Have you ever had an incident at your library and wondered how you could do more afterwards than just try to shake it off? On this show, Mary Graham, Service Delivery Manager, and Becky Potter, Library Experience Supervisor, with Calgary Public Library, talk about Debriefing After Challenging Situations. Timely and flexible debriefing can help staff deal with challenging situations. On this show, you’ll hear why and how.
Transcript
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership Podcast where we talk about libraries and leadership, and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations, and strategic insights in the profession.
Have you ever had an incident at your library and wondered how you could do more afterwards than just try to shake it off? On this show, Mary Graham, Service Delivery Manager and Becky Potter, Library Experience Supervisor with Calgary Public Library, talk about debriefing after challenging situations. Timely and flexible debriefing can help staff deal with challenging situations. On this show, you’ll hear why and how. Enjoy the show!
Hello, Becky and Mary, welcome to the show.
Becky Potter:
Thanks so much for having us.
Mary Graham:
Yes. Thank you Adriane, it’s great to be here.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: It’s great to have you both here. Today we are talking about debriefing after challenging situations. As libraries experience increasingly complex social issues, you say it’s no longer enough to expect people to simply shake it off. Mary, will you please talk about this? 00:59
Mary Graham:
The shake it off analogy is one that we use in the title of our presentation, and it’s something that, I guess, we really experienced in our own experience at Calgary Public Library. As many urban public libraries over the last, I would say, five years—but even the fifteen, twenty years that Becky and I have both been working with Calgary Public Library, things have become more complicated. We see more difficult situations happening. We see more complex situations happening where staff need to intervene with patrons and in situations that can be, at the very least, troubling and sometimes downright dangerous. As more and more of these things happen, we’re just seeing that it has an impact on people.
At one time, maybe, it would be once in a while something would happen and you could just go to the back and have a chat with someone around the water cooler and get things off your chest and you’d be okay. But the frequency of incidents and the severity of the incidents mean that it’s happening all the time. It’s like that image of a water pitcher or water glass where there’s drips of water coming in, bit by bit. But over time, it really fills up the glass and just one more thing can put you over the edge. So, having the ability to make sure that the stress level—the water level in that glass is at a manageable level, so that one more thing just doesn’t put you over the edge, I think is really essential.
Recognizing the emotional labor and the other things that are going on in our job—it’s not always normal. It’s not just something that it’s like, Okay, we just deal with this. This does have an impact. It is something that we need to actually deal with. It’s not an individual problem. It’s not something—you’re going to go home and get your counseling, or have your support from your family, but it’s something that, actually, in our workplace that we need to be addressing because it isn’t an individual problem. It’s a systemic problem in public libraries and other spaces.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: It is systemic. And, you mentioned that supports such as employee counseling and wellness programs can help with ongoing concerns. But, immediate support is crucial after challenging situations. Why can this be so hard to access or provide, Becky? 03:34
Becky Potter:
Yeah, definitely. Immediate support is really important. But most libraries—we know that social workers are more common in libraries, but certainly not every library has a social worker, or has some sort of professional that staff can lean into after a serious incident occurs.
Sometimes it’s not even a serious incident. Like Mary says, it might just be that extra drip, that extra minor incident, but twenty minor incidents in the last week maybe is just too much. Or, five minor incidents in a certain amount of time maybe is just too much for a staff member to handle. So, immediate support is important. Sometimes it’s coming from staff themselves where they just want to push through because they don’t necessarily feel like they’re supposed to feel the way that they’re feeling, or that there’s a space for them to feel the way that they’re feeling at work. Libraries are busy places, and sometimes staff feel like they just need to move to the next patron. I’ve dealt with that situation and now I’m just going to put my head down and move to the next patron or, the next situation that they need to deal with.
Then sometimes it’s also about our coworkers. Library staff are exceptionally helpful people, and they want to help each other. They want to support each other in these difficult times. But, sometimes it is a situation where they’re not sure if they should, or how to best support, or how to help. Those are some of the kinds of barriers to accessing that immediate support that we tried to address with the debriefing process that we developed.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: Timely and flexible interventions are important after staff deal with challenging situations. Will you share how the Calgary Public Library explored debriefing as a process that can be used by all library workers to walk each other through the immediate impact of any incident? 05:32
Mary Graham:
It’s kind of a long and unfortunate story about how we got to this place. And certainly, in the presentations that we’ve done at ALA and also Ontario Library Association, we’ve done a few presentations online as well—we talk in detail about this, but we had in the post-COVID period, through COVID, and post-COVID, we had a lot of incidents and a lot that were really hard.
But we had one particularly hard critical incident that happened to us at the Central Library that was a turning point for us because that was overwhelming. In the context of everything that was already happening, to have a critical incident thrown in there. I think it threw many of us over the top, and we were just struggling to deal with that because we were already pushed to our maximum. So, in the aftermath of this incident, we stepped back and thought a lot about what our staff were dealing with—not just in the big things, but also in the small things. So, we did a lot of different training around supporting staff in difficult incidents. One of the ones we did was a session on de-escalation with the Calgary Counseling Center, which is a local for-profit center that provides counseling to Calgarians.
They had worked with us to provide this de-escalation training. And as part of it, they referred to the debriefing process—after you have a difficult interaction you do debrief. They mentioned it in passing. It was one of these things that we were like, Oh, I think we need to explore this a little bit further, because this seemed to be a key thing that we were missing on a daily basis. Becky was the person that really dug into this a little bit more and went through to figure out, What are the steps, what makes a good debrief? What do we not want to have in a debrief? And, started fleshing that out so that we could try and see if this would make a difference.
That’s how we got to exploring this because we were looking for everything that we could do in the wake of something very serious to figure out what we’re doing. We realized there was sometimes that debriefing was happening. It’s not uncommon for us to have to come back after something big happens and need to take a minute, or want to talk to a colleague, or a supervisor, or things like that.
We just realized that we really didn’t have a protocol for it. It might happen sometimes or it might not happen. Some people are really good for advocating for themselves. Some people didn’t know that’s something they could do. Some people felt like they couldn’t come off the floor. Although it sounds like, Oh, yeah, it’s a no brainer to do this kind of thing, you also need some things in place in your organization to make sure that people know that this is a thing that they should do—that it’s a thing that they can do. You can leave the floor, you can seek out help.
Then for those who are the helpers in this situation, we’ve designed our debriefing process so it can be anyone—for those to know how to do this process, because there are probably some do’s and don’ts for this process, I would say. Certainly for our context, there’s some things we wanted to do. We did not want to turn this into a counseling session. We wanted it to be a debrief. We wanted it—it could be a bridge to something more, if that’s what people need. But really, it’s meant to be something that is five to fifteen minutes long and is centered around a few different questions.
That’s the process that we set up. We very specifically outlined that for people. Then had that ready to test for a little while before we, at the Central Library—before we brought it out to the rest of the system and did more training and education about this process. That was educating, I will say. Both our staff who are on the front lines and impacted by this, but also managers, supervisors, librarians, so that they could understand that, Yeah, some people might need this is support that we’re going to provide. And it’s not just someone trying to get an extra break, that this is something that people actually need to have. We needed to make sure that everyone in our organization understood that this is one of these human needs, and we can, and will accommodate it within our operations at the library.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: Given the importance of this, what are the steps in developing debriefing plans that fit a variety of public service contexts? 10:31
Mary Graham:
I think exactly what you said, context, is so important. Understanding your own context. What works for us at Calgary Public Library maybe isn’t a perfect fit for every location. So, understand your context. We are public-facing in most cases, so a lot of it is logistics as well. We’ve talked to different libraries all across Canada and a lot of places in the US now. We understand that there’s different sizes of libraries and different staffing accommodations at different locations. If you have two people in a very small location trying to figure out how you’re going to accommodate a debrief in that context is very different than here at Central Library in Calgary where we have twelve—fourteen staff, possibly available, to support that.
That has a lot to do with getting staff buy-in. If it feels like when the debriefing process is developed that the context isn’t understood, that will really impact how staff embrace this process. We got a lot of that pushback, right? We only have a certain number of staff. How are we going to do this? Having those answers to those questions upfront is really important. And, that leads to the idea of organizational support and organizational buy-in.
So for us, Calgary Public Library, we were really lucky to have organizational support and buy-in right from the beginning where we asked some questions around, Well, how would we accommodate this? How would we accommodate a situation where—staff couldn’t debrief during a shift, would they be allowed to stay late? And yes, we were told that, Yes, staff could stay late to to accommodate a debrief after their shift.
That was huge for staff, because it’s not only just the organizational buy-in conceptually, but it’s also actually putting money where it matters. That really speaks a lot to making sure that staff feel this isn’t just lip service and a check mark against some box—that we support staff health and wellbeing. But actually, truly supporting it in a way that is meaningful. At the end of the day, it’s not a big thing in dollars and cents, but it is a big thing for the staff to see that the organization supports us. So, I would say that top-down buy-in is one of the biggest things to get in place before starting to roll that out.
If for whatever reason, there’s financial constraints that can’t support that—then figuring out what the answers to those questions are going to be within the context of your organization. If there’s financial constraints that don’t accommodate those extra minutes after a shift, then having something else in place, whatever that might look like is really important.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: What does a debrief look like at Calgary Public Library? 13:34
Mary Graham:
For us, we tried to be very purposeful about providing framework around what a debrief is, and what a debrief is not. For us, one of the biggest distinctions is: a debrief is not a training session. It’s not an opportunity to look at what should have happened or what staff should have done differently. For us, a debrief—it’s really important that we validate staff’s intentions to support the decisions that they made.
Oftentimes, we will identify things that, at a future time, might need extra training. They might need extra support around how they made decisions or understanding certain policies. That’s all really important stuff. But, for the purpose of our debriefs, that’s not part of that initial meeting. The initial debrief meeting is really about supporting staff, validating that they did the best they could with the information that they had. Because we know, nobody goes into a situation and thinks, I’m going to wreck this. Everybody goes into these hard situations trying to do the best they can, and it doesn’t always work out. So that human connection and that human validation, especially from someone who’s working in the same field as them, knows the struggles of public service—that’s really important, one of those big validating things.
We have certain questions that we have to frame the conversation. Things like, Tell us how you’re feeling.Tell me what happened. Let’s unpack exactly what happened. Like we say, it should be about five to fifteen minutes. And, we want to give the opportunity to actually give some control back to staff.
We know that in a lot of situations, the loss of control in a negative interaction is one of the things that makes stress and anxiety higher. So, even simple things like asking, Do you want to debrief? They still have a choice. Staff do have a choice. We do like to advocate for how important debriefing is. We tend to share that with them if they are resistant. Where do you want to debrief? The only rule for us is that it can’t be in the public area. It can be at a table in the back room, it can be in an office, whatever makes a staff member comfortable. And when? Do you want to grab a drink and then come find me when you’re done? Do you want to sit down right now? Little things that we can do to give staff back that sense of control are important.
Then framing the conversation and trying to find those wrap-ups. One of the things about debriefing is we want to have staff leave the stress of these situations at work. We don’t want them to bring this stuff home with them. We want to prevent that rumination. We find that if the conversation goes on longer than fifteen minutes, we’re probably getting either into rumination where we’re playing the scenario over and over again. Or, we might be getting into more complex support that we are not equipped to handle.
Debriefing is a small piece of a bigger system of care that staff hopefully have access to. It’s not intended to replace professional help or counseling sessions or anything like that. In fact, it can be a really good link to actually encouraging staff to reach out to those resources. I know at Calgary Public Library, we’re very fortunate to have employee family assistance programs that provide those types of supports. So, within the debriefing process, we also are able to nudge staff in that direction and provide them with the information that they have access to.
So yeah, the actual document itself provides that framework and also provides a way for staff to sit down, explain with the other individual who they’re debriefing, what a debriefing is, what it isn’t—so everybody starts with the same level of understanding of what the process is that they’re going enter into.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: Thank you. You mentioned encouraging people to take part in this process. What tips can you provide on training staff to use this process effectively? 18:04
Mary Graham:
Yeah, it’s really interesting. Staff training for us is a little bit ongoing because the process develops and it evolves. Every context is different. As different libraries are developing their own process, one thing I would encourage is: don’t be afraid to change your process along the way. As things work, lean into those things that are working and things that aren’t working don’t be afraid to move away from that stuff. That’s part of the training for staff—encouraging that feedback, encouraging that dialogue around, What’s working for us, what’s not working? …building that context. Explaining to staff, Why are we doing this?
Different levels of buy-in will happen, especially if there are systems that have multiple libraries within it. Some of your library locations might have incidents regularly, and those staff likely will see the value in debriefing pretty early on. Other libraries that don’t have incidents very regularly might think, Oh, this isn’t for us. That’s for those other locations that have incidents all the time. The tricky thing is for those libraries that don’t have incidents all the time, often when they do, the effects are actually a little bit—they stick with staff a little bit more because they’re not used to dealing with these complex situations. Trying to introduce the why of debriefing and why it’s so important and how it is actually for all locations, even if you don’t have incidents all that regularly.
When you’re training staff I would also say it’s really helpful to have something that they can physically sit with, an actual document that when they’re initially doing debriefs and they’re not super comfortable with the process, something that they can literally sit down with the other person and actually go through the process, explain what they’re doing, use guiding questions to help guide those those conversations, and frame the context of that discussion for what it’s supposed to be for your organization.
Then if you can, one thing that was really helpful for us is the opportunity to observe. I did a lot of the first initial debriefings here at Central when we were piloting it. We piloted it at one location to see, How was this? How did this feel? Did it make sense? A lot of the other supervisors for us—they observed.That was a good way to introduce the process and do some peer-to-peer training. Then they were able to take on more of those debriefs.
Becky Potter:
If I can just add into this too—this was a very iterative process for us at Calgary Public Library too. We’ve been doing this now—we first rolled it out, I guess, in the spring of 2023. So, it’s been a couple of years now, but we’ve made significant changes and believe me, we made some mistakes along the way too, right? We learned by doing that, Oh, you don’t want to get too many people involved in a debrief because sometimes that can spook people and make them feel much more uncomfortable. We’ve added in as we’ve done other training and had other learning—we’ve added in other pieces to it. We recently did some training around setting personal boundaries, which was really useful training for our public service staff, and they had some really great ideas from there too.
So, we added a couple of things into our document. So our document is a living document. It’s not something that’s set in stone. We continue to hone this process and we continue to learn from it. So it’s not something that, Okay, it’s one-and-done and you’re going to get it right from the outset because that isn’t realistic. But anyway, so it does take a while. And it took us a while too.
Mary Graham:
Mary brings up a really good point. Whenever possible, we’ve tried to go back into training and sprinkle in the concept of debriefing into other types of training that the library does. Initially our onboarding training, where all library staff are new to our organization, they take a specific onboarding training. The concept of debriefing is brought up there—in any different training opportunity whenever we can. We don’t want debriefing to sit on its own silo of, This is a thing you take a training session in and hopefully you don’t have to use it. We want it really to be part of our organizational culture that everybody understands. This is part of being a supportive coworker, and debriefing is the norm and a normal thing as part of daily library operations.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: Having this as a living process seems good. What are your observations of how debriefing supports overall organizational resiliency now that you’ve been doing this a while? 23:31
Becky Potter:
It’s been a couple of years, and I would say that it really has had an impact in our organization. I think it comes down to some basic things—we’re not trying to claim that this process is a magic bullet, or something that’s going to solve all of your problems. It’s not. The problems that we face are still there. It’s just a way of approaching. It’s that basic— having someone listen to you, having someone else understand your experience and acknowledge your experience goes a long way in order to be able to cope with it. I think that’s just a basic human need.
Outside of libraries, or workplaces, or anything else—that is just something that we all need. I think it was probably something that we lost track of, a bit, in all that isolation and siloing that we had during COVID. I think that is really significant in our organization— having people in upper levels of our administration and management also acknowledge and understand what the daily experience of our frontline staff, too.
So, having this process—having this put in place, acknowledging that, Yeah, you can step off the floor like this is important for you that it is good public service to have our staff needs looked after. We have said—I know I’ve certainly said it to my staff, I’m okay with a line-up forming and someone having to wait a few extra minutes while a staff member who’s just been through something hard gets their needs attended to. That is okay. That’s actually good operations for my location, because it means long-term that everyone will get their needs met.
That has made a huge difference in terms of some of our absenteeism, some of our retention of staff, but I think more important than that, it’s the staff morale. Definitely we have gone through some periods where it’s been very low and staff are not engaged—that whole quiet quitting kind of thing. You’re at work, but you’re not really at work. Libraries really do depend on their staff. Libraries run because of the staff. I mean, the resources are there, but without the staff to mediate that and to make all of that happen, we are just buildings with stuff in them.
Recognizing that staff are the key to having a successful operation, and acknowledging that in putting them back into the equation, I think, has made a huge difference in terms of our own resiliency in dealing with things. Because, we continue to deal with hard things. Yes, we’ve come through COVID and some things are getting better, but some things are not getting better. I don’t think that’s going to go away. Recognizing that we have to invest in our staff in order to have good public library services is essential.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: Is there anything else you’d like to share? 26:56
Mary Graham:
I think one thing for me that was really interesting is we—we’ve done the presentation on debriefing, a lot. One of the questions we often get asked is about staff, managing staff time, do staff take advantage of this process? Over the years, as this has evolved within our organization, I think Mary and I can both say that overwhelmingly, no—staff don’t take advantage of this process.
It’s quite interesting to see that in a lot of cases, staff have a hard time saying that they themselves need a break, that they themselves need a debrief. Often their coworkers will identify it for them—their coworkers will observe a situation happening and the coworker will say, That looked like that was really hard for you. Why don’t you head to the back? They’ll message one of our supervisors and say, Hey, so-and-so had a hard situation. Can you check on them? That’s our cue to head over and start the process of debriefing. Check in on them, see if they need to debrief. So for us, that’s been really core learning, and it’s really interesting to see how that builds that sense of teamwork and that supportive environment that we really want to have for our frontline staff. So, that’s been a really important learning for us, I think.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: It’s fantastic that colleagues want that support for one another. Do you have any books or resources you’d like to share and why? 28:32
Becky Potter:
It’s called Navigating Difficult Situations in Public Libraries: The PLA Guide to Trauma-Informed De-escalation. It’s by Margaret Paauw. She did a great presentation at ALA. She certainly does talk about debriefing. We had a conversation with her after the session because her models for debriefing were a little bit different than ours. But again, that’s great. There needs to be lots of different perspectives and ideas about that. Yes, I would say that is a great new publication that’s out there, and I’m looking forward to reading it when we get it in. I think that one just came out in June.
Mary Graham:
One training that I would recommend—University of Alberta actually developed an online workshop called Emotional Labor of Public Library Work. That’s something that we’ve had access to. It’s been a really important training tool for frontline staff just to frame some of the work and in understanding the complexities of being a frontline public library worker—also: skills; tips; tricks; coping skills; setting boundaries, and how to support each other. That was a really good training session.
I have also just started the book called Project UnLonely, by Jeremy Noble. That was recommended to me by someone else who was working in this field. It’s just a bit of an understanding of that human emotion piece—what we are all craving and his book was written, started in 2020 and I think published in 2023. It spans that after-COVID era. That’s something that is quite interesting.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Thank you for those. In closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 30:41
Becky Potter:
Well, I could probably spend the whole podcast talking about this, but really my core value as a librarian—I’ve been working as a librarian since the last century, since 1998. It’s really about empowerment of people. And, it’s empowerment for the skills, the knowledge, whatever it is that they’re wanting to do. I’ve worked mostly in a public library context. That is what we do. I think that is so powerful. It has always been powerful and it continues to be a powerful thing because equipping people with the skills to meet their own needs and do what they want to do is so, so important. My own career—I’ve done that directly with patrons. Now I’m able to do that with staff as well. That just continues to be the theme for me, is really giving people that ability to do what they need for themselves—is fantastic.
Mary Graham:
For me, I think that sometimes what makes libraries so challenging is also what makes them so great. That is that it really is a community space that’s open for everyone. It’s that last space, that last community space where you don’t need a membership, you don’t need to buy something. You can be in our spaces. It’s a space to have your ideas challenged. I love that Joe Goodwin quote: a sign of a great library is that it has something to offend everyone. I think that’s what makes library so great. Right? …also so challenging to work in. I grew up at the library. I’ve worked at the library for over twenty-five years. So yeah, I really truly feel like I’ve grown up, especially at Calgary Public Library, because that’s where I’ve worked for twenty-five years. I’ve seen our communities change, and I’ve seen the library adapt and change to the needs of the community, which I think is so important and how we’ve been able to change and grow. And yeah, I love that we are just part of that community space and fill that need that really no other organization does.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #11: It’s insightful what you say that libraries are there for the empowerment of people. And sometimes what makes libraries challenging is also what makes them great. Recognizing that staff are key to our success means we should empower them through debriefing after challenging situations and support each other to make libraries great in that way. Thank you for discussing this timely topic with me today. 33:10
Mary Graham:
Thanks so much for having us.
Becky Potter:
Yes, it’s been our pleasure.
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership Podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune into Library Leadership Podcast.com where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right into your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
The opinions expressed on this show are those of the speaker, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Library Leadership Podcast or our sponsors.