The environment surrounding each individual in a library today is quite different from that of 50 or even 15 years ago. Attention to the organization as an organic whole, rather than as a mechanism, very likely has been beneficial for most library employees and surely can be credited with the great progress that has been made in meeting the need for swift and profound organizational change and in steering the organization in a direction that will allow it to cope successfully with its environment. The library, as a managed collective, is currently in a better position than ever before to concentrate on the strengths and needs of its individual members, who daily provide the services and public relations of the organization. But, again, this focus should be on the individual as he or she functions in a much more sophisticated organizational dynamic. In the past 50 years, society in general and work in particular have changed considerably, and in a way that makes it likely that management directed at the individual can be more
successful today than then. Movements toward a more flattened organiza- tion, toward the flexibility of team approaches, and toward the learning organization, point in that direction. At the same time, the focus of the kind of change immediately pertinent to information technologies demands that individuals become expert and ever adaptable and open to learning situations. In the final analysis, the burden of change falls on to the back of individuals.
For many perfectly justifiable reasons, the question inevitably will arise as to the appropriateness of business models of organization for the library.
That will not be debated here. But it is pertinent to the substance of this paper to underline just two fundamental distinctions between business organizations and the vast majority of library organizations. First is the fact that the library almost always belongs to a host organization. Most often, however, the library is appended to the host organization, rather than being firmly embedded in it. Whether or not this should be the case or must forever remain the case is not argued here.18 But this situation is a consequence of the fact that the library is a service to the entire host and, as such, is not part of the assembly line of daily production, policy, procedure, goals, and objectives. Instead, the library functions in a consulting, auxiliary, and/or staff capacity to the host organization. In that regard, it is useful to bear in mind the counsel of two of the leading scholars in the field of organizational development:
The key concept is that of ‘fit’ya culture is good only if it ‘fits’ its context, whether one means by context the objective conditions of its industry, that segment of its industry specified by a form’s strategy, or the business strategy itself. According to this perspective, only those contextually or strategically appropriate cultures will be associated with excellent performance. The better the fit, the better the performance;
the poorer the fit, the poorer the performance. (Kotter & Heskett, 1992, p. 28)
‘‘Fit’’ is a matter of developing the culture that best aligns the library to its particular setting and that also accommodates the special considerations of the library profession.
Another feature of libraries that distinguishes them in a most fundamental way from business and industrial organizations is contained in the very premise of their existence. The library exists foremost, and in many cases solely, to engage the cognitive processes of the membership of its host organization. The implications of this distinction for the management of the library organization are broad and run deep, and they constitute the uniqueness of the library. But such implications extend well beyond the scope of this paper.
Returning to the library culture, the rapid and ubiquitous infusion of innovative technologies in recent years has placed unprecedented demands on the organizational flexibility of the library to fit the shifting contours of its host organization and, at the same time, to meet service standards that are constantly being raised within the profession. These have been challenges that libraries by and large have met through intelligence, dedicated effort, and organizational development. Generally, staff development programs have achieved a high profile in libraries and are becoming well integrated into the daily work and thinking of librarians. The often discussed phenomenon of the ‘‘blurring of lines’’ around functions and administrative units is an indirect consequence of the infusion of information technologies into the library. But it is even more directly the consequence of the organizational development strategies that have been adopted to gain control over the challenges and opportunities that the technologies introduce. It would be difficult for the observer to perceive that the organizational structure that continues to appear from the outside to be very much like that of two decades ago belies the fact that it works in ways that are much different.
Meanwhile, other changes are occurring. As the library organization becomes more horizontal and, therefore, a tad less vertical, direct authority holds less sway, and both authority and accountability become more diffuse.
This development creates a set of conditions whereby the role of the individual in the organization takes center stage. Success in the current environment demands greater self-discipline, greater self-accountability, and a much higher level of trust and ethical strength on the part of the individual than was previously required.
Organizational development strategies have helped individuals within these organizations understand more fully their respective roles, and even to gain some insight into the roles of others. Above all, they have helped form individual minds to see that there is a larger picture that incorporates their own responsibilities while placing added demands on them as members of the organization. Thus, the guidelines for individual behavior and attitude in the organization have evolved commensurately with the culture. There are limits to the influence that organizational development can have on the individual, of course, for there are many other influences on behavior and attitude that have formed the individual before entering the workplace, while there are still others that continue outside the workplace. But anyone who has been employed in libraries during the past two decades has surely seen and felt the change in their corporate culture.
Throughout that period, the responsibility of librarianship has been to varying segments of a society that has evolved from a production to a
service orientation. Similarly, in the past the profession prepared itself to serve a society that valued knowledge; then it adapted to serve a society that valued nothing very perceptible for a while, and then adapted yet again to serve one that valued information. Now we are returned to meeting the needs and interests of a society that seems to value knowledge, only this time it is a society imbued with a better understanding of the mutual dependence of information and knowledge. We even seem to be on the verge of returning to the notion of library as a place, but not the place that was familiar just a few decades ago. Moreover, while these fairly heavy environmental transformations were in motion, the entire world of knowledge, information, and communication shifted from labor intensive- ness to both labor and equipment intensiveness. Our profession has had to make more than a few profound changes in order to remain successful in this tumultuous environment, while its adaptation to the new characteristics of each successive environment definitely required ever greater agility of thought and action.
Consider, for example, the implications of practitioners moving away from the idea of a collection-centered service toward that of a client- centered service. Consider also the shift from viewing library personnel as a group of individuals filling rather discrete slots in rigid bureaucracies to viewing them as a set of teams with a common mission. Then consider that the profession has effected this transformation in a relatively short time. All this was accomplished largely through the process of tacit adoption of a new set of principles principles of a more qualitative nature that are far more demanding of the individual’s total being. ‘‘In a turbulent world, the requirement for change is ongoing’’ (Kotter & Cohen, 2002, p. 183). But note well that this did not come about by fiat of either the profession or the host organization; these principles were not established first and then followed in a neatly ordered fashion. In fact, looking back, it would appear that librarianship quite simply was driven by the desperation of so few trying to do so much in so little time while learning to carry on the business in a changing environment and subsequently in a new kind of organization.
In summary, the new qualitative principles are those that have been derived through the culture-driven organization.
The purpose of these qualitative principles in the library is to define how the functional principles are expected to be invoked by individuals, by the organization, and by the profession. Therefore, their implementation hinges on a revised strategy for the deployment of library staff and a raised set of expectations for them. Many of the personal characteristics now in demand formerly were not accorded high value in a formal sense or were considered
only as an ‘‘icing-on-the-cake’’ bonus. Such attributes are ‘‘flexibility’’ and
‘‘interest in being a team player,’’ and other personal attributes that have become as essential to practice as the functional principles, and in a learning organization may even overshadow some of them. Much like the frequently posted functional hiring criterion of ‘‘familiarity with information tech- nologies,’’ they more often are required for success in the profession than just preferred, even if the advertisement fails to make that clear.
How come human beings are skillfully incompetent and unaware? One answer is that the very action required to become skillful produces unawareness. Once human beings become skilled, they forget much of what they went through to become skillful. Skillful actions are those that ‘work’, that appear effortless, that are automatic and usually tacit, and that are taken for granted. A consequence of generating skills is designed ignorance.
(Argyris, 2004, p. 11)
The point here is not that we are wrong in wanting the skill set, but that we need far more than the skill set. In general, the profession is becoming more interested in the individual as a rational and sensitive being than as a palpable set of skills.
Anyone with much experience in hiring personnel into a large library is familiar with what I have labeled for the past three decades the ‘‘bucket brigade syndrome.’’ This syndrome is encountered when those who work closely with the position in question tend to want to hire someone who, posing no disruption, can step into the middle of things and assume the specifics of the vacated position without the need of any training. This is an easily understandable interest, for many reasons. But there are larger considerations. For example, could the bucket brigade be formed in another way, or could it be eliminated entirely in view of some other approach to the responsibilities, while taking other matters into consideration? Probably most of us fall victim to the bucket brigade mentality at some point, but, when the dominant part of the organization functions on that basis, problems arise and opportunities are missed. The question such an organization would do well to raise, if only in the absence of introspection, is, ‘‘Do we too often emphasize the skills useful to the maintenance of a particular function in the short term at the expense of an aptitude of value to the mission and goals of the library in the longer term?’’
The fact that the library leadership has been directing so much energy to organizational development indicates not only that it has grasped the need to overhaul its organization to fulfill the mission, but also that it has recognized the easily neglected need to project a positive image to the host organization. This involves choices about how the library culture should
be perceived from the outside. They are binary choices that could be represented on a sliding scale, such as an inviting and helpful environment, or a forbidding and austere environment; a service orientation or a task orientation; a team spirit or a bureaucratic mentality; an understanding of the culture of the host institution, or a disregard of distinctions among institutions; and manifest respect for clientele and colleagues as individuals, or their treatment as objects and as interruptions on the conveyor belt of daily work.
Similarly, individuals employed by the library have a set of choices for the kind of culture they would choose for the collective mindset of their workplace, where they spend more waking hours than anywhere else: an understanding of the mission and goals of the library and their relation to the individual, or a disregard of the implications of the library’s mission and goals for one’s responsibilities; knowing how things get done in the organization, or following a mental image only of anarchy; a willingness to test common assumptions, or an acceptance of them; recognition of the benefit of shared values, or protection of insular values; recognition of the value of dialectic, or rejection of the possibility of making improvements and achieving something better through collective reasoning; expectation of change as a normal part of responsibilities, or resistance to change as a distraction from the normal responsibilities; a predominance of continuous planning and evaluation in the work mode, or a predominance of reaction and problem solving; and the adoption of select strategy and tactics because they are congruent with the desired corporate culture, or the acceptance of those that fall outside that norm because they constitute an expedient.
And there are specific implications for choice in one’s own behavior and attitude that each individual now should feel responsible to consider:
effective and efficient communication, or communication that lacks in clarity, concision, and timeliness; understanding that learning is integral to a successful organization, or seeing it as a specific added task; flexibility and broad vision, or rigidity and narrow focus; initiatives or reactions;
identifying and controlling biases and prejudices, or allowing them to become the de facto controls; ability to cope well with ambiguity, or a heavy dependence on specificity; the vision of one’s responsibilities as a challenging career, or the reluctant acceptance of them as a job; a generally positive and optimistic outlook, or a generally negative pessimistic outlook; a sense of accountability to the organization and its host, or accountability solely to the supervisor; a process orientation, or a bucket brigade mentality; and the willingness to take risks, or aversion to risk.19
These choices all tie together, of course. They are the choices to be made by the individual and by the organization in the interests of service to the community and of earning its support.