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Welcome back to Season Four of Linking Our Libraries!

This season we are looking at the skills you can use to be a better manager and leader in your library, archive, history center, or other nonprofit. Over the next 15 episodes, we will cover some important skills you need to develop to be a stronger leader. These are not just good ideas – this list is based on research into effective management and leadership. You do not need to become an expert in any of these skills; but understanding them will make you a better leader in your organization.

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. And we are connecting with other nonprofits and organizations with people who want to be stronger leaders in their work and in their community.

Do you want to talk with us about a topic? Want us to set up some training for you? We can make that happen! Your question, or your training need, is not too big or too small – we are just right for you. Check out website under “Can We Help You?” and let’s talk!

This week we are starting the season on a positive skill: Integrity!

 

The Basics:

Integrity is important in everything you do as a leader. What do we mean by integrity? We define it as following professional codes, being honest, being a role model for how to behave.

This is the foundational competency you build all your relationships on, the one that helps you to get everything else done.

 

Without integrity, no one will follow a leader. Without integrity, people do not believe things the leader says. Without integrity, no one respects a leader in anything else.

Think about supervisors you have seen, or leaders you have known, who spend their careers trying to get around rules, or thinking rules did not apply to them. We all know people who lie – and you know you cannot trust the things they say, no matter what it is. Leaders who lack integrity, who cannot be trusted, are a serious problem for an organization.

And it is not enough to feel you have integrity. To be a good leader, it is important to be perceived as having it. Part of that is behavior – because people watch what you are doing. And part of it is to talk about honesty and integrity. Think consciously about doing both of these things, to be most successful as a leader.

How do we do this? How can you demonstrate integrity as a leader? We have some ideas!

 

Step One: Following Professional Codes

Everyone generally assumes they are a good person, doing the right things. That may be true, but it is easier when you have some objective standards of what the “right” thing is, instead of just winging it.

In the library field, we are a profession, and as such we are governed by an ethical code. To be more accurate: we are a multi-faceted profession with a lot of different people in different professional areas doing all kinds of different things. So we actually have several different ethical codes relevant to the work we do.

• There are the biggies that cover us in the United States: the American Library Association (ALA) and the Society for American Archivists (SAA) both have ethics codes governing most of us across the profession.
• Subsections of these groups may also have specific ethical codes to follow that are relevant to their work.
• Other ethics codes may also be relevant to you if you are an LIS person working in some of the less traditional jobs for our profession. So you may be governed by codes for computer science, or engineering, or museums, or performers, or wherever else you find yourself working.

When you have a code to follow, you know whether you are meeting the standard of “good behavior” or not. It is an easy way to demonstrate that you understand your responsibilities of integrity as a member of the profession. And ethical codes can give you good tools to talk with others about behaving with integrity in a library or archive.

 

It can also give you some protection when patrons, boards, or other stakeholders question why you are making decisions or doing specific things. Being able to point to an ethical code to explain that you are not just keeping secrets, when asked for a patron’s record, but are instead following the strict ethical code preserving patron privacy, makes it much easier to explain.

Know your ethical codes, and be sure you are following them! (Listen to our podcast on Ethics from Season Three!)

 

Step Two: Being Honest

Mary has two professional rules that everyone should follow:

• Rule One: Don’t Lie
• Rule Two: Be Fair.

These two rules will take everyone in the right direction, with integrity.

Don’t lie.

Other people notice liars. Once someone gets a reputation for shading the truth, not telling the full story, or just flat-out lying – it is really hard to get over that.

But of course, nothing is as easy as it sounds. It is easier to not confront an employee who is doing a poor job, and just keep giving them satisfactory performance evaluations. It is easier to lie to a vendor to get a better price. It is easier to share only selected circulation information with your stakeholders to give a more glowing picture of the library that is actually the case.

 

Did we say that being a good leader was easy?  We did not!

Be very conscious of the things you say, write, or type for a few days. How completely honest are you being in your communication with others? Are you saying only things you definitely know are true? Are you giving the entire picture? Are you just lying about anything?

If you are like most people, you may be surprised by the amount of dishonest things you say!

From Psychology Today: “According to a 2002 study conducted by the University of Massachusetts, 60% of adults can’t have a ten minute conversation without lying at least once. But even that number makes it sound better than it really is; those people in the study who did lie actually told an average of 3 lies during their brief chat. And I know you’re sitting there right now insisting you would be part of the 40% that didn’t lie. That’s what the liars in the study thought, too. When they watched the taped conversations back, they were shocked at how many fibs they had told.”

 

It is good to take some time to be conscious of the need to be honest. Developing the habit of thinking before you speak, being very thoughtful of what you are actually saying – these will help you to cultivate honesty. Honesty does not mean you need to volunteer every opinion that comes to mind; it means sorting out the important things form the trivial.

Yes, it’s always fine to tell your wife she looks beautiful, or your child that she is wonderful – regardless of any objective reality at that moment.

But it can be damaging to your professional reputation to shade the truth too often at work. Be the kind of person who can be relied on to give an honest answer, even when it is hard. Good leadership demands no less.

 

Step Three: Being a Role Model for Good Behavior

This is the step that can really show the difference between someone who is generically a nice person, and a leader who has integrity. Leadership means other people look to you to see how to behave. Again, leaders do not need to have any specific job title; they do not need to be the overall boss. You can be a leader in any position in the library. Anyone can be a role model for behaving with integrity.

 

How do you actually make this happen?

• Take some time for self-examination. What did you do today that showed you have integrity? What about the last week? Role models should be able to look at something they did, big or small, that was done with integrity.
• Think about your communication. Do you answer emails? Are you consciously focused on sharing information?
• Be consistent. Acting with integrity means you behave and respond in the same way each day. When an issue comes up, you respond to it in the same way, so people know they can count on your behavior.
• Share recognition for good things. When complimented for good results, be sure to quickly include others who worked with you. It is pretty rare to do something great on your own, so be sure to recognize the good work being done by everyone.
• Be on time. This seems like a small thing, but doing what you say matters. Being on time for meetings, events, or anything else you need to do shows respect to everyone involved.
• Talk the talk. Spend time regularly talking about ethics, honor, truthfulness, and anything else that is relevant in your work to having integrity and demonstrating it. The more these ideas become a regular part of your culture, the easier it is to follow them and to encourage others to do so.
• Walk the walk. Be seen acting with integrity. Feel free to talk about making hard decisions, and deliberately choosing to do the right thing. Letting people see you struggle with decisions, and struggle to make good decisions, helps them to do the same thing.

 

Establishing an Integrity-Filled Organization

As part of having integrity, you want to be sure your organization is constructed in a way that it is easy to continue to demonstrate it every day, in everything you are doing. A few ways to make that happen include:

• Talk about integrity at staff meetings, and maybe share some stories about making hard decisions
• Post the codes of ethics relevant to your library where everyone can see them – and refer back to them when you are talking. Don’t let them become just another piece of wall art.
• Be as transparent with your work as possible. Let people know what you are doing, and encourage people to talk about their work. When everyone knows what is happening around the organization, and there are no Big Scary Secrets that need to be kept, it reduces the potential for conflict.
• Establish good procedures for materials and money. Taking home books before they are cataloged is not acting with integrity. Taking home money from the photocopier is not acting with money. Make the procedures for behaving with integrity part of the everyday procedures everyone follows.
• Don’t put yourself into a situation where your integrity can be questioned. Don’t be alone in a room with cash. Don’t be alone in a closed room with a kid patron. Interview job applicants in pairs. It is easier to head off any potential problems than to untangle misunderstandings later; so do what you can to prevent problems.
• Discipline employees who violate workplace rules. If you are a manager, don’t let things go because it was just one time, or just a little bit of money stolen, or because the person is your friend. Listen to our episode on effective discipline for some ideas on making discipline a learning experience, instead of just punishment.
• Admit when you make mistakes, and show people how to gracefully bounce back from trouble. Everyone will screw things up sometimes. Integrity can be demonstrated by showing how to publically recover from mistakes – big and small.

 

Books Read

 

Conclusion

As a leader, it is particularly import for you to know and to display integrity. Leaders who lie, cheat, and steal show staff members that ethical behavior are pointless; no one will get ahead in this kind of organization by following the rules and doing the right thing.

Thankfully, the opposite is also true. Managers who create an ethics-friendly organization, and who demonstrate integrity even when it is the harder choice, are showing their staff how things should be done. All of this will add up to a much better workplace. And you will have yet another powerful skill for your own Manager Skill Set!

 

Thanks for joining us this week! And check back in with us next week for another leadership competency!