The 80/20 Librarian: Focusing on the 20% that matters

Just completed a new post entitled Empowering Others.

I am thinking of blogging about some important life lessons that I have learned going forward. To keep it simple I will just blog about one life lesson at a time.

Another year of blogging and librarianship is about to pass yet again, so here is one successful thing that I have truly learned over this time:

1. In terms of supervision, empowering others has proven to be a great asset again and again. Empowerment immediately moves the supervisor away from micromanagement to a position of allowing the employee to flourish on their own. However, empowerment does not mean just leaving the employee alone to participate in a veritable guessing game as to what is effective or successful action. I accomplish empowerment in these steps:
   • Have a discussion as to how the employee’s gifts and interests contribute to the success of the organization or group. I always find that employees have an expertise or skill for some important work that I will never have or will never be nearly as good at. This is a good thing! Everyone should realize that have something unique to positively contribute! This understanding allows the supervisor to internalize the fact that the group or organization can be far more successful using everyone’s gifts, instead of just relying on the supervisor to force action.
   • Once finished discussing the employee’s gifts/interests (excellent employees often proactively bring their good ideas to a supervisor without the supervisor needing to ask, but if the employee is hesitant to initiate conversation the supervisor should reach out), the supervisor should ask the employee what they can do to help the employee succeed. I often ask an employee, what resources can I acquire or what support can I give to help you in this project? This question alone will allow the supervisor to learn and to gain the employee’s confidence/trust by providing resources and other support even if it is just moral support. I find that, as a supervisor, material resources are generally easy to acquire (unless something outlandishly expensive is deemed necessary). Another relatively easy resource to give employees is needed information. This allows the employee to have a context by which to place their work in.
   • The supervisor should then allow the employee time and space to work on their project with the understanding that the employee can go to the supervisor at any time to ask for assistance. Upon completion of the task the supervisor should check in with the employee to see how things went and what can be improved. Often a compliment or congratulations from the supervisor to the employee is in order. It is important to give feedback. If something went totally wrong, the supervisor should consider this a learning opportunity and ask the employee what they would do differently going forward. Learning from experience leads to wisdom. Great learning occurs more often from failures than from successes.
   • Quotes from business leaders to support empowerment
     1. Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft said, “The vision is really about empowering workers, giving them all the information about what’s going on so they can do a lot more than they’ve done in the past.” See http://sourcesofinsight.com/lessons-learned-from-bill-gates/
     2. Timothy Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week on page 110 notes, “It’s amazing how someone’s IQ seems to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them. People are smarter than you think. Give them a chance to prove themselves.”
     3. General Stanley McChrystal has several quotes from his book Team of Teams that I find useful. I will refer readers to excerpts of my post from three years ago.
     1. McChrystal’s decentralized managerial philosophy went something like this (page 214), “”If something supports our effort, as long as it is not immoral or illegal,” you could do it. Soon, I found that the question I most often asked my force was “What do you need?”
     2. Page 214, “On the whole, our initiative-which we call “empowered execution” met with tremendous success. Decisions came more quickly, critical in a fight where speed was essential to capturing enemies and preventing attacks. More important, and more surprising, we found that, even as speed increased and we pushed authority further down, the quality of decisions actually went up.”
     3. Page 216, “In the old model, subordinates provided information and leaders disseminated commands. We reversed it: we had our leaders provide information so that subordinates, armed with context, understanding, and connectivity, could take the initiative and make decisions.”
     4. Page 228, “”Thank you” became my most important phrase, interest and enthusiasm my most powerful behaviors. For a younger member of the command, even if the brief had been terrible, I would compliment the report.”

I’d like to share my favorite quotes from We Fed an Island by José Andrés with Richard Wolffe. I enjoyed learning how the chefs employed a variety of resources from school kitchens to food trucks to effectively respond en masse to the food and water crisis in Puerto Rico just after Hurricane Maria. From a management standpoint the lesson I learned was to utilize any material resources you have, communicate your needs to any existing partnerships you have, endear then recruit people to your cause, and keep plugging away by creatively improvising as the situation demands.

“With a couple of pieces of bread, you can easily put something in between and make a good sandwich. In a moment of real need, a simple sandwich looks like heaven. And if you feed the people, you are creating an army of first responders. If you look after people in their time of need, they become the most important and effective response: they become volunteers.” (Page 77)

“Our expertise was not just in cooking, and we couldn’t be the only ones to cook the food if we truly wanted to feed the island. Our expertise was in the whole food chain: from understanding what people wanted, to establishing where hungry people could find the food; from securing reliable supplies of ingredients, to distributing that food to the kitchens. We were matching supplies with needs, on an island where power and communications were still very unreliable. We had no idea how anyone had done this before, or how the official powers were planning to do it now. But we solved the problems as they popped up, as chefs do, and we just started cooking.” (Page 124)

“Our solution to the challenge of creating a meal that was easy to transport and stayed edible for long periods was a simple, old-school idea: the ham and cheese sandwich. I have created many avant-garde dishes as a chef but there are few meals I’m prouder of than the hundreds of thousands of sandwiches we made in Puerto Rico.” (Page 136)

“Whether the meals cost a few dollars or a few hundred dollars, you do your best with the ingredients you have. In the end, it’s the same thing.” (Page 196)

At the end of We Fed an Island, on page 235, is a reference to Tim Sullivan’s article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “Embracing Complexity,”. Sullivan’s example of an ant colony is briefly discussed on page 235. “Each ant works with local information, and has no big picture of what’s going on. It has no plan, and no obvious leadership, yet together the colony achieves incredible feats of organization and engineering. What we did was embrace complexity every single second. Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people.”

“If we had a plan, it was to be united to achieve as much as possible.” (Page 236)

“What works in a disaster is localized decision-making.” (Page 240)

I think the library community should be aware of the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus

Libraries could benefit from looking at this since they are so connected to education.

The website states, “The Lennon Bus is highly adaptable, designed to provide students, their schools and communities with performances, hands-on demonstrations, remote recordings, and studio sessions customized for their needs, levels of experience and interest. The Bus travels the country visiting schools, music and technology conferences and events, and partners with communities and media outlets to call attention to the importance of arts and digital media education.“

I recently came across a passage while reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain.

On page 57 Cain discusses research from Adam Grant

The summary, on introverted and extroverted leaders, is as follows:

Introverts do really well leading initiative takers

Extroverts are better at leading passive workers

I never knew that the leader’s success is possibly related not only to the leader’s own personality but also to the personality or disposition of the leader’s followers.

My favorite quotes on this topic were:

“Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtuous circle of proactivity, in other words.”

“Extroverts on the other hand can be so intent on putting their own stamp on events, that they risk losing others’ good ideas along the way and allowing workers to lapse into passivity. But with their natural ability to inspire, extroverted leaders are better at getting results from more passive workers.”

Earlier in the year I paid tribute to author Peter Mayle. As Bastille Day is almost here come July 14, I thought I would let readers know about the recent publication of Mayle’s final work entitled My 25 Years in Provence. I have gotten through the first several chapters and am really enjoying it.

Shannon Ables’ blog the Simply Luxurious Life has a very well done post on My 25 Years in Provence. It gives a potentially interested reader a good glimpse of what to expect without giving away much.

Those of us in the library industry following the trend of the implementation of passport services will want to pay attention to Yvonne Wenger’s Baltimore Sun article from June 4, 2018 entitled Baltimore’s Pratt Library Goes Fine Free Foe Overdue Books

While overdue fines will be eliminated, replacement charges will still be issued to those customers who never return checked out items.

It is interesting to note that the revenue incurred by fines will need to be made up for budgetary reasons. What service is very likely to be implemented to make up the shortfall of dollars? Passport Services! As Wenger writes, “She (Pratt Library CEO Heidi Daniel) is considering adding revenue-generating services, such as accepting passport applications, to help offset the loss.”

$100,000 is the dollar benchmark that will need to be recovered and I am 95% confident that the Pratt system will implement passport services in the next 6 to 12 months if not sooner. I use a 95% confidence level to account for a 5% chance of error.

Thus, we have one of the first articles that points to a direct relationship between the forgoing of fine revenue and the implementation of passport services to recover a library system’s lost revenue once fines are abandoned.

My professional opinion is that we will see this trend continue. Automatic renewals of checked out items, the increasing number of electronic materials which automatically return making them fine-less by their very existent, less purchasing of physical circulating materials, the labor involved in collecting fines with collection agencies, and a potential movement to go fine-free completely are driving an interest in passport services to recoup a revenue stream which is no longer as strong as it once was.

Well, ALA Connect is now officially up and running! The Public Library Association’s (PLA) Immigration and Citizenship Interest Group might be a good place to start a discussion on the passport services work that libraries are carrying out across the country.

Note that PLA personal membership is required to join an interest group and you must be logged into your ALA Connect account to access the page.

In following the story of American Library Association (ALA) Connect, which is currently being worked on I am wondering if this could be the best platform for librarians to electronically communicate on a national level on passport related service ideas/questions that they have.

To my knowledge no national electronic platform to communicate on passport services currently exists for librarians to use.

Obviously ALA Connect has the backing of the national professional association for the industry, which makes it ideal to use.

While work is still being performed to get ALA Connect ready to launch, I am willing to wait and see what transpires. To be continued.

A few months ago I was asked to speak on a panel at the Maryland Library Association Conference, in nearly two weeks, on the topic of passport services in libraries.

I recently learned from the State Department that 323 library branches around the country offer passport acceptance facility services.

One aspect of this service that makes it unique is that there is, as of early February 2018, a $35 passport execution fee paid, per application, directly to the library for its role in providing the service. The execution fee is a separate and distinct fee from the application fee paid directly to the State Department

While the number of libraries offering this service nationwide is impressive, the library industry only has a few articles out there which speak to this service.

Robert J. Rua from Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Public Library wrote in February 2011 in American Libraries Magazine

Some important points from Rua’s article are that his library started passport services in April 2010. His library made over $100,000 in execution fees. The money from the execution fees allowed his library to reinstate Sunday service hours to the entire library system. Passport services were then offered at all branches of the Cuyahoga County Public Library System.

Michael Meise from Roanoke County (VA) Public Library wrote in June 2016 in Public Libraries

Some important points from Meise’s article include the statistic that 203 libraries were offering passport services nationwide at the time of his writing. We also learn that some discernment is involved in seeing what the trade-off is between obtaining the then $25 execution fee per application and considering the number of staff needed, the time the service takes, and the staff’s current and future workload. Many tips on how to actually go about providing passport services are provided.

Leah White from ELA Area Library System wrote in her personal blog in November 2016   

We learn the following points from her post. Her library filed 7,493 passports in 2015. With a $25 execution fee the amount earned from all 7,493 filings came to $187,325. She provides links that act as “how-to” resources for libraries that want to become passport acceptance facilities.

White brings forth some compelling arguments to provide passports services at the library. The two quotes below resonate. The first speaks to libraries being able to offer evening and weekend hours, and no appointment needed service for their passport acceptance services.

“Most facilities, like a local clerk offices or post offices, offer extremely limited hours that only people privileged enough to have paid time off can afford. Weekdays during work hours and appointment only. Someone with multiple jobs and no paid time off cannot come in Monday through Thursday between 9am and 1pm,  in addition to the hassle of getting their children out of school for the day.”

“You bring people in for passport service but also introduce them to all the library offers – ESL classes, voter registration, lifelong learning, programs, books, etc.”

So what do I think are the next steps? Here is a general outline of my thoughts.

1. The national library industry, possibly through its professional associations, needs to develop some platforms (facilitating both electronic and in-person communication) for librarians across the country to communicate about passports. At the very least a national directory outlining where passport services are provided would be key to start opening up the lines of communication. After looking through program information for the American Library Association Conference in June 2017 in Chicago and the Public Library Association Conference in March 2018 in Philadelphia I could not find any program offerings on the topic of passport services.
2. The academic wing of the library industry should invest in studying and explaining the passport acceptance service model. Some basic questions should be posed to start the study. These could be simply asking, Who was the first library to offer passport services? When? What was their original intent? What were the metrics of success for them? Do those metrics of success differ from other libraries providing this service? Why or Why not? Case studies can be created to explain the development of passport services at different types of libraries across the country.
3. The library industry’s technological vendor community can be consulted for a possible pilot study to see what can be done to automate at least a part of the passport application acceptance process. Currently, the vast majority of passport applicants going to a library must pay the State Department with a paper check or money order. Why not work on building in a credit card payment system? In addition, the filing process largely uses paper forms and filling out those paper forms by pen. Why not build in a kiosk system that can scan the form and prepopulate the data on a screen? Or, enable a kiosk system to fill out and submit an application electronically? Digital photos of the applicant could also be taken by the kiosk system. While physical objects such as previous passports and original government documents will probably still need to be mailed in, the payment/form completed piece could be considered for automation.
4. Promote the services to major press outlets! Since there are not many articles written about the service at the national level of the library industry, the national press is by extension possibly largely unaware of the library as a passport acceptance service provider. There was no mention of libraries providing passport acceptance services in this Fox News Report in early February 2018 documenting the change of the execution fee from $25 to $35.