SWOT’s up?

Today we took some extremely valuable time out to meet as a team to conduct a SWOT analysis. This followed a briefing earlier in the week at which every team member was individually tasked to come up with strengths, weaknesses (internal influences), opportunities and threats (external influences) for our Information & Library service. Everyone was given a wadge of different coloured post-it notes on which to record their take on the current status quo ahead of the session and this morning they were added to four separate flipchart sheets, before we discussed and debated the findings.

Strengths were first up and we all felt pretty upbeat and cheery as there was some very affirming content on that sheet and it was great for us all to hear it.

• expertise;
• creativity;
• innovation;
• forward-thinking approach;
• willingness to assist users;
• strong customer-service focus;
• 24/7 access;
• wide range of e-resources;
• a popular blog/website;
• our teaching role;
• listening to our users;
• making an impact beyond the library walls.

Weaknesses. Out of these arose a clear need for:

• a more appropriate physical space with more study desks (which could be more representative of the service we offer);
• more project planning;
• improved relations with some internal depts;
• less confusing access to ebooks;
• better marketing;
• improved knowledge of the specific content of each of our databases (we can all use them as experts but, for example, we might not know which one to go to for OECD economic surveys).

Opportunities seemed easy to identify and included:

• new technologies and social media;
• collaboration in Cambridge and beyond;
• more classroom teaching integrated with the curriculum;
• lack of information skills of some of our stakeholders;
• forthcoming secondment and shadowing schemes;
• new faculty, researchers and support staff;
• our new Deputy (no pressure !);
• very specifically the installation of new Bloomberg and Datastream installations at Economics which may take some of the pressure off us here from non-JBS students;
• courses and conferences;
• identifying and carrying out more point-of-need support;
• the fact that we are highly-regarded (giving us a platform from which to build);
• demonstrating non-’library’ expertise and support (e.g. Prezi, Qualtrics);
• and our relative freedom and autonomy (which of course allows us to take up opportunities in the first place).

Threats came last, which, on reflection,was a bit of a mistake as it ended a great session on a downbeat note. Contributions included:

• budget and funding cuts, including our increasing reliance on Exec Ed funding and the fact that library services can be seen as ‘soft targets’;
• e-only initiatives leading to false assumptions that staff can be cut/librarians are not needed (perhaps not so much here as elsewhere in the University);
• the fact that a lot of what we do, despite our marketing, remains invisible to some stakeholders;
• Googlisation;
• unavailable content (e.g. key textbooks as ebooks and specialised industry/market databases);
• media perceptions of librarians;
• ignorance and ill-informed user expectations (e.g. everything is available for free online);
• centralisation of Cambridge University libraries (inasmuch as might negatively impact on our service);
• keeping current in rapidly changing technological/business information environments;
• and misconceptions as to what it is we do on the part of stakeholders.

Examining and discussing these issues as a team was very useful and brought out ideas and contributions which otherwise might not have been shared or explored.
The SWOT framework proved a useful framework on which to hang discussion and the element of physical activity also added value. Perhaps most important of all was the fact that everyone’s voice was heard and the discovery that, thankfully, we’re all on the same page. Some of the weaknesses and threats may be hard to address but now at least we all know they’re on the table. We plan to repeat the exercise next year to see how far we have come and to assess what has changed.

The fact that the session was expertly organised and facilitated by Kirsty pointed up how much we’re all going to miss her when she packs her bags shortly for Oxford. We’re going to miss you Taylor! I can’t sign off, dear reader, without revealing how with the above title of this post you were let off very lightly. Other contenders were: ‘SWOT to trot’, ‘SWOT’s happening’ and ‘SWOTs up pussycat. It’s Friday.

Not just a pile of bricks

“You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation” - Plato

Endless possibilities...

I don’t know about you, but for me there’s something innately comforting about Lego. That it fits so neatly together, its pleasing iconic design, the way it transports you back to a time when both play and possibilities were endless…

I’m currently enjoying the ‘Lego Experience’ a second time around through my son John. I don’t know how many ‘Rebel Alliance bases’ I’ve built so far for his Star Wars Lego figures but we’re definitely into double figures. The current base is white and very Empire Strikes Back (Hoth-esque if you’re a devotee).  A few weeks ago, for reasons I won’t go into here (but I do here) my wife and I happened to be entertaining the actress Caroline Blakiston, who played Rebel Alliance leader Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi, and it amused me hugely that one of ‘her bases’ was in the same room. I half expected her to criticise the accuracy of the build! John has a lot more Lego than I did as a kid, mainly because I still remember how much I craved and coveted friend’s larger Lego collections (Simon Brown – your Space Lego circa 1983 was truly a wonder to behold) and this time around I’d kind of like other kids to crave and covet his. The huge vat of Lego we bought off ebay has certainly helped with that!

Gavin Wedell and helper (copyright Gavin Wedell)

Anyway you get the point – I think Lego rocks. But why am I blogging about it? Well, I recently heard about a Lego training session being run for business school faculty by one of our MBA students who has worked as a corporate trainer, with clients including Diageo and Vodafone, one Gavin Wedell. Gavin was one of those lovely MBAs who nodded in all the right places during the induction sessions, completely gets what we’re about and is a great advert for what is a largely misunderstood breed of student. I should make it clear that Gavin isn’t just randomly dumping Lego in front of people in these sessions and hoping something creative or good happens, he’s actually – now let me get this right – an officially certified facilitator of the innovative LEGO^® Serious Play™ methodology, having been trained at LEGO’s U.S. headquarters (I love that they have a U.S. headquarters, with Lego figures on guard presumably). What is LEGO^® Serious Play™ I wondered? So I took at look at their site and read their their promotional blurb:

‘An innovative, experiential process designed to enhance innovation and business performance. Based on research that shows that this kind of hands-on, minds-on learning produces a deeper, more meaningful understanding of the world and its possibilities. [It] deepens the reflection process and supports an effective dialogue – for everyone in the organization.’

One of my models in which a mystified cat looks on as I contemplate bridge-building

This description taken together with the fact that I knew Gavin was ‘one of the good guys’ and that my team needed a fun summer training session (and of course the fact that – Hey! We’re talking about Lego here) motivated me to email Gavin and ask if he could run a session for us. Gavin was fantastically accommodating. Not only was he keen to tailor the session to our specific needs, but he was very flexible about a date and, best of all, he refused payment. I knew we were on to a winner by the team’s gleeful reaction to news of the workshop: smiles all round which suggested many happy childhood hours with The Lovely Bricks.

My expectations were already high at the start of the workshop. but I could not have anticipated just how much fun and, more importantly, insight and productive team-building would arise from the session. First up we were tasked to build a tower, a tower which, on receipt of new phoned-in instructions from Sir Paul Judge (via Gavin), suddenly had to be rebuilt at 90 degrees (to reflect how priorities and directives can suddenly change). More model-building followed as we used the bricks and figures to reflect challenges in our current job, before we all switched seats and had to describe each others challenges on the basis of each other’s Lego models alone.

Sarah's model (as the outcome of our wider model)

What surprised me was:
1) just how good everyone was at building with Lego (special mention must go to Natasha who had never used it before, but immediately employed it in such an eloquent and creative way that it almost left me speechless with admiration);
2) how the models we built spoke volumes about our challenges – it seems a lego model also paints a thousand words
and; 3) how much we already understood about each other and were willing to understand and empathise more.

The final half an hour saw us bring together our individual models as one over-arching strategy for the team going forward. By this point our models had been named by each of us with attributes that were means of overcoming the challenges we currently face. So, for instance, Sarah brought ‘open communications’, Natasha brought ‘hope’ (or the ‘Helicopter of Hope™’ as I prefer to call it!) and Ange brought ‘blending talents’ to the table. Surprising again was that the end result was strategically viable as a way forward for Information & Library Services within our institution.

Team (with Natasha holding the 'Helicopter of Hope' TM)

Post-session emails of thanks, individual comments and tweets from team members suggested that our LEGO^® Serious Play™ workshop had been a great success. The only caveat I would add is that we’re currently very lucky to be in a team which really IS a team – respectful, appreciative of our differing talents, empathic – our challenges are more from without than within and several times during the session I thought ‘Ooh!” at this or that element which could well have been awkward, if not downright uncomfortable, in other teams I’ve worked in or led. Having said that, I do think the methodology seems robust enough to deal with that, especially if you have a facilitator as good as Gavin.

So where does this leave me and Lego? Well, I am of course now looking at it in a whole new light. Why do I build rebel bases for John in a particular way? Why do I adopt a rigid colour scheme? Why do I always build in an arms store? Why do I only ever have one door? What does all this say about my personality?  Sometimes a rebel base is just a rebel base – isn’t it? Now I’m not so sure.

Gavin Wedell can be contacted as follows:
Email: gavinwedell AT gmail.com | LinkedIn | Twitter

Missing a trick? Faculty and admin staff induction

Conducting a 1-2-1 induction with a new member of faculty and talking about databases with several administrative staff who were completely in the dark about our offering has led me to question this week whether here at Judge we’re currently missing a trick when it comes to informing new (or existing) staff about our library and information services. Rather than just blogging about what I thought about this I decided to ascertain from my peers within business librarianship whether they were doing the same things as me or adopting alternative approaches. The responses I received were both interesting and illuminating…

common themes
Of the 30 or so responses I received, common themes emerged.  1-2-1 induction/initial training session with new academics and a tour of the library for those that request them seem to be the norm. The route to these sessions/tours was quite different though, being either automatically timetabled in by HR, or offered by library staff after scans of lists from HR or receiving ‘new starters’ information by email. For those faculty being offered optional (rather than timetabled) sessions this was largely coordinated via emails containing relevant links and information. It appears that take-up of this offer varies widely. Some people cited very low take-up, others cited 75%, suggesting that this may be very much dependent on choice of email wording and content.

the 1-2-1
Of the 1-2-1 session itself it seems to mainly be used  to introduce the range of e-resources and bibliographic software and tools that are available, as well as being an opportunity to highlight the teaching and training on offer. Several respondents mentioned that they made a point of establishing the faculty member’s research interests ahead of time in order to tailor the session and that finance faculty appear to be more engaged and interested. Session length varies from 20 minutes to 2 hours, but the average appears to be 30-45 minutes.

paperless?
I was interested to find that we are divided on the value of printed guides and handouts, some citing their value, others believing they are unread and a waste of time to produce. Having said that, those in favour stated that guides should be short and to the point.

the personal touch
Several respondents expressed the importance of making any contact with faculty as personal and warm as possible with a view to long-term professional relationships and collaboration. There was also active recognition of the fact that faculty coming away from the 1-2-1 feeling that library staff were helpful and could make their teaching and research lives easier was the most important outcome. Some respondents talked about happily knocking on faculty doors and introducing themselves, while others felt guilty for not knocking on doors or being proactive enough.

group inductions/refreshers
Group inductions for new staff at which library staff get a chance to introduce themselves and their services seem to occur less than 1-2-1′s. Some business librarians are also engaged in group refresher sessions for existing staff, but again in low numbers.

administrative staff
Most respondents do not offer inductions to admin staff as a matter of course, instead this only appears to be at the instigation of said staff member or if they are picked up on by library staff as particularly student-facing and therefore potentially useful in pointing students to what we offer. However, there was common agreement that we  don’t do enough for admin staff and that, as I myself felt, we are probably are missing a trick in this regard. Some respondents described these staff as more receptive and interested than faculty, others mentioned that we could be giving them help with their day-to-day work  and that they don’t know what is available or, moreover, that they are eligible to use it. This has been my experience here, with one admin staff member telling me that they had always thought “the library wasn’t for them”. I was a bit ashamed that they felt like this and I am now determined to turn that perception around by opening up and offering more to this forgotten or largely ignored user group. Not only should this assist them with their work but it should also make a difference to internal understanding of what it is we have and what it is we do – after all we can never have enough library advocates can we?

Thanks to everyone who responded to my email

Inspector Morse and faculty/librarian relationships

Last week I attended CILIP’s Umbrella conference in Hatfield. It was a bit of a flying visit, with my primary purpose being to present a talk on faculty engagement, specifically with respect to information literacy and librarians teaching. I’m always looking for a hook to hang my presentations on and this time I chose the TV series Inspector Morse, because like Morse and Lewis  I’ve spent the majority of my working life dealing with the foibles and idiosyncracies of academics at Oxford University.

My rather tongue-in-cheek presentation asked whether Oxford academics were really as awkward, pompous, sex-mad, disturbed and murderous as Morse would have us believe. I also mused that some faculty I have worked with would probably have rather cooperated with a murder enquiry than with the idea of librarians teaching alongside them in the classroom! I also stopped off along the way to see how I’d developed as a teacher and how with confidence and increased freedom, arising from the trust and support I had gained from relationships with faculty, I had been able to provide ‘point of need’ teaching  to which students have truly responded.

I was lucky enough to be joined by two other preseners Carol Webb and Chris Powis for this ‘Information Skills for Life’ hour and despite the relative absence of communication between us before the event, I felt that our respective presentations gelled nicely. The main reason for this was that we all agreed on the importance of emotional engagement and the building and developing of relationships with faculty/teaching staff. One of my slides was headed ‘Relationship’ in a large point size and was there to prompt me to hold forth about the importance of putting all the theory that has been expounded about faculty/librarian collaboration to one side and just getting out there and building relationships with faculty, by: having coffee with them; passing the time of day; and essentially treating them as fellow human beings! Chris took this one stage further by getting the audience to consider in small groups how we see faculty, and how we think they see librarians, and ultimately drawing out the fact that we hold on to a mass of prejudices and preconceptions that are very effective barriers to the development of relationships. He also commented that if he had used slides – the clever sod dispensed with a presentation and got the audience to do all the work (only joking Chris!), then he would have put the word relationship in a bigger point size than even I had done.

Part of my presentation dealt with encountering a situation where you might be starting from scratch at your workplace on the faculty relationship/teaching integration front, as I had done here in Cambridge, back in Autumn 2007. At Oxford, I’d had the cushion of having known the same faculty for years, first at Templeton College and then Said Business School, at Cambridge they didn’t know me from Adam.  My main approach at Cambridge  (see slide above) was as follows:  1. To make it clear from the outset  (as early as interview) that I was seeking to teach and train not simply to curate and protect; 2. To shamelessly declare my teaching credentials by referring to the fact that I had received a teaching award from Oxford University for my lecture/workshop series on effective literature searching; 3. To engage with faculty by embarking on a faculty consultation exercise – partly to find out what their information needs were, but also to make my agenda, abilities and interests known; 4. To ensure that via meetings, email and other forms of communication that I was always ‘on message’ about the potential for the library service’s teaching role and its value and relevance; 5. Identifying latent teaching opportunities e.g. the plagiarism problems at Cambridge which strengthened importance of our provision of plagiarism avoidance lectures; 6. And finally, of course, actually proving myself to some of them as a teacher by making that initial teaching conribution so that faculty are reassured that this was something that I could do and be trusted with. The result of the above approach was that after only 18 months I was teaching on all programmes.

Returning to the question of prejudices, and indeed stereotypes, I took each of the typical characteristics of the faculty as portrayed in Morse in turn and commented on how this tied in with my own experiences. The message being that, of course, reality is far more palatable, surprising and interesting than fiction. There were a few imponderables, such as whether Oxford faculty were sex-mad. I revealed that I have only been propostioned once (a fact of which Chris was profoundly jealous!) but didn’t really like to say whether this qualified  the faculty member in question as ‘sex-mad’. However, I did conclude that as I had  not stumbled across any dead bodies during my time at Oxford we could probably cross murderous off the list of attributes!

Andy

Ungrateful, if deeply realistic, sod

Today I found myself complaining about having to attend a training session having only just got back from a three-day conference. Then I suddenly caught myself and mused on what an ungrateful sod I was. At the Judge Business School, all managers are given the opportunity to attend a year-long management development programme covering all aspects of management, team development and other relevant HR issues. My previous experience had been quite different – you had to chase after training and it certainly wasn’t offered as a matter of course institution-wide. In fact the very idea of this happening at my previous place of employment amuses me no end.

One of the best parts of the Judge training programme apart from the detailed examination of each topic in hand is the opportunity to get to know and catch up with the other managers across the business school – something we wouldn’t have the time or perhaps the inclination to do otherwise. Also I find I can’t help but use it as an opportunity to hopefully subvert a few expectations as to what it means to be a business librarian today, especially in this current climate of rapid technological change.

Today’s session was on assertiveness and threw up some inevitable lightbulb moments because I guess your communication skills can always be improved:

1. Occasionally I still fit the child role in transactional analysis terms (I suspect due to too many years in a deputy role during which I inevitably sought approval and acceptance as I didn’t have the final say)
2. Some more verbal techniques for assertive communication: broken record (importance of repetition and restatement); probing (asking questions rather than stating your case); and, best of all, not always asking how people feel about something (you may mean well but it can invite more problems than it solves).
3. Something which sounds obvious in the cold light of day: simply the fact that you shouldn’t always expect an immediately positive outcome when seeking buy-in for a change of procedure or practive, instead you can gradually work on seeking acceptance. You may only get part of the way there initially – but that’s fine.
4. Finally, I was stunned by the difference of opinion in the group when ticking against a list of items from which we were asked to choose  what we thought were the rights of a manager. I was in the minority by not seeing commanding respect and getting the work done as a given. I only see these as attainable if you fulfil your duties as a good competent manager, not as an automatic (and expected) right of any manager. For me this seems to depend on whether you are idealistic or realistic in your approach. I’m a committed idealist and am driven to unreasonable fury by those people who bang on about how someone should be behaving or how things should be working. Got no time for that!

Thanks to those of you who are following my blogging journey so far. Tomorrow unless something else crops up I’ll return to reviewing the sessions at the EBSLG conference, starting with a fascinating insight into what makes Generation Y tick…

Andy