Episode 413: Risk Taking

Introduction

Welcome back to Linking Our Libraries! This week we are going to talk about an exciting leadership competency: Risk Taking!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we are here to chat with you this season about building your leadership skills. We provide support and training for all types of libraries, and our work can be used by anyone who wants to build skills, and to become a better leader in your own organization.

Do you want to talk with us further about leadership skills? Do you need some training organized for your organization? We are here for you! Check out our website: cmle.org and let’s get this started!

And now, on with the show!

 

The Basics

Your first thought when listening to this topic might be surprise. Hasn’t everything we’ve talked about this season implied that leaders need to be reliable, steady, and predictable?

 

Yes. All of that is true. These are important qualities for leaders.

But you can’t just take the safe course all the time. Sometimes you need to take a chance, try something new, to boldly go where no librarian has gone before!

Good risk taking skills will help to propel you and your organization forward. So let’s talk about risk taking, and strategies for minimizing risk and maximizing your chances for success!

 

What do we mean by risk taking? Different people may think of this in different ways, but we mean not taking the easy way; taking a chance of failure; bold or courageous action.

If this is a scary thought, if you need to sit down for a moment – go right ahead. We’re here for you. Libraries and archives are not organizations traditionally know as big risk takers. But the popular image of us as quiet and maybe a little crabby are very outdated!

Library and archive people are instead out there on the forefront of development of different service strategies in a rapidly changing world. We moved our paper card catalogs out of the building to make way for a more flexible and useful online catalog, and we have never looked back. Now you can find library people embedded in university classrooms and on rounds with doctors. We provide books and computers, and also heirloom vegetable seeds, 3D printers, ties to wear to job interviews, telescopes, fishing rods, and innumerable other things. We do all of this on shrinking budgets and reduced staff – and don’t even charge users a direct fee for it.

Libraries of all types are amazing values for their community, returning much more economic value than they receive in tax money or tuition. Not only are we awesome places, we are also an awesome deal for anyone to use!

So we think library people are natural risk takers! We just want to help you take calculate risks, to think through your ideas, to make good decisions and go for it, then to see how it all went.

 

Looking at Risk

Risks can make your library great. You can achieve new and exciting things. You can bring in all kinds of much-needed money. And you can fall on your face, cause disasters, and set back your progress.

We suggest starting with small risks. Try a new paint color in the fiction section, have a fine-free month, offer multi-language conversation circles for a couple of month. You can do some new things that are not too big, and will not cause any big problems if they don’t work out. You can also minimize risk by making programs or services a set amount of time. Try new things a pilot projects to see how they work out for a week or a month or two. You can see how much interest there is, and make any changes that will help it to be more successful when you roll it out for real.

 

Once you feel comfortable trying small new things, you can move on to bigger risks. Keep perspective, of course! Don’t bet the library’s book budget at the gambling tables of Las Vegas or anything. But try something new that might be great! Can you connect five or ten community groups together, and have them work out a year’s worth of all the programming in your library? You could save staff time to work on other projects, and have new ideas and new faces in your programming schedules. It might be a great way to connect people to the library who had not considered it as a place to go. It might be a disaster, with no programming happening for two months. You don’t know until you plan it out and take a risk!

Look back to our Episode #405 on Creativity. You want to build an environment where people suggest ideas – even if they sound way outside your usual stuff. Making a culture where people feel ready to discuss and to share things they have read about, heard about, or just want to test out means some things will not work – but some of these ideas will be the best thing your library ever tried!

 

Plan your Risks, Then Do It!

You may have a risky decision that needs to be made on the spot. In that case, do it and move on to evaluating it. If you have more time to plan out your risky decisions, great. Go back to our Planning episode and get some ideas about making good plans so you are putting yourself into the best position.

Then go ahead and try something new! It’s good to be consistent and reliable – but if you take that too far you never make good changes. Your library needs to keep changing, to keep developing, and to keep meeting the needs of your community. It can be easy to get caught up in analyzing risks, or thinking about plans to make it all as prefect and safe as possible – but that will not preserve you from failures. Jump in and try it! Part of the risk may be in getting underway before you know all the details. But if you have a final goal and some basic ideas – make the decision to start.

You may not always get where you thought you were going. But you get nowhere if you don’t try. So dive in, do new things, talk to new people, ask for new money – whatever you are thinking about. Try it! Let’s see what happens!

 

Evaluation

We talk about evaluation a lot. And it is so important for anything you are doing! You always want to know if your plan was a success, if the budget is working, if storytime is still fun. Clearly, taking risks is something we encourage – but you definitely want to know if the risk was worth it! Was it a good idea? Was it worth the chance you took? If it didn’t work, is there something you can see there that you can do differently next time??

When you are taking a risk, you have some sort of goal in mind – something that you want to accomplish. Be sure to take the time to go back and see how closely you hit that goal. Plans change, of course. But did you achieve that goal? Did you achieve part of that goal? Did it fail in huge way – but you now know something important to do differently next time?

Talk to people around you in an evaluation process – especially when it’s something you feel unsure about succeeding. It can be easy to get caught up inside your own head, and think things are worse, or better, than they really are. Get perspectives from colleagues, patrons, community members – anyone who might see the risk and reward with a different vision than yours.

Evaluation is a great too for improving things; so never be afraid to hear bad news in this process. It’s your chance to make things better!

 

Failure is Okay

And in the end, if you always play it safe and never take a risk, you might avoid problems. But you definitely will not take advantage of the great things that you might have tried. Sometimes they won’t work out – but successful leadership is not avoiding trouble, it’s doing great things. Part of that will be making mistakes, doing the wrong thing – and that’s okay. Failure is rarely fatal, and the way you bounce back from problems can be more inspiring than a lifetime of timidity.

As a leader, promote a culture where it’s okay to fail. Instead of rushing to assign blame to people when a program falls apart or when a project is a disaster, accept that as a step toward progress. This was not the way to go, but there are lessons to learn and things to keep trying. Keep the Thomas Edison attitude about building lightbulbs; he is rumored to have said “I have not failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Whether or not he actually said this, it’s a great leadership attitude!

We have a challenge to you: take a small risk today. Do you want to start a new habit? Reading a scary-long book? Wear a new shirt? Decide to do it today! Take that risk! Paint that wall! Then go ahead and tell us all about it. You can comment below, or email us at admin@cmle.org. Whether or not it’s a success, we will celebrate your risk taking!

 

As always, if you want to talk about this topic further, or you would like us to come talk with you, your staff, or your organization on this or any other leadership topics, you can check out our website at cmle.org and click on “Can We Help You?” right at the top of the page. Or you can email us at admin@cmle.org. You do not need to be a CMLE member; we are here to help everyone build skills!

 

 

Books We Read

Everyone shares a book (or two) they have enjoyed, or are currently reading: (Click on any book below to go to Amazon; if you decide to buy the book – or anything else! – Amazon will (hopefully!) send us a small percentage of their profits. Thanks so much, in advance, for your support of CMLE!)

My Family Divided: One Girl’s Journey of Home, Loss, and Hope, by Diane Guerrero “

Before landing a spot on the megahit Netflix show Orange is the New Black; before wow-ing audiences as Lina on Jane the Virgin; and before her incredible activism and work on immigration reform, Diane Guerrero was a young girl living in Boston. One day, while Guerrero was at school, her undocumented immigrant parents were taken from their home, detained, and deported. Guerrero’s life, which had been full of the support of a loving family, was turned upside down.

Reflective of the experiences of millions of undocumented immigrant families in the United States, Guerrero’s story in My Family Divided, written with Erica Moroz, is at once heartbreaking and hopeful.”

 

Convenience Store Woman, by by Sayaka Murata “The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction―many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual―and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action… ”

The Amateurs, Book 2 Follow Me: The Killer You Know, by Sara Shepard “It was the perfect night for a party.

That is, until twenty-one-year-old Chelsea Dawson disappeared. The social media star was last seen enjoying a beautiful summer night at the Jersey Shore with her friends. But after an explosive fight with her ex-boyfriend, she vanished without a trace.
When Seneca, Maddox, Aerin, and Madison hear about the suspected kidnapping, they notice a jarring detail about the victim: she looks exactly like Aerin’s sister, Helena, who was killed five years earlier. Seneca is convinced she knows who killed Helena, and she can’t shake the feeling that the same person has taken Chelsea.
Desperate for answers about the two girls, and the truth behind her mother’s murder, Seneca will stop at nothing to find out if the cases are linked. So when Maddox receives an invitation to the Shore from none other than their primary suspect, the Amateurs begin an intense new investigation.
Full of disturbing secrets, startling twists, and horrifying revelations, the second book in #1 New York Times best-selling author Sara Shepard’s The Amateurs series follows the team down a twisted path-one crafted by a brilliant killer.”

 

If you want to get some more book ideas, we would love you to join our podcast book group! Check out our podcast Reading With Libraries, and join us for a new genre each week. We drink beverages matching up with the genre, talk about places to find more info on the genre, and have Guest Hosts who help us to excitedly share all kinds of books we have loved! Join us!

 

 Conclusion

Thanks so much for joining us today! Taking risks can be a little scary; but ultimately this should be rewarding for your library – if you are good at it. So practice taking a few risks, and see how it goes!

Tune in next Thursday for another important leadership skill! We are looking forward to chatting with you then.