When Life Changes Hurt

I’ve not been posting a lot lately because life has trumped blogging more than usual.  My grandmother (Nannie) passed away last Tuesday night.  It was the end of a long 6 months of rapidly declining mental and physical health.  The truth is, my Nannie mostly left us this past summer.  Her mental state was quickly deteriorating along with her physical health.  Regardless of whether she was having a “good” or “bad” day, she never forgot who I was and always smiled when she saw me.  I was fortunate that even though I live almost 600 miles away from my family, I was able to see Nannie several times before she passed and while she was in relatively good health.

My Nannie was the center of our family.  She leaves behind two daughters, two son-in-laws, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.  She loved all of us very much and went out of her way to make everyone feel like they were a part of our family.  She was everything a grandparent should be and I am truly blessed to have had her in my life.

I had the honor and painful task of giving the eulogy at her funeral Thursday night.  I’d like to share it:

I feel very out-of-place as I am usually better prepared when I stand in front of a group of people to talk, but I was thinking about what I wanted to say and kept getting stuck, and then I would cry and ended up with nothing written.  In my thinking I always came back to the same thought:  Nannie taught me how to drive.  Nannie taught me how to drive because no one else would get in the car with me.  So for three years she let me drive to and from school every morning.  It’s funny because I didn’t even get my license until I was 21, but she still taught me.  What I don’t think anyone knows since I know I didn’t tell anyone, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t either; is that I almost got into my first car accident with her.  We were driving to school one morning, it was winter and the road was icy.  I lost control of the car and we went skidding off the side of the road almost hitting another car.  Luckily I managed to stop the car before we hit anything.  Now when we stopped I was gripping the steering wheel so tightly and then I bursted into tears because I was so afraid.  I turned and looked at Nannie and she was laughing hysterically at me.  And that is what I remember.  That she was silly.  I don’t think many of us think of her as silly, but she really was.

I work everyday with students and I have a large number of coworkers.  Sometimes we get into conversations about our families and I always sorta feel alien when the subject of grandparents comes up.  Most people talk about their grandparents in terms of people that they see maybe several times a year or monthly or maybe once a week.  It seems sort of unusual that Nannie was there everyday.  I am grateful and I feel very blessed that I had my grandmother in my life every day for 30 years.  Dad and I talked earlier today and we figured that she lived with us for at least 25 years.  Every day of those 25 years she was in my life.

Nannie taught us a lot of things:  Red birds are evil and mean something bad.  Newlyweds can’t make their own beds and someone whose father has passed can’t for them.  If you’re a maid of honor you must have a red ribbon shoved down your cleavage (I won’t talk about how I found that one out).  And our favorite: If you laugh on Sunday, you’ll cry on Monday. Well it’s Thursday and I’m crying. Lots of great things….but seriously….she taught me that your family is the most important thing you have.  No matter how frustrated or angry or upset they make you, they are still your family.  No matter what decisions they make, even the ones that you may not agree with (like moving to North Carolina or telling someone that you are actively praying that they don’t get that job in North Carolina) they are still your family and they love you.  She also taught us to treat everyone like family.  I am reminded of how when I was younger I’d have sleepovers and she would make breakfast for all of us, telling my friends to call her Nannie.  She treated everyone like a member of our family.  Even if you weren’t you were treated that way – sometimes better than those of us who were family.

People talk about unconditional love and they usually refer to the parent/child relationship, but I really think that if you want to see the true definition of it, you should look no further than the grandparent/grandchild one.  She loved us unconditionally and let us do whatever we wanted.  All she wanted was for us to be happy.  She was very fortunate as she lived to see her children and grandchildren grow up and be happy and successful.  She was surrounded by love.

So she could be very silly.  She wrote me this card, which is really just half of a card because she recycled it.  But I know she sent it because the front is in the shape of a house.  She wrote this note on the back [reads note]..she was very sweet, but the real reason I kept this, aside from being a packrat, is because the house has windows on the top of it, like a second floor, and she drew a picture of herself looking out the window.  And that is how I will remember her – living upstairs from us.

When I called my boss to tell him I would be out this week, he must have called our director and let her know.  She sent me a very kind email and in it she said: “Great relationships between a grandparent and grandchild can be
difficult to continue into adulthood so those that do are so, so precious.  They provide great, great joy, but their loss brings a terrible grief.”  I’m 34 years old, so I guess I’m an adult, and I can tell you that what she said is correct- this is incredibly painful and I am so sad.

I love my grandmother very much.  I don’t know what else to say except that I miss her very much.  This is kind of morbid, but I can’t help laughing and thinking as I look at the pictures we hung, that there is one hell of a party going on up in Heaven.  Nannie is up there with her husband and her sisters and friends and family and I can’t help thinking that they are having a good time.  I’m sure they are eating really well and being very loud and possibly annoying the rest of the dead people.

I’m so grateful that I had her for as long as I did.  I love her very much.  I miss her.

I don’t usually get very personal in this space, but I feel like this is such a life changing event for me that I wanted to share it.  I absolutely equate her death to that of a parent.  My grandmother was everything to me and such a center of my family’s universe.  Sometimes situations like this change us.  I do feel a change, though I have not yet put my finger on it.  My attitude is definitely being adjusted – for the positive I believe.  I’m still processing all of my emotions, but I’m certain that they will manifest somehow in my attitude towards my work and my approach to management and service.

The Side Effect of Management No One Wants to Talk About

I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts folder for a while now.  One of my new year’s resolutions was to work through or delete draft blog posts.  This one seemed important enough not to delete and it came up in conversation this afternoon.

Ideally we strive for a healthy work/life balance.  We all want to come home at the end of the day, unwind, do our thing and not have to think about work until the next day.  Depending upon your job, acheiving a happy balance is either easy or difficult.  A lot of times when starting a new job it’s very difficult to have a healthy work/life balance, but eventually as you learn the ropes and work gets easier, the scale evens out.

Social networking has thrown a bit of a wrinkle into this equation.  All of us seem to be online 24/7, whether updating our Facebook status, tweeting where we are eating dinner, posting pics of our pets to FriendFeed – whatever your social network of choice – our lives, both professional and personal are available for all to see.  This is both good and bad.

Good:  We can connect with others professionally and personally.  We find people with similar interests.  We feel connected to a larger community.  We can learn from one another.

Bad: As managers our staff can read these updates and posts and while our intent may be one thing, their reading and interpretation of it may be entirely different.  Not. Good.

So what to do?  Do we censor our online selves?  Do we only post off the clock?  Do we nuke our social networking profiles?  My answer to all of these is an emphatic no with a word to the wise:  be mindful.  We don’t need to censor ourselves, but we may need to choose our words more carefully.  We may need to consider the time we are posting.  Does your Facebook status of, “Don’t mind me, my head just imploded” refer to that staff meeting you had an hour ago?  Well, even if it doesn’t your staff may think it does since you posted it after the meeting.  Yes, there are coincidences in life, but most people don’t think of coicidences first, they think the worst case scenario.  Usually the worst case scenario involves you, the manager, being upset at them, the staff.

Our online personas tell a lot about the people we are and what we are doing and thinking.  As a manager, you need to keep that in the back of your mind at all times.  Perception is important and when it goes bad, it is hard to repair.  There is a time and a place to share thoughts and feelings about work, be mindful of what you are sharing and when.

Change is Good

Yesterday, Colleen and I were walking back from lunch and we ran into one of our staff whom I had not seen since before the holidays.  She had a very good holiday season as she became engaged, bought a new home and new furnishings.  Naturally, she was beyond happy. You could see her happiness coming from every pore of her body.  Her effusiveness while telling us about her latest life happenings, her body language, her eyes…..all spectacularly happy.  It was absolutely contagious.

Around May of 2009, this particular staff member was informed that her position that she has dutifully performed for 10 years was going away due to budget issues.  She was literally handed a new job description.  One that had absolutely nothing to do with the type of work she had been doing.  I was impressed with her positive attitude about this situation then and to say that now would be the biggest understatement on the planet.  She has embraced every aspect of her new position with energy, enthusiasm and flexibility.  It is amazing to watch and I could not be any more proud to have her in our department.

In our conversation yesterday she kept repeating something: “Change is good.  It is hard at first, but you have to go through.  It’s scary, but sometimes when something isn’t working you have to make a change.”  She recognized how much change she has gone through in her professional life this past year, and admits that while it was scary at first, in the end it turned out to be a good thing.

Her feelings nicely sum up my own thoughts about work and life.  Change is good.  We may not always realize it when it is happening, but if we allow ourselves to take a step back, give it some time or space, and look at it objectively we will find something positive.  I’m hoping to continue the trend of positive change that we’ve been riding in ADS for the past two years.  I am hoping that 2010 will be the year ADS kicks ass.  I think with people like this in the department there is no way that can’t happen.

Looking Back at 2009

I can’t believe that in less than 3 weeks 2009 will be gone and 2010 will be upon us.  To say that 2009 was a rollercoaster would be an understatement.  The past few days I have been thinking back on the year and listing what I thought the highs were.  There were many moments that make me smile. I’m going to try to list some of them chronologically.

January:  Our new associate department head, Colleen Harris, started.  She has been a fantastic addition to the department’s management team.  She hit the ground running and hasn’t stopped.

March: Our circulation/reserves supervisor, Tina Adams, was named Library Journal’s Paraprofessional of the Year. To say that I was/am beyond proud is another understatement.  This was the first year NCSU Libraries submitted a nominee for the award and we won!  The competition was stiff, but the awesome thing was the terrific amount of support Tina received from her colleagues.  Her nomination letter and letters of support were strong and spanned various departments in the library.  I am so proud of her.

May: The department survived another semester.  We had a full year of course textbooks and Reserves Direct had been implemented for an entire year.  Neither of these projects could have been possible or successful without the expertise of our colleagues in collection management, IT, acquisitions, metadata & cataloging, and preservation.

June & July:  In addition to the staff training that ADS completed, staff successfully navigated the merger of the media/microforms center with ADS.  This involved some changes in responsibilities and positions for certain staff, as well as absorbing and moving the entire media collection.  I am incredibly proud of how all the staff directly affected by the closing of MMC and ADS as a whole handled this change.  We also took over the responsibility of circing tech lending devices.  This is a high volume service that requires some more specialized knowledge and included a staff person being added to the department.  Again I am proud and impressed by how this was handled by everyone directly affected.

August:  The first Annual ADS Staff Retreat was held the first week of August.  It was/is the proudest day of my professional career.  Nothing has made me happier than what happened that day.  The department came together all at once, for the first time all 30+ of us were in the same room at once, and we talked about the kind of department we would like to be.  The ideas expressed and shared were positive and constructive.  I was proud and impressed with my staff.  They showed me how incredible they all are and how much they are committed to both the department’s and Library’s mission.  It was amazing. It would not have been a success were it not for the fantastic facilitation provided by our colleagues in Training and Development.

September – December:  The first semester where we were hit with the big three: tech lending, course reserves, and textbooks.  This was also the first semester where we hired students to work the circulation desk alongside full-time staff (at least since I have been here).  I truly feel the semester was a smashing success.  The students are a tremendous amount of fun to work with and watching them and the staff bond has been a riot.  There are some definite lasting friendships. There is now a waiting list to get to work in ADS.  Students are stalker our supervisors in order to get interviewed.  It is awesome and indicative that we are doing something right.  I am beaming.

Personally, I have had one of the most fulfilling professional years of my career.  Aside from what is listed above, my colleagues continue to impress me with their expertise and willingness to collaborate and share.  I gave more presentations this year than any year previous.  In my opinion they were all resounding successes.  I am most proud to have been included on the ACRL/NY’s Annual Symposium’s program this year.  It was a fantastic day and I thoroughly enjoyed giving my presentation.  I spoke at Brick & Click on managing staff performance and got terrific feedback.  It was a great feeling to share some of my expertise with my colleagues at other libraries. The first Access Services Conference was held this year in Atlanta.  It was exciting to be a part of the inaugural program and I am looking forward to attending and presenting again at next year’s conference.  It was a thrill to finally put faces to names and to have it reiterated that I am not alone in the work I do.

On the whole 2009 was pretty awesome.  I am looking forward to 2010 and the challenges and opportunities it will bring.  BRING IT, LIBRARYLAND!

On the Internet No one Has to Know How Much of An Ass You Really Are

I’m kinda tired of all the negativity lately.  In fact, it’s starting to get stale and exhausting and nauseating.  The latest large dose of it is courtesy of the Annoyed Librarian and all the anonymous commenters on the most recent posts.

Here’s the thing: I don’t care if you disagree with the medium, I don’t care if you don’t agree with the message.  I don’t care if you disagree with the list of skills, the essays on the site or the work that Michael Porter and David Lee King do.  Because if you disagree with those things I will make the assumption that you can back your opinion up with some substance.  And then there would be a constructive discussion.

What really bothers me is the massive hate pile on.  The general attack on both of their personalities and professional work.  The non-constructive comments.  The anonymous mean comments.

Library 101 may not be my thing, but I’ll never take away from the enthusiasm, passion and effort that went into creating it. I appreciate that enthusiasm and frankly I think the library profession needs more of it.

It bothers me to watch two people get attacked for work that they put a ton of time, effort, money and love into.  When was the last time you did something that you passionately believe in and put a huge effort into and gave your all and got really excited about creating?  Think about that.  Now think about how you’d feel if it was bashed in a national public forum by anonymous strangers.

It wouldn’t feel too good, huh?

Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

I am the oldest of four children.  I have one sister who is three years younger than I am, and two female cousins, one 4 years and the second 10 years younger than myself.  I say that I am one of four because in grand, old school Italian style, our families (my mom and her sister) lived very close to one another and my grandparents.  We were raised as a four-pack and did everything together – vacations, birthdays, weekends, weekdays, after school, Sunday dinners, you name it, we did it together.  When I was 13 our grandmother moved into our house and still lives with my parents.  Us kids thought this was great because now we had Nannie’s cooking every night and she dropped us off and picked us up from school – no more bus.  This also meant that at any given time there were 5-8 people in our house.  It was fun, but insane, and very, very loud.

Sometimes stereotypes are so dead-on that you laugh when you read about them or see them portrayed in movies or on television.  The stereotype of the loud, everyone talking at once, everyone has an opinion, everyone’s opinion is correct, and whomever is the last one talking wins all happening around a table of food is very true, at least it was in my house.  If you put any stock in birth order, you’d know that first born children tend to be more conscientious, more socially dominant, less agreeable and less open to new ideas than later born children.  Add a huge dose of Italian upbringing and this pretty much summed up my personality up until I was 22 years old.  You could not tell me anything.  I had an opinion and you were going to hear it.  I was right, you were wrong and that was the end of the story.  It was my way or the highway.

I took this personality to college with me and surprisingly did very well.  I had my mind opened much more than I had before and became a more tolerant person.  I began college as pre-med.  I wanted very much to be a doctor, but life had other plans for me and after my sophomore year, I transferred schools and found myself as a history major.  I graduated and then on the suggestion of a librarian I worked with, decided to go to library school.  She swore up and down that I would be a “fantastic librarian.”  I am still not sure if she was correct, but I am enjoying figuring it out.

This seems like a very long winded story and way to talk about stepping outside your comfort zone, but there is a point I promise to make.  Being a doctor would have been a great job for me and my domineering personality.  I wanted to be an ER doc, which would have been fantastic since I could bark out orders and work in a high stress environment.  But, that did not happen.  What did happen was during my first year of graduate school I accepted a management position at the library.

Looking back on that time, I can safely say that I was not a glowing success in that position.  I actually had a supervisor tell me that they thought my personality was not suited for management and that I tended to get very upset when I did not get my way.  I wish I could say that I disagreed with that assessment, but I knew then and I know now, that was a dead-on appraisal of my management skills.

When I accepted my first professional position I made a promise to myself that I would work on developing my management skills.  There was not a lot of opportunity to attend formal professional development classes for this, but I found ways that I could improve my skills.  I started very simply, I listened to other people.  I really listened.  I considered other people’s opinions.  I worked on having better discussions about projects or issues.  I engaged others.  And, more often than not, I took their advice or suggestions and put them into practice.  I also learned how to accept criticism and feedback.  I learned to listen to it and accept it with grace and then work on improving the problem.  When receiving criticism and feedback I practiced what I like to call “generous listening.”  To me, that meant remaining calm, not interrupting, not arguing, asking for clarification or suggestions, and then thinking about what I was just told.

Do I need to explain how difficult this was for me to do?  Me, the gal who won every argument by yelling the loudest.  The one who would sit at a table of 10 people who were all talking at once and was still heard.  The oldest child who’s way of doing things was always the right way.

The point I am getting at, rather circuitously, is that doing that self-reflection and work was difficult and at times extremely uncomfortable.  Being honest with yourself, the type of honest where you admit you have faults, is painful.  However, it is also invaluable to our development and improvement and when you are committed to changing, the results can be life changing.

Being a good manager requires constant self-assessment.  It requires adapting to your environment and those who you are interacting with on a daily basis.  Learning how to communicate.  Discovering how to motivate people.  Realizing what you are doing that may be ineffective and sometimes damaging.  In short, it requires you to go outside your comfort zone on a continual basis.

The good news is that once you regularly go outside your comfort zone it starts to become familiar and comfortable.

An interesting side note: the three remaining in my four-pack (my sister and two cousins) all became teachers….and married teachers.  I find it funny because the classroom, at least as I remember it, is not a democracy.  You do what the teacher tells you.  This is even more funnier after I tell you that they are all math teachers.  There are no gray areas in math. The answer is either right or wrong.  This is the perfect place for our types of personalities.  I’ve been a manager for almost ten years.  When I come home for holidays, events or vacations and we are all together (now our numbers seem to have doubled) I get teased because I am the “quiet one” who “never argues” anymore.  I just smile and tell them that I am listening to them.

Librarians In the Wild Doing Awesome Things

Getting ready to catalog in Library Thing

I’m sitting in the gift shop of the Joel Lane House in downtown Raleigh, NC with 13 of my collleagues.  We are “flash mob” cataloging the museum’s small collection in Library Thing.  Having not cataloged since library school, I must say that cataloging in Library Thing is so simple and fun!!!!!  Loving every minute of this.

Settling in to flash mob catalog the collection

The Not so Fun Part of Management: Confrontation and Accountability

I was going to title this post Compassionate Management, but I think I want to go bigger than just this one aspect.  Confrontation. Most people hate it.  A small number love it, while a much larger number work diligently to avoid it.  Contrary to what people may think, this is not a part of being a manager that makes our year.  We do not relish in it, and it can be an extremely uncomfortable interaction.

A while ago I wrote a post about Giving and Receiving Feedback.  It is one of the most popular posts on this site and it is extremely applicable in this discussion. Rather than re-hash it, I want to expand on it a bit.  As managers we have a responsibility to our superiors, our employers and most importantly, our staff to provide performance feedback and guidance.  Ignoring under performers and claiming blissful ignorance, or covering for those whose work is not up to standard helps no one and hurts a heck of a lot of people.  I come to work each day and have to look each of my staff in the face and tell them I am working hard to help them.  If I chose not to address blatant performance issues I would be lying to them.  I don’t like lying or liars.

Confronting someone about their performance or behavior is not a fun or easy task.  There have been many books written about how to conduct a performance discussion and/or review.  All give solid advice and I have used many of the tips and strategies.  The important thing to remember is that a person needs to understand and accept responsibilty for their performance and behavior.  They need to know how they will be evaluated and that they will be held accountable when issues arise. As managers we need to work with staff to correct or improve performance. We need to provide our feedback in a constructive manner, clearly and concisely.  And most importantly, set expectations and deadlines if necessary.

This is not a joyous or fun part of being a manager.  Confrontation is a part of life – work life, home life, personal life.  At work, it is just abou that.  It’s not personal and should not be taken that way.  No one likes to tell someone something that they don’t want to hear.  No one likes firing anyone.  I would not want to work for someone who enjoyed these types of interactions.

LJ’s Paraprofessional of the Year 2009: Tina Adams

I am so incredibly proud to work with Tina Adams, LJ’s Paraprofessional of the Year for 2009.  Tina is a valued member of my department who truly cares about our work and our staff.  What tickled me pink about Tina’s nomination was the willingness of our colleagues to write letters of support and recommendation.  She is a credit to the profession and I hope that I have the good fortune to work with her for many years to come.  Congratulations, Tina!  You deserve this!!!!

Generous Management is a Two Way Street

Happy New Year!  Well, work trumped blogging a lot towards the end of 2008.  There was a lot of work orienting new employees, general end of the semester/year craziness, and then preparing for the new associate department head’s arrival.  There have been a lot of posts brewing in my head and I figured now is a good time to share some thoughts.

A friend of mine recently reminded me of a post over at Brazen Careerist that I had bookmarked.  It is focused on good management and stresses the importance of generosity when managing people.  I agree with Penelope on pretty much all of her points, but my mind can’t help but go one step beyond where she ends.  It is absolutely true that the good managers are the ones who give generously of their time, patience, skills, and mentorship.  A good manager checks in with staff on a daily basis, listens to their feedback, addresses issues and concerns, provides the necessary resources, and dedicates time to developing their stafft.  I get behind all of this and try to practice this in my management style.  The last paragraph of the post is what hit home for me:

“So really, management is an opportunity to self-actualize. Some people will self-actualize by being artists, or writing code. Some people will self-actualize through management. Some, a combination. But the point here is that being in management is an opportunity to grow spiritually and give back to the world in a way that is enormously fulfilling. If you allow it. You will need to set aside real time to make this happen. And you need to give generously. No big surprise there, though, because why else are we here, on this planet, except to give to each other?”

Reading this started the wheels turning in my head.  The holidays put the wheels on pause, but then recent discussions at work and home this week got them spinning all over again.  The big questions I keep spinning around: What happens when you get little to nothing in return? What happens when you get nothing but negative back? How can we as managers build something from little to nothing?

I’ve been thinking that the short answer is that it means you’re in for a lot more work as a manager.  You need to dig your heels in, find the small, but significant battles to win, and every now and again pull the rug out from under people in an effort to facilitate change.  Failure is always a possibility.

Sometimes I feel like management is treated as if we are not allowed to have feelings or needs.  Sometimes we have to swallow a lot that in situations other than work we would never stand for.  I love a challenge and I love to give of myself, but sometimes it can be a very draining, unrewarding experience.  No one wants to hear or talk about that side of the coin, but I think it is time.