Considered and effective leadership

Abstract:

Difficult fiscal scenarios can be seen as opportunities to make difficult but necessary choices. External pressures can create a climate that will spur your organization to become more flexible and agile. Use unintended and undesirable circumstances to move your organization further along the path toward becoming a high performing organization, developing a culture that is even more responsive to user needs and expectations. Undertaking a complete organizational review can be time intensive and unsettling, but if done correctly, it can also be cleansing, invigorating, and helpful for staff morale. The result of incorporating purposeful abandonment will be a more effective organization, with an appreciative clientele and a realistic set of priorities and operations.

Key words

high performing organization

purposeful abandonment

external pressures

service reviews

financial difficulties

opportunities

enhancements

Why undertake a review?

As the economist Paul Romer stated, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste."

Consider your current difficult fiscal scenario as an opportunity to make difficult but necessary choices with less emotional resistance. Utilize the pressured climate to spur your organization to become even more flexible and agile. Use this unintended and undesirable impetus to develop a culture even more responsive to user needs and expectations. In reality, these are all desirable traits of a high-performing organization.

Undertaking a complete organizational review can be time intensive and frightening, but if done correctly, it can also be cleansing, invigorating, and helpful for staff morale. A well-conceived organizational review begins with considering and determining the ultimate intentions. Will the organization be satisfied if it continues to for the most part operate and perform as before, simply saving money after an efficiency re-engineering process? Or is this the right time to perform a more transformational evaluation and redesign, possibly abandoning less important operations while supplementing and/or enhancing existing services? A thorough organizational review should at least consider implementing transformational changes rather than merely modifying existing operations; even more so when resources are limited and new services are still expected. Purposeful abandonment of selected operations will be the logical consequence of intentionally using tough times as a driving force to examine, re-evaluate and drop certain historical but not recently re-evaluated tasks.

Organizational reviews may be initiated due to both internal and external factors. Changes in local conditions and priorities may result in reduced resource levels, or uncontrollable external costs may drive efforts to review and revise existing operations. Often it is both local competition and outside influences that pressure the organization, and the best ways to combat these factors are to be aware of potential stresses and proactively offer solutions that demonstrate your awareness of other competing claims on resources and concurrently enhance your services in important areas. Justifying budgets to simply maintain the status quo will not be as successful as offering better services with the same budget requests. Be seen as creative and entrepreneurial rather than conservative and safe.

Managing expectations, not operations

A library is a service organization, and success should be measured by the quality of the services provided. Quality can be measured in many ways - efficiency, effectiveness, satisfaction, creativity, and flexibility and agility to adapt in changing times. The most important element of success is the generation of user support and advocacy. In the highly competitive resource allocation negotiations that occur during challenging financial times, administrations often consider testimonials very highly . perhaps even more importantly than raw numbers which carry no inherent values. Powerful justifications and requests for additional or continuing resources should include important and informed stakeholder support.

In terms of documenting excellence, it is more important to measure and demonstrate user services effectiveness and satisfaction rather than internal productivity and efficiencies. For this reason you will want to solicit user feedback in quantitative and qualitative ways. It is also important to perform organized Focus Group and ethnological studies to better understand user desires and behaviors. This will help you create a more user-oriented organization.

Demonstrating user satisfaction with services is not enough; administrators also expect high-performing organizations to maximize their capital resources by considering and intelligently repurposing public spaces in relation to user desires and changing behaviors. Creatively adapting physical spaces and equipment is an important part of demonstrating good management, and leads to trust and respect - which leads to better and more proactive relationships with decision makers.

In addition to satisfying user expectations and making obvious facilities enhancements, addressing and meeting internal staff expectations results in improved morale. In addition, the involvement of staff in the design and evaluation of operations, with their detailed and nuanced understandings of day-to-day specific operations, often results in more highly improved and enhanced services. One cannot overestimate the importance and influence of total staff involvement in organizational reviews.

Finally, while libraries would like to control the environment and domain of expectations, in these dynamic times user expectations are often developed in response to outside factors, known as disruptive influences, which are outside the control of the library or the organization. These external influences must be identified and considered if libraries are to remain relevant portals and spaces for ever-changing user needs and desires.

Reporting to multiple masters: finding a balance of service quality and efficiencies

Libraries exist with a perpetual state of conflicting interests. In the classic paradigm, libraries must spend money to save researchers and users time and effort . which are often not counted as values in a measurable and returnable way. Good managers make such returns on investments obvious and part of the value equation.

Academic libraries are in a difficult and delicate situation as either cost centers or non-fee operations. Frequently a challenging administrative question is, "To whom do you demonstrate success?"

On the one hand, the administration stresses efficiency through efforts at centralization and standardization. On the other hand, user populations request customization and specialized services. The result is often a balancing of costs and services, with specialized services maintained according to specific population needs and demands. The consolidation of service points, a reduction in branch or departmental libraries, and the centralization of cataloging, check-in, and other distributed services are becoming more prevalent due to financial concerns. Fewer departments maintain librarian subject specialists as libraries migrate toward standardized book and journal profiles, patron-driven acquisitions, and/or utilize consortial cooperation for collection development and reference assistance. The expansion of e-books, with the possibility for on-demand point-of-need document delivery, will also allow for the further removal of redundancy of staff and services to unique and distributed populations. Librarians must advocate for and demonstrate a strong need for specialized and distributed services in order to maintain these more expensive (but more satisfying) arrangements.

Quite often politics and history are just as important as actual service quality when departments consider closing a branch library or removing subject support staff. As a decision maker, do not always allow emotional considerations to override practical or political concerns that may have much more important long-term value and impact. Lead users into the future with sensitive but firm direction and information about the need and benefits of change. Lead users across the uncomfortable line with the knowledge that new options will improve their efforts and resulting services.

Use quick demonstrations to show such improvements; seeing actual and powerful new options rather than hearing about them will quickly make converts out of even the most stubborn holdouts.

Commercial libraries may not have the exact same confusion of priorities, but they are constantly being reviewed for effectiveness in comparison to free resources and outsourced information services. Charge-back mechanisms to individual corporate units and enterprise-wide services for international operations can be just as competitive and require careful balances of special interests. In these cases the return on the investment (ROI) is even more important to demonstrate, and is the best way to compete against free options that might actually carry heavy negative costs in terms of effectiveness, reliability, and credibility.

Involvement and understandings across the organization

In order to perform a successful...