Taking the Stairs

It is amazing how many opportunities I’ve had lately to either read or hear about change and organizational structure. What is exciting about each one is how they can be applied to all that is happening at Linebaugh or with our strategic planning process. Let me share with you some snippets from a recent speaker at the monthly Rutherford CABLE meeting, Rory Vaden. He is the co-founder of Southwestern Consulting and New York Times bestselling author of Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success, published in 2012.

Vaden shared a study of U.S. employees that reveals that the average worker admitted to wasting 2.09 hours each day on non-job-related activities. This costs employers $10,396/year per employee! What is the source of this? Procrastination.

We all know about procrastination, and most of us admit to falling prey to it, whether as a college student and waiting till the last minute to study for a test or finish a project or in just cleaning the house. Vaden shares three forms of procrastination:

1. Classic procrastination – You know when you do it.
2. Creative avoidance – Unconscious procrastination. It’s doing menial work just to be busy and avoiding what really needs to be done.
3. Priority delusion – Allowing your attention to shift to less important but more urgent tasks.

Vaden’s premise in Take the Stairs is that success in life comes down to the choices you make, especially when no one is looking. Really successful people formed habits of what they knew they should be doing even when no one else was doing it. Nobody wants to take the stairs, because we live in an escalator world. Even though a broken escalator becomes stairs, some will complain and look around for the elevator. That convenience has turned into entitlement and a majority of people are no longer willing to do the work. (I see this a lot with the handicapped button in our front entrance…but I digress).

Negativity in life comes from continuing a bad habit and putting off what we knew we should be doing in the first place. Vaden says the solution comes from something we all know about but don’t like to hear – discipline. “Success is never owned, success is rented and the rent is due every day.”

I was thinking of this principle recently as an email was sent to remind staff to “slow down and be more careful with checking items in.” Being more purposeful in our work takes discipline, and though we may see it as going slower, the end result is better efficiency. With the changes happening in our system, we will all have to change some habits that we’ve grown comfortable with but which no longer meet the needs of our patrons or organization.  As we look to the success of our libraries, we will all have to pay the rent of a disciplined mindset and work ethic each and every day. So, let’s take the stairs to get on the bus!

Get on the Bus!

Change is a-happenin’ at Linebaugh Public Library, and this “Energy Bus” is moving at breakneck speed these days, it seems. With every kind of change, each of us goes through transition, which can involve grief, stress, excitement, trauma, or many other emotions that affect our mind, bodies and even work performance. Our Director recently gave us a book to read, The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon, and it has an interesting point about dealing with change:

E + P = O

“The E stands for events in your life…The P stands for perception and the O stands for outcome. We can’t control the events in our life but we can control how we perceive them and our perception and response to the events determine our outcome.” The way we choose to look at change determines the outcome or effect it has on our life and/work. In choosing to face change with a positive attitude does not deny the natural emotions that are part of the transitional process, but means that even if the change is tough or hard, I am going to choose to see that there could be something positive happening as result of this specific change.

In our local circumstance, we can apply this is in looking at our new HOLDS process. It has brought change, because we have to adjust a procedure that they are used to and comfortable with. The new system is not perfect yet, because we still need some work done through adjustments in our library software, which will take time. So, I can choose to either be unhappy, because I have to change the way I’ve always dealt with Holds, or because the imperfect result may cause confusion sometimes. If I choose this, the outcome of the event plus my perception is going to be negative on my work performance and on patrons who come in and I deal with.

The other option is that I can choose to be positive about the change, because I see how it will benefit patrons and staff in the long run (even when it’s not perfect yet), and thus the outcome will be that I encourage patrons with excitement to see how easy this will be for them, and look forward to having more time myself in taking care of other tasks or helping patrons in ways I haven’t been able to do previously. Either way, I have a choice. What we all need to realize is that the choices we make affect how we work with others, how we relate to our patrons and even how we feel.

I’m excited about the road ahead! Yes, change is a constant, but also reminds us that we are growing and improving and making even more of a difference in the lives of our community. GET ON THE BUS!