effectively and the problems of the moment have been corrected. Change does not always have to be perceived as a negative situation – yet our human tendency is to look at anything that upsets one’s normal rhythm as being a disruption.

The level, frequency and magnitude of changes that have occurred within the library community over the past few years are staggering. The 8Rs Research Team made many references to this in their 2005 report on ‘The Future of Human Resources in Canadian Libraries’. The most significant area of change, as it impacted the human resources function within libraries, had to do with the changing role of the librarian and the paraprofessional staff of the library.

It may seem ironic that the authors of this in-depth study have identified that while workplace changes create stress for people, they also create enriching job opportunities for these same people, all at the same time. The point is that these contrasting impressions do not occur at the same time. The stress comes while the change is being anticipated and implemented. The satisfaction comes as a reflective after-thought, once the change has become part of the new routine within the library.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, speaking at a SHRM Conference in 1995 helped to explain this phenomenon when she stated during her keynote address:

I have never forgotten that comment. And from personal experience, it is very true. If we look back to Chapter 5, in which we outlined the principle phases of the Rollercoaster of Change, this notion becomes quite visible. The lowest point of the change process – The Hang-In Point – occurs just before we begin to sense that there may well be some positive benefits in the change that has been introduced, and we begin to actively pursue the possibilities inherent in the ideal future state that was originally outlined, as the change process was launched. Up until then, we tended to resist the change, because we did not want to have to go through the effort of bringing about the required changes, or we were unable to see any of the potential benefits, because we were too focused on what we were losing or being asked to let go of, in order to move forward with the change.

Let’s come back to the stress aspect of change that was cited in the 8Rs Research Study. The interesting thing about stress, according to Peter Hanson in his book Stress for Success, is that stress is neither positive nor negative.

Our individual interpretation of the nature of a demanding situation is what drives us to label it as being negative, which we might label as stress, or positive, which Hanson refers to as eustress. So, it seems that we get to determine whether the situation will cause us to be fearful or excited.

The primary thing to remember about this particular critical HR issue within a library setting is not as much about learning to deal with change, but rather how good we are at initiating major change.

In order for things to improve within any workplace setting, individuals need to be prepared to do whatever they can to initiate constructive changes. If we see ourselves as having any leadership responsibility, then we cannot sit back and wait for someone else to initiate a change. If we recognise the need, then we must do something to bring about a change. This ‘initiative element’ can occur at three different levels:

We are very cavalier when we speak about ‘organisational change’. Personally, I think that this phrase is incorrect. Organisations do not change. Individuals change. When enough individuals begin to make personal changes in the desired direction, it creates the critical mass needed for the change to gain enough momentum to succeed. When this occurs, we call it organisational change. But really, it is all about personal change. Change is a personal journey. We all go through it at our own pace and with our own motivation. If we want to establish highly successful organisations, we are dependent on successful personal change.

As leaders, we cannot sit back and wait for someone else to initiate changes for us. If we do this, we may well miss the opportunity that lies in front of us. We must be proactive and decisive. Each of us must do what we feel is necessary to bring about the changes that are needed.

Ram Charan is a highly regarded and respected author and consultant to large corporations worldwide. He speaks about the importance of the leader’s role as an initiator of change in his book Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform From Those Who Don’t. The eight skills that he is referring to are the abilities to:

In this book, he highlights the importance of leaders who are very adept at dealing with change.

You can also add Google Scholar and its impact on libraries to that list. Google and the industry that it has spawned are having a dramatic impact on the role and function of libraries in the 21st century. Some would argue that it is making libraries redundant. How are the leaders within the library community responding to this external change that is bombarding their business and siphoning off many of their would-be customers and clients? Are we using these opportunities as a way to extend the reach and the impact of the library?

In the chapter where he deals with the skill of pinpointing external change by detecting patterns ahead of others, Charan examines some of the difficulties of being able to detect and interpret external patterns accurately.

One individual who has risen to the skills challenge cited by Charan is one of the authors of this book – Dr Vicki Williamson, the Dean of the Library at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. In fact, this book is just one of the products that have been generated by Dr. Williamson’s approach to change.

Dr Williamson wrote about her personal change experience of moving to another country to accept the senior position at an academic library in a 2007 issue of Library Management dedicated to the subject of ‘Globalization, culture and social capital: library professionals on the move’.

In her paper, Dr Williamson discussed her observations about the changing landscape for library services in Australia where she had been pursuing her career for many years. She also outlined how she had been assessing what was happening in the global library community along with the three employment drivers that would guide her consideration for any job or career change. These were:

Given an opportunity to consider a move to the University of Saskatchewan, as the Dean of the Library – which would be the very first Canadian academic library to make such an appointment at this level – she focused on the issue of organisational culture and fit, since her first two employment drivers were adequately satisfied through the information provided through the extensive selection process. Now she needed an answer to the question – ‘Will I fit the emerging organisational culture?’ This is how she searched for a good answer to that question.

After accepting the offer to become the University’s first Dean of the Library, Dr Williamson quickly shared her desire to create a corporate culture in the library that would make it a leader within the Canadian library community. She then set about to pull together a cross-sectional group of staff from the group of college libraries across the University to develop their first Library Strategic Plan which would set the direction for the library over the next 5–10 years. It was through the relationship that led to the creation of the Library Strategic Plan that the discussion for the writing of this book was spawned.

This example clearly demonstrates the importance of a leader having the skill to be able to pinpoint the need for change by examining external patterns and using external sources to reflect on the internal operation of an organisation. This is also a very good example of initiating major change, in order to produce a greater degree of influence in the creation of your preferred future state. Dr Williamson’s work on her doctoral thesis at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia, in the 1990s – Innovation and change in professional practice: a case study – provided the grounding that was so important as she applied some of the best practices related to introducing major change.²³

Issue 6: Fostering a culture of outstanding customer service

The issue of ensuring that you provide outstanding customer service is one that has been written about and talked about extensively for many years by many different authors, consultants and trainers. It is not our intention to rehash those ideas and suggestions here. Instead, we want to examine the concept of customer service as it specifically applies within a modern-day library setting.

In your library setting, how do you view the people who you serve? Are they users? Are they students? Are they the public? Are they customers? Are they disturbances? How you answer this question will determine the attitude that you have when you come into contact with someone who wants to make use of your services.

There is a very fundamental principle that applies to any business – whether in the public sector, the private sector or the not-for-profit sector: ‘Without customers – you are out of business!’ Over the years, we have found that those who work in the public sector often have a tougher time accepting and understanding the importance of serving the customer, as though your job depended on it. This notion prevailed whenever staff held the view that because they provided a service that might be considered a ‘monopoly’, there wasn’t as much need to be concerned about the calibre of the service that was provided. After all, if our office is the only place people can go to receive our services, then clients or customers don’t have much choice – they must deal with us, regardless of the level or type of service they receive, because there are no alternatives. After more than twenty years of employment within a public sector environment, I can certainly state that this ‘monopoly perception’ is far from the truth – in every sector of government service.

Today, people have many choices at their disposal when seeking a specific product or service from their publicly funded agencies. There are a variety of educational options, besides the public education system. There is a range of ways to receive health services, besides the public healthcare system. There are also a variety of ways to access information besides the academic library system or the public library system.

If you cannot provide easily accessible, accurate and reliable customer-friendly service to your customers, they will go elsewhere to obtain the services that they want and need. Tolerance for inadequate, poor or incomplete service in today’s society is very low. If you don’t deliver your services in a way that makes your customers feel they are appreciated and valued, then they will go elsewhere. It’s that simple.

In today’s world of data storage, data accessibility and technological access to information banks and data banks worldwide, people make choices that meet their needs. The ways in which a library provides valuable services to its customers has gone through many major transitions over the past ten or fifteen years. This point was brought home quite vividly for me when I first started working on a planning project with an academic library.

As part of an initial get-acquainted meeting with the two senior members of the Library, I had agreed to meet them for supper one evening prior to starting the work on the project, to discuss their needs and expectations for the project. During the course of the dinner, we had a very attentive server who demonstrated an interest in our discussion. As we were concluding our meeting, he stopped and asked us if we were from the local university library. When the two senior executives responded that yes they were, and explained that they were embarking on a long-term planning process for the library and the services that it could provide to students throughout the university, he said: ‘Whatever you do, just remember one thing as you are planning for the future – technology, technology, technology.’ He then went on to say: ‘I am a graduate of the university and I can tell you that in my four years at university, I never made use of the university library.’

This comment generated an intriguing discussion with him. He informed us that he had been able to successfully complete his course of studies in Business Administration by accessing data banks online. So, he never had to go to any one of the library branches across the campus or use their services. He was trying to make the point that from his perspective the university library was no longer relevant.

I was amused to see his look of surprise when the senior member of the Library team pointed out that access to all of the information retrieval systems he had been accessing throughout his four years at the university were available to him because of the Library’s subscription service agreements with information system suppliers. Free access was a service provided by the library all the time – and he didn’t even know it.

This conversation provided several interesting points for consideration as we began to initiate the planning process. The following types of questions became significant as we moved forward:

One of the most challenging parts of every strategic planning project we have facilitated for clients is to be able to find a clear answer to the question ‘Who is our customer?’ As you go through the discussion related to this question, it generally creates a high degree of clarity and shared understanding about who your customers are and it also highlights the importance of the customer in your continued operations. As we stated earlier – without customers you are out of business.

As the group of library staff who were creating their strategic plan for this university library moved through the process, they came to a realisation that their original concept of ‘serving the university community’ was too vague. Eventually, they identified their customers as falling into five different categories – learners, teachers, researchers, scholars and practitioners.²⁴ This helped them to develop a better understanding of how each of these client groups expected a somewhat different, more focused and more customised type and level of service. They did not all want the same things. Once this became clear, they were able to move forward and develop a set of unique strategies and a series of corresponding services that were primarily targeted to meeting the needs of their customers, as opposed to primarily meeting the needs of the library staff. This was a significant shift in attitude and it yielded a dramatic shift in the internal culture of customer service for the staff of the library. They came to an important realisation – the students, the professors and the researchers didn’t come to the library because the library staff were there. Instead, the library staff came to the library because the students, professors and researchers were there. Once we clearly understand that our jobs are dependent on our customers, then we are ready to see the customer as an important ingredient to our ongoing employment, to our jobs and to our careers.

One of the most significant concepts I have learned about the importance of establishing a healthy culture of customer service came early during my consulting career and I have never forgotten the lesson. It came from the book Moments of Truth: New Strategies for Today’s Customer-Driven Economy by Jan Carlzon, the President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Scandinavian Airline Services (SAS).²⁵

In this book, Carlzon shared his concept of ‘moments of truth’. For him, a ‘moment of truth’ was any moment in which a customer or a potential customer comes into contact with your organisation and forms an opinion of your organisation as a result of the way they are treated in that moment. He felt that this initial first impression, which occurred over and over again throughout your organisation every day, had a dramatic effect on your reputation. We used this concept several years ago when we were working on a consulting assignment with a small, regional telephone company. After a short exercise in which they calculated the number of employees within the company and the typical number of contacts each one had with a customer or a potential customer during a typical day they were stunned to realise that they had over 20,000 moments of truth every day! That’s a lot of opportunities to make an impression on your customer base. Is that impression a strong, positive one where customers feel that their concerns were addressed quickly and effectively, or is that impression a poor, negative one, because their needs were not met, they were shuffled from one person to another and no one seemed to care about helping them to achieve a satisfactory answer or a satisfactory service experience?

Carlzon had been appointed as CEO of SAS in 1981. He was charged with the responsibility of turning SAS around from an airline that had lost $30 million in 1979 and 1980 to a position of profitability, in order to avoid bankruptcy. He was able to achieve this goal and returned SAS to profitability within 12 months – and this was done at a time when the international airline industry was recording a $2 billion loss annually. This turnaround was brought about through the transformation of the company’s approach to customer service. In launching this initiative, Carlzon made a bold statement to all of the staff of SAS. His message was: ‘Everyone here at SAS either serves the customer directly – or serves those who serve the customer – or you don’t have a job here.’ This declaration, which resonated throughout the organisation, firmly established his philosophy of the importance of making ‘serving the customer’ – either the external customer or the internal customer – the number one priority for every employee in the company.

Although this concept and the lessons provided by Carlzon’s experiences are somewhat dated, they are still extremely valuable. These lessons are regularly referred to even today by consultants and trainers across the globe, as they design and deliver customer service training programmes for clients in the private sector, the public sector and the not-for-profit sector. The lessons are timeless and have universal application.

If you want to establish a culture of outstanding customer service within your library, you will need to spend some serious time assessing the collective readiness of your staff to ensure that your services to your customers are:

To ensure that this assessment is legitimate and unbiased, you will also need to engage a representative group of your customers in this assessment. Your customers ultimately determine the value and importance of your customer service efforts, not those who provide those services to your customers. For your staff, this type of customer service assessment is an examination that could have an impact on their job, their role and their responsibility, so obviously they will always consider it to be an important and valuable part of the library’s business. The key question is: Do your customers consider it to be an important and valuable part of your business, on a day-to-day basis – or on a moment-of-truth basis?

Issue 7: Impact of technology – to assist in breaking down silos

This issue has three different components to it for library leaders:

There are thousands of publications available that express a full range of views about the impact of technology within the library setting. It is not our intent to try and add to that body of comment here in any expansive way, as that is not the primary purpose of this book. Instead, we want to examine ways in which cross-functional communication and collaboration can be enhanced for improved service delivery and operational effectiveness. At the same time, we hope to be able to offer some suggestions about how you can make effective use of technology to support this preferred state of operation.

A few thoughts about the issue of ‘technology within libraries’ might be worth mentioning, however, before we move on to exploring ways to make use of technology to improve your people management practices and improve overall service to your customers. Here are a few key points to keep in mind regarding technology:

Having offered a few basic thoughts on these points, we will now move on to the real subject of this particular issue.

The title of this issue indicates that there is some value to be realised if we ‘break down the silos’ that exist in an organisation. This notion of a ‘silo organisation’ may not make sense to some readers who are not familiar with this expression. In many large-scale farming cultures, silos are large storage bins that are round and very tall, generally made out of metal or concrete, which are used to store grain. Imagine the picture of a group of these silos standing side by side in a farmer’s yard – a group of strong, tall, independent structures that are seemingly oblivious of each other’s existence or presence. Their independent construction is designed to prevent any linkages between the silos – you don’t want the grain from one interacting or mixing with the grain from another. In this case, the separation serves a useful and functional purpose.

But how does this image play out within our organisations? Is it our desire to have different functional groups unable or unwilling to interact or connect with their colleagues in neighbouring departments of our organisation? Does this sometimes occur within an organisation that has been designed on a functional structure model, but over time has become very bureaucratic and non-cooperative?

The silo description, within an organisational context, refers to the vertical organisational structure that many organisations employ by establishing specific departments or work groups who specialise in one general aspect of your business – such as the Acquisitions Department, or the Circulation Department, or Information Technology Department, or Specialised Collections Department, or the Human Resources Department. These groups are intentionally grouped so that their particular expertise can be maximised. The problems that arise from this structure occur when people adopt an attitude of ‘That’s not our problem. Let IT – or HR – or Special Collections deal with it.’ In this frame of mind, there is a reluctance to communicate actively across the functions or across the silos to help resolve something that should be considered as a corporate issue. In effect, what we need to be able to do is to create bridges and doorways that enable us to connect the organisational silos, so that people, information and dialogue can flow back and forth between these functional silos.

One metaphor that we like to use here to make this point is to picture a chair made of webbing. If the webs are strung only in a vertical direction from the top of the chair back, down to the back of the seat and then forward to the front of the seat, you will have a problem. When you go to sit down on the chair, you run the risk of ‘falling between the webs’, because the webbing will separate under the weight of your body, as it does not have sufficient strength to hold you up.

This is where the expression ‘falling between the cracks’ is an apt description of what happens to a customer or client whose request or issue doesn’t land neatly into one group’s area of specialisation – no one knows how to deal with it, or who to pass the problem over to (along with the customer) for a solution.

When the webbing in your chair is also strung horizontally by being inter-woven with the vertical straps of webbing, you create a strong, fully integrated chair that can support a significant amount of weight, without letting anyone slip between the cracks.

In an organisational context, we want and need to ensure that the structure of the specialised departments and groups is retained where it is appropriate to do so. However, we also need to ensure that individual staff members and work groups are capable and comfortable at working in cross-functional ways, to capitalise on the full strength of the organisation working in a collaborative, integrated way. To achieve this, you need to foster a culture of collective teamwork.

It is also wise to ensure that your corporate strategies – either for your strategic plan or your people plan – are cross-functional in nature and do not belong solely to one functional group only. These strategies need to be crafted and written in such a way that every operating unit within the organisation can explore ways in which they can contribute to the successful achievement of the actions included within the strategy. For example, a strategy that is designed to grow the leadership competencies across the organisation does not belong solely to that part of the HR Department that designs and delivers leadership training programmes. Certainly, they have a key role to play in developing the leadership talent. But individual managers, supervisors and senior executives in every department of your organisation also have a role to play in the ways that they foster and support the growth of leadership skills within the members of their own work groups and teams. Also, each employee also carries some of the responsibility for leadership development, by looking for opportunities to expand their own individual leadership skills. Leadership development is a challenge that runs across the organisation.

The spirit or notion or organisation culture in which specialised expertise can only be accessed by ‘following channels’ needs to be eliminated.

When a culture of collaborative, integrated service delivery is in place, the calibre of customer support and service rises dramatically, the spirit of teamwork is further enhanced and individual staff members become more knowledgeable about the skills, competencies and services of another unit within the library. This outcome contributes to at least three of the six issues already discussed in this chapter. Even these ten critical HR issues are integrated and criss-cross the organisation and its operational structure.

So, if the intent is to strengthen cross-functional communication and inter-departmental collaboration, the question here needs to be ‘How can we use technology in the most effective way to achieve this desired outcome?’

In today’s business world, there is a proliferation of technology programmes that can help to open up your organisation, to foster better sharing of information, to create opportunities to share common concerns and find potential solutions. Here are a few examples.

These are just a few suggestions for making use of technology that Library Leaders could use to generate and foster more cross-functional collaboration and communication in a very cost-effective and time-conscious way. Technology is a tool and – like any tool – it can help to make things work better, once we learn how to use the tool properly and effectively.

Over the years, we have seen countless examples of organisations that were quick to adopt some of the latest technological options, but never fully learned how to use the option to achieve their desired outcome. If you are not clear about what you are trying to achieve or accomplish, how can you determine if one or another form of technology will be helpful? Don’t jump on something just because it is new. Jump on it and use it if it helps you to achieve what you are trying to accomplish. Remember Stephen Covey’s second habit – ‘Begin with the end in mind’.²⁶

Having said all of this about how you can use technology to help break down the organisational silo mindset and improve cross-functional communication and collaboration, don’t overlook a fundamental principle of organisational effectiveness. Candid, face-to-face dialogue is still one of the most effective ways of building a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork, when time and cost permit. In fact, there are times when it should be your preferred means of interacting because of the nature of the issue to be discussed. If it requires that personal touch, where you need to look one another in the eye, to discuss sensitive, difficult or complex issues, then do it. Don’t use a technological approach. Many challenging problems have been solved over a cup of coffee or tea, or over a business lunch. Don’t let yourself get trapped into the situation that we have seen with some individuals where they only use technology to communicate with others. When that becomes the standard, the personal side of a relationship begins to be compromised, reducing the spirit of cross-functional collaboration – which is the whole point of this specific issue.

Today we have the ability to communicate more frequently and more quickly, with people all over the world in ways that are unprecedented in the history of human kind. Yet we are losing the ability to ‘speak’ with one another in a meaningful way. Seems kind of ironic doesn’t it?

Make sure that the tool you use to send the message you need to communicate with someone in another part of your organisation is the best one for effectively conveying the message that needs to be received.

Issue 8: Fostering cross-functional skill development

Several years ago, I was asked to write a paper on the ‘History of HR Management’, as part of a large-scale transformation project within a large utility company. At that time, I was employed as the Senior Leadership Consultant in the HR Department, which was playing a lead role in this corporate change initiative. This was an enlightening exercise for me, both personally and professionally, because it provided me with many insights about how certain events in history helped to guide and shape the evolution of the HR function.

One of these key insights for me was to be able to track how business itself had unfolded over the centuries. Within early societies, we started as a group of individuals who had responsibility for looking after our own individual needs, around the homestead during the agricultural era. As people became more skilled, we started to develop specialised crafts and trades, which was evident during the period of the ‘craft guilds’ of Europe in the 16th to 18th centuries. With the advancement of the industrial age, companies began to provide many of the products and services that we used to handle independently. This created a group of specialists or experts in various elements of the manufacturing or service sector. As this evolved, many people started to rely on others to provide certain things for them, in exchange for a fee. We began to develop a more generalist set of skills for all of those other aspects of life where we felt that we could do it for ourselves. Then as we moved into the information age and the knowledge age, we began to access much of the ‘how to do it’ information that enabled us to develop some of the skills of a gourmet cook, or an interior decorator or an accomplished gardener or a carpenter. To test this out, just spend a few minutes in any bookstore and check out the volumes of ‘do it yourself’ books on every conceivable topic. We have returned to a ‘DIY Culture’ – Do It Yourself.

We now seem to have gravitated to a stage where individuals have worked to establish specialised skills in some areas, particularly around their job or career and complemented those skills with a set of generalist skills in many other aspects of their lives. We are seeing a similar occurrence unfolding within the workplace. We are developing a workforce made up of Specialist/Generalists who can perform a variety of tasks at varying degrees of expertise. Is this phenomenon helpful within your library or is it creating confusion and uncertainty for staff?

Business today has reached an incredible level of complexity that is further complicated and compounded by the pace with which people expect services to be provided. As such, many organisations – and libraries are included – have become too complex to be able to rely on a large number of specialists to provide their full range of services to their broad client bases. This dilemma is further compounded by the various expectations of the different generations working within your organisation, as discussed earlier under Issue 2: Generational differences in the workplace. As employees seek more flexibility in their on-duty working schedules, if their specialised skills cannot be covered by other members of their team, then their specific skills become unavailable when they are not on duty. Telling clients that they will have to wait until a specific staff member returns to work to be able to obtain the information, the product or the service that they are looking for is not acceptable. ‘Come back tomorrow’ or ‘Call back next week’ are not acceptable answers for customers with high expectations. As discussed under Issue 6: Fostering a culture of outstanding customer service, customers and clients expect to have qualified people available who have the skills and abilities to meet their needs, especially in today’s society where instant responses and instant results are expected as a matter of course. So how can we manage our way through this complex situation, with so many competing interests and expectations?

One of the most effective responses is to accelerate the rate of skills development among staff, to take advantage of the specialist-generalist interest that currently exists in the workplace. Finding ways to introduce or to increase efforts to create the development of cross-skilled competencies among staff will help to address these issues head on. However, in order to proceed down this path, there must be a strong commitment from the leadership team that this is a worthwhile strategy. Unless there is agreement on this point, you will never be able to establish the mechanisms required to bring this approach to fruition.

Within a unionised workplace, the engagement of the union leadership is also required. As individuals start to expand their skills base, there will be expectations for changes in how compensation and benefits are applied. Fears about job security, job encroachment or blurred responsibilities will become major stumbling blocks unless candid, serious discussions are held with union representatives and employees, from the outset.

We ran into this situation a few years ago with a client that provided utility services in one of the provinces of Canada. As the techniques for running this utility in a safe and effective manner and delivering services to its client base changed, it was clear that the demands for some of the technical expertise could not continue to be provided by specific individuals only, especially in remote areas of the province, such as in the far north where the population base was very small and travelling distances between facilities were very great. It was no longer feasible to be able to demand that only a qualified electrician or only a qualified plumber or stationary engineer could perform certain functions in these remote locales. The demand for each of these services was limited and the payroll costs to maintain a full work team of specialists were becoming prohibitive. In some cases, the talent pool for some of these technical specialists was becoming quite shallow, with few new recruits being attracted to these skilled trades.

To overcome this rising tide of problems, management decided to undertake a process whereby current skilled trades people could become skilled in another trade if they wished, so that they could provide more than one set of skills when travelling across the province. Although management intentionally included union representatives in the discussions from the outset, there was still a degree of resistance – from the unions, who were fearful about the possibility of job losses or layoffs for some staff; from the employees themselves, who felt that they would be pressured into taking on skills and responsibilities that they were not interested in developing; from HR staff who were unsure about how this change would impact the current wage and benefit programmes; and from some managers who could not see how they could provide the time needed for staff to acquire the new skills. All in all, it was not a very encouraging scenario.

It wasn’t until we began to conduct an extensive series of information/discussion sessions with a mixture of people from all of the affected groups, including senior managers, union representatives, HR staff and employees, that we were able to identify all of the potential concerns. Then as the details of the programme were presented, along with the explanation that this change would be introduced gradually, based upon the results of an initial pilot project, each of the various stakeholder groups gradually began to come onboard with the new proposal. In the end, there were no job losses, which satisfied many of the union’s concerns, management was able to reduce their normal maintenance and service costs significantly because one properly trained individual was able to provide a variety of services while at a remote station, and due to some innovative and creative thinking by the HR team, individuals were able to receive increased pay and benefit considerations for their additional skills and duties. They had become more valuable to the company because of their cross-training capacities.

This ended as a win-win-win situation, but there were some valuable lessons learned along the way, including:

In too many cases, this type of initiative fails because management expects the staff involved in learning the new skills to carry their current full load of responsibilities and learn the new skills on the side, on their own time. That creates an unrealistic level of pressure, which will produce a high dropout rate among those who try to get onboard at the outset.

When this type of initiative is introduced, you need to understand that you are intentionally disrupting the normal flow and structure of the way work was being done, as you try to adapt to a new approach. During this transition period, don’t be surprised if efficiency falls off and a higher volume of errors occurs. That is natural and normal as everyone tries to work with the new approaches, the new responsibilities and the uncertainty that automatically accompanies any change of this type.

If you want to consider something like this for your own library, you need to give serious up-front consideration to the overall benefits to be achieved. Be as specific as possible in listing these benefits – and don’t overplay the benefits and underplay the potential difficulties, whatever you do. Smart managers actually do just the opposite. As such, if there are any surprises, they end up being positive ones as opposed to negative ones. By using the systems technique outlined in Chapter 5 (Concept 3: The A-B-C-D-E Systems Thinking Approach), you will be better able to consider the full range of issues that need to be factored into the planning such as:

Time spent on carefully working out a detailed plan of action – before you launch an initiative such as this – will always yield a positive return for you. Some experts feel that every hour spent in thoughtful planning will save you four hours of frustration during the implementation stage.

As you are no doubt already aware, there will be certain functions within the library that lend themselves quite naturally to cross-skill development or cross-training. These are the ones to start with, where the mutual benefits are clearly obvious. At the same time, other functions may be so specialised (such as Information Technology) that the possibilities for cross-functional skill development are somewhat limited or restricted.

The cases in which this approach seems to be most effective are in those organisations where the specific functional departments have already established a common practice of interacting across departments and functions. The ‘silo mindset’ discussed under Issue 7 can be minimised or reduced entirely, through some conscious efforts to encourage and advocate for lots of interaction between the various departments and across the whole organisation. Inter-departmental meetings or staff visitation programmes to other departments for brief periods, in order to develop a better appreciation and understanding of the role and function of another department and how your two departments can be more supportive of each other, are valuable small steps that help to set the stage for a more formal cross-functional skills programme. The use of cross-functional project teams to help find solutions to current problems, or to develop new and innovative approaches to enhancing service delivery can be a highly effective tool for creating opportunities for staff to meet their colleagues from other parts of the library. Anything that helps to minimise the negative components of the silo approach, without losing the specialised service benefits of each of the functional departments, will go a long way to building a ‘corporate mindset’ about how the total service function of the library can be delivered.

The benefits of cross-functional skills development was cited in the 8Rs Study on the Future of Human Resources in Canadian Libraries. In several areas of the final report, data were provided that demonstrated that staff were often expected to provide functions that were outside of their normal areas of responsibility.

In this study, one of the areas where this was most evident was in the leadership or management role that some librarians were expected to serve, even though their official job title or job description did not include these roles.

Under Issue 5: Initiating major change, we spoke of the stress/satisfaction issue that senior librarians were experiencing because of the demands to perform a wider variety of tasks and more difficult tasks over the past five years. This same phenomenon was also reported for mid-career and senior paraprofessional staff as noted in the study results, which:

The fact that library staff included in this extensive study found that more challenging work and more challenging tasks or assignments helped to make their jobs more interesting and more rewarding makes it an ideal opportunity to intentionally capture cross-functional skill development as a way to retain staff when there is the pressure of staff being lured away to another employer. It is also an extremely valuable way to help prepare staff for new positional responsibilities, as part of a succession planning initiative. Both of these issues – staff retention and succession planning – will be discussed in detail in the next sections of this chapter, as they are the last two of the ten most critical library HR issues.

Issue 9: Coping with the impact of the retirement boom

As noted when examining Issue 2: Generational differences in the workplace, one of the generational groups identified was that of the ‘Baby Boomers’ or the ‘Boomers’. Remember, this category, which describes employees who were born between 1943 and 1960 applies primarily to European and North American cultures, which experienced a significant population boom in the years immediately following World War II. Well, guess what? The Baby Boomers are now ready to retire – which has created our current ‘Retirement Boom’.

Projections about the size of this retirement boom are quite varied, depending on the specific country and the specific industry being examined. It is fairly safe to say that anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent of the senior management ranks of most organisations in North America and Europe are on the brink of retirement within 3–5 years. This range of estimates is very broad for several different reasons, including:

To overcome this uncertainty, Library Leaders need to conduct their own demographic profile for their current workforce in order to be able to know what their own unique situation looks like. Without this information, you could be in for some unpleasant surprises.

Earlier in this book, I described a workforce planning project for a government department that I had worked on. As part of this project, HR staff were asked to provide a statistical demographic profile of their current workforce. When the summary profile was presented, the senior executive leader was shocked to discover that 25 per cent of her management group was set to retire within the next three years. She asked, ‘When did this happen?’ My comment was ‘It’s been happening every year for the past fifteen years – but nobody has been monitoring it or worrying about it … up until now!’ This organisation was now faced with the difficult task of developing the new generation of managers and executives at a more accelerated pace than they had been anticipating.

This anecdote presents the heart of this issue in a succinct way.

This specific issue has a variety of five sub-points or concerns within it that we have been able to identify:

Let’s look at each of these sub-issues in more detail.

Like most complex organisational problems, the solution to this key issue of coping with the impact of the retirement boom does not lie within any one or two actions. The best solution is probably made up of elements related to each of these areas of concerns, as a composite set of responses which address the specific issues that are most relevant to one’s own situation.

Issue 10: Establishing career management and succession management systems

In covering Issue 9 we pointed out that there are a number of challenges to be faced by any library trying to weather the storm of the retirement boom. If you are already in the throes of this issue, then the value of being more proactive will become very self-evident. If the wave of the retirement boom within your own work team is still a few years away, now is the time to introduce some proactive initiatives that will ease the pressure for you down the road.

The two systems that any organisation can put into place to stay ahead of the retirement curve are:

With a sound Career Management System in place, you will be well positioned to introduce your Succession Planning process, because you will have a deeper talent pool to draw from, within your staff ranks, in identifying potential replacements for key positions that will be vacant within a year or two.

These two elements are intimately inter-twined. However, there is a logical sequence for introducing each one. Let us examine each of these components separately.

Summary