Have you ever thought of your professional life as a series of highways and backroads, and wondered how to navigate? On this show, Sam Passey, Associate Dean of Library Services at Colorado Mountain College, shares his model for navigating organizational stoplights and roundabouts to better avoid congestion and ensure smooth progress.
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 thought of your professional life as a series of highways and backroads, and wondered how to navigate? On this show Sam Passey, Associate Dean of Library Services at Colorado Mountain College, shares his model for navigating organizational stoplights and roundabouts to better avoid congestion and ensure smooth progress.
Enjoy the show.
Hello, Sam. Welcome to the show.
Sam Passey:
Hey, thank you so much. It’s so good to be here Adriane.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: It’s so good to have you. You’ve been on the show before but today we’re talking about a new topic, which is navigating the highways and backroads of organizational life and leadership. As we start, will you please share why you developed this model to help library workers and leaders navigate professional life? 00:56
Sam Passey:
Of course. First of all, since we last talked, I moved from Utah to Colorado. I’m the library leader for Colorado Mountain College. We have eleven little teeny campuses in eleven different mountain towns in Colorado. So, there’s all kinds of back roads and beautiful scenery. And, I’ve seen a lot of really weird things. Coming to any new organization, you notice what’s different—like with the culture. As an example, I would get these notes to approve and weigh in on every single book selection. As a public library director I was used to getting batches of books to approve orders, but not like, Hey, can you approve this $10 book? And, to realize that this person was waiting for me because there were a lot of these hidden rules, hidden things that just happened in culture.
It was like, You know what we need? We need a map. We need a traffic system. And we need a driver’s ed program when it comes to operating our libraries. If we needed this here, and I know we needed something like that in my previous job at Uintah County in Utah, maybe this framework could help some other people because so many people can resonate with the idea of driving and traveling and roadways. So, that’s the carrying metaphor and how this came to be.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: Well, first of all, where you’re at now does sound beautiful. And, I’m glad you’ve translated all of this into a roadmap to help all of us. So let’s jump in on your concept, Sam. What are common stoplights that slow progress and decision making in organizations. 02:42
Sam Passey:
Some of the common stoplights are things like a reactive or permission-based culture. What this can look like is if you go into a place, this could be any kind of store you’re visiting, and you need help—maybe it’s the paint counter at a hardware store and they say, Oh, Jane’s not here. So, we’ll have to wait till Jane’s here.
Sometimes only one person is able to help out in a certain way. Or, I would like to order this interlibrary loan for you, but I’ve got to get permission to do that first. Or, a staff member has a really, really good idea that if the boss would just ask them about it, they’d be happy to contribute it and share it. But they sit on it. Sometimes we do that out of fear of making the wrong choice. Sometimes we do it because we think we’re standing or driving in a road construction zone, and we think that flagger is holding out a stop sign for us. But he’s not. He’s just kind of resting, taking a break on the side of the road. But we’re conditioned to wait for permission.
We get a lot of this through the public school system. You know, Stand in this line, raise your hand, wait your turn. But, you get into organizations, and if we’re always using stoplights at every intersection, even the ones that hardly get any traffic, sometimes we can get more efficient when we can have more of a roundabout. There’s lots of roundabouts in Colorado.
Sometimes this looks like some of the stoplights look like processes that were built for a different time, and they just never got updated. I remember digging into this issue where I was asked to approve every single title selection, and it went way back to when there were three different physical library branches that my college here, at one point in time, they didn’t have the most robust catalog where they could check and see what had been ordered and what was at the other locations. So, the best way to do that was to send all the acquisitions to the leader of the library, who could then manually do that process. Well, that’s automated now. We don’t need to do that. There’s a nice on-ramp. We can just look and go, if it’s clear.
Sometimes there’s misaligned expectations between departments that can create unintentional red lights. I remember my day of onboarding, and we’ll talk about onboarding later. There were so many people that they introduced me to—and I’m taking notes. I’m trying to scribble things. I’ve just moved into a new town. I moved into a new job. I even had to get rid of my old rusty truck because it wasn’t reliable enough to make it down the road. So, everything’s new, and I’m trying to remember all these names and who does what, and I got some of the information mixed up. As I’m trying to communicate with these people, if I’m not understanding the rules. If I have a misaligned expectation what does that look like? That can look like a stoplight.
Sometimes stoplights come from a leader that holds on to information too tightly. Maybe there’s some tough decisions coming up ahead. I’m guilty of this—I used to want to insulate my team from the political pressures that were going on. There’s so much fighting about any topic you can think of these days that I saw my role as being the person that would stand out there with the hard hat on and just hold all that at bay so my team could do their job. There’s a degree of that that needs to happen.
But, think of driving—if you are teaching a new driver how to drive, but you never let them experience driving in the rain, or at dark, or during a snowstorm, does that really benefit them? Does that benefit your organization? So, sometimes we need to let go of some of those things.
Finally, a stoplight can be a culture that defaults to no, because choosing yes—choosing to do something differently feels risky. And, What if this is the only chance we have? And what if I mess up? And what if it’s not good enough? But, I know what we have now sort of, kind of works. So, that’s what some of those red lights can look like.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: That makes a lot of sense. And, I could really see what you’re talking about as I think about the organizations I’ve been a part of over the years—how organizational highways and backroads can lead to a lot of stoplights. So, this is resonating with me. There are stoplights and roundabouts in this model. Can you help us understand the principles of roundabouts? 07:33
Sam Passey:
Everyone, I think, knows what a stoplight is, but there might be a few people that haven’t seen a roundabout. I remember the first day the roundabout in Vernal, Utah opened. They essentially take an intersection—and there’s this sweet spot for roundabouts. So, the roundabout—they have a big round circle. You drive around and you exit. You travel in one direction and you can exit where you need to. There’s a lane for people on the inside that are going past the first exit, and then there’s one on the right. These things can be efficient. They don’t use power to operate. There’s no stoplight. There’s no electronics that can go bad, no bulbs that can go out. And, if the intersection isn’t too complicated and it needs something more than just a stop sign, a roundabout can be a good option.
Now the thing is, they really only work when people trust each other—trust the other drivers to follow the flow and they know how it is. Leadership is no different. I saw this two weeks ago. I was in Grand Junction, in Colorado. For whatever reason, they have gobs of roundabouts. They must have had some grant from the highway department to do roundabouts, because any conceivable intersection that could have a roundabout pretty much does. At first it’s a little weird, but then you’re like, This is kind of cool. I’m not sitting here stopped at red lights as much.
Anyway, I was in Grand Junction. I got off the freeway and the freeway exited to a roundabout. There’s a guy with out-of-state plates, and he went the wrong way around the roundabout. He went left instead of going right—the direction traffic goes in the United States. And, I thought he was going to die in an accident. Fortunately, the drivers that were coming from the other direction stopped and the accident was avoided. But, what this means is roundabouts work great when there’s trust—when permission is given under parameters, and people know what those parameters are.
This implies that there needs to be a strong driver’s ed, or mentoring component, not just the, One day I talked about that a little bit, but an effective organization. You either assign, or people will find those strong mentors, or strong driver’s ed teachers who can help them navigate some of those kinds of things. I’m fortunate enough in my current role to have an amazing dean of academic support that I report to. She’s been very good at sitting next to me, as it were, ready to reach over and grab that wheel. She had to, or tell me to slam on the brakes. But, she’s teaching me the nuances and how they navigate certain things around here, and people need that in an organization.
So really, the roundabout thing—the entry point is transparency. If information is clear, if the rules are clear, you know what you can do—you know what you can’t merge into, that kind of thing. So, the metaphor gets a little tired on the roundabout. But, I find that it’s a pretty powerful visual for people. If you need to experience that firsthand, come visit me in Colorado and I’ll take you on a tour of some of my favorite roundabouts. Lots of them have art in the middle of the intersection now. That’s kind of cool.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: Or come visit me in Park City, where we have lots of them here too. And, it does take some getting used to, but they do flow pretty smoothly once you get the hang of it. So what you’re saying is absolutely true. How do we create smoother flow and empower teams around these ideas? 11:29
Sam Passey:
Really this is all about designing good processes. Some of those good processes are having—I like to call them green light checks where you have regular check-ins. You’re working with a remote team. This can be very important because you have to go out of your way and be really intentional to schedule those, Hey, how are you doing moments. In the office, I would do this more casually and make the rounds and go visit with people—go for a walk with a team member—no solid agenda other than seeing how people are doing and asking, How can I support you? Or what questions do you have? If you’re the manager—the leader asking them, What am I doing now? And, what should I keep doing? Are there some things I’m doing that I should stop doing or start doing? Some people call these clarity loops—these structured check-ins.
It’s an opportunity to get to the yes, to find out what someone’s really concerned about, what their feelings are, rather than just reporting tasks. There’s the joke that this meeting could have been an email, but there’s also a lot of emails that should have been conversations, and phone calls, and walks together.
Some of the things that are helpful tools are decision maps. Literally making a flow chart that shows who decides what and how it works. Like with the question of purchasing authority, you know, Hey, you are the content expert. I told one of our librarians, You are the content expert. You have relationships with these faculty members. I’m some new guy that’s off the street. I know a lot about budgets and libraries and a little bit about leadership, I hope. But, you know this collection, and you know your students, and your faculty. Up until this dollar limit, if you’ve got money, I’m going to sign that—you don’t even have to ask me.
And then those guidelines, if there’s a bigger conversation or situation that we need to have about a looming—let’s say they’re adding in academia. Let’s say they’re adding a new degree plan. What’s our organization going to have to adjust to support that degree plan? That might be more of a stoplight moment like even breaking out the old flagger for a minute. Stop. We got to talk about this and figure some stuff out because we’re doing some road work here.
But short of that, using a lot of quick prototypes. I really like the Idea Labs approach, where you prototype things, you iterate quickly, you really focus on what your patron, your customer, your team member needs and explore what might work and what can you do now that inches you forward—even if it’s not perfect. I think sometimes we wait for fully engineered, fully built, fully designed schematics, but those often don’t last too long or ever come to fruition in the real world, at least in my experience. Really just inviting people at all levels of the organization to be involved in designing these workflows, because they’re the ones that are dealing with things every day.
Are you contemplating a new ILS because it has this cool admin reporting feature, and as a director or a dean, that might be the part of the library management system that you interact with most is that statistics part. But is its checkout process terrible? These things happen. These kinds of decisions often get made by back-of-house staff to solve one problem that creates problems for other people.
So finally, the main tool here is just practicing communication. It doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be drawn out. It doesn’t have to be nice. It needs to be kind. If you want to know the difference I encourage you to read Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead book. She really goes into the difference between kind and nice. I’m sure you’ve had webinars on that, so I won’t get too into that, but the communication is complete. If you know something, share it. If you’re speculating, you can say you’re speculating or you can say, I don’t know. You don’t know. Those are some of the tools that I found to be pretty helpful.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: Absolutely. And will you please reflect on personal leadership habits that either create congestion or smooth traffic? 16:17
Sam Passey:
This is like—this top one is one of my big failings I’m always fighting against. I avoid conflict. I’m a middle child. I’m a peacemaker. I don’t like arguing. I don’t like playing board games when they change the rules because I’m like, Wait, that’s not fair. That’s wild now. Leaders who avoid conflict unintentionally create enormous logjams. If you’re afraid to make a decision because you might hurt someone’s feelings, you’re going to hurt the whole organization.
That’s a cautionary tale that you can find all over the place. Issues pile up. Overusing email as a substitute for having a discussion. If you’ve got some bad news to give to someone, that really should be done in person. If you’ve got some good news that should be done in person or on the phone. There’s a lot of communication that needs to happen verbally and visually that gets lost in an email. Can you imagine if we only communicated by emoji? We want to avoid that kind of thing.
Leaders who want to become a hero often create congestion and traffic jams. What I mean by this is they want to touch everything. They want to control every little bit and command every little decision that’s made. That might have worked at one point in time. I don’t think that works in modern organizations. If your organization has more than one person involved in it, you really need to share the authority and the responsibility.
Some of the things that help create helpful movement—help the traffic flow are moving at a calm and steady pace. You’re careful about what you’re committing to do. We want to say yes to everyone. I think that’s ingrained in librarian DNA. Like, I am here to help people. And, I want to say yes. Sometimes there’s a difference between saying yes and getting to yes. There’s a great book on that, actually called Getting to Yes. It’s all about negotiation and understanding what the underlying needs and interests are. In librarianship we think about this a lot through the reference interview, What do they really need? Maybe there’s something else I can provide that will help, or another organization that’s better suited—someone we can partner with.
Curiosity is a traffic smoother. If you can, listen as an ally when someone’s bringing you something. This sounds like improv—the whole “yes, and” thing, and it gets overdone, and sometimes can feel tiresome. But, there’s something to it that if we’re really genuinely curious and not just going through those motions, people can tell. It’s like the difference between talking with a good friend and talking to some random person on the airplane that you’re going to be sitting next to for an hour or two. So really, so much of this on the leadership level is self-regulation.
If you’re emotionally stuck at a red light, if you’re having a terrible time, if there’s something going on at home that you need to deal with—we all have this kind of thing. I think we’re so ingrained to like, Just power through it. Just power through it. Just do it. Be strong. We’re going to work ten days in a row and get this thing done. It can feel like that because there’s a lot of urgency to the work that we do and trying to help people and build vibrant communities, but you’ve got to take care of yourself emotionally. Because if you’re stuck, your whole organization is going to be stuck.
The final point in this area is understanding that you want people to give their best—yes. You need to understand that best is going to look different every day depending on what’s been going on. If you’re talking with a parent who’s just had a call from the school and they got called to the principal’s office, as it were—then they’re coming into work after that, and you’re asking them to have their whole brain engaged in the statistics on this database. Or, Should we put more money into Libby or Hoopla this year? They might not be in a good emotional state to make that kind of a decision. So, if we have these relationships of trust with our colleagues and there’s enough to like, Hey, I need a minute to figure some stuff out, can we put a pin in this or, I trust you guys. You have it. This isn’t coming from a place of avoiding wanting to make a decision, but a place of, My head is not in a good space right now. Or better yet, Take the day off and go fishing. That’s the last tip in that area.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: Yeah, and the best tip of all. Sam, is there anything else you’d like to share? 21:06
Sam Passey:
Really so much of leadership to me is self-awareness. I think it can serve as a bit of a GPS—to continue our metaphor. How are you doing? Take some time to check in. Find your own community of support, whoever that might be at work, at home, online. I think that as you learn your own triggers, your own blind spots, things will become a little easier for you to navigate and really focus on building healthy relationships with your team—helping develop together what this roadmap looks like.
If I were to come to your organization, Adriane, and say, Here’s my roadmap, here’s my book. It’s got everything you need to know, just do it. That’s not going to work. Stepping back to some principles of communication and conflict negotiation, I think, can help us all have some good self-awareness that can help us create guidelines and rules and know what things are hard and fast.
If we’re spending large amounts of public money—yeah, you’d better bet you’re going to go through a series of stoplights with audits and check-ins. Should we change our practice around how we do storytime? Yeah—use your judgment. Talk with your colleagues.Try some things out and look at whatever the intersection is, as it were, and taking some time to figure out what kind of system will support smooth flow through here. That’s really what it comes back to, is some intentionality about how we interact with others, what the parameters are, and teaching all the people that are new that when you see these roundabouts, you’ve got to drive right around it, even if it looks a little shorter to go to the left—go to the right.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: And, like you say, customizing these roadmaps to our organization in a way that is understandable by everyone, that makes so much sense. Thank you, Sam. 23:16
Sam Passey:
Thank you. Thank you. It’s been fun to talk about these ideas with people. I’m doing a webinar for a company coming up here in a while, and it got me thinking about this whole notion. What’s the overarching theme that so many of us library leaders and managers in general have and we keep seeing similar patterns at different organizations? When you’re at an organization and you’re new and you’re actively working to build the culture, it seems like there gets to a point where you’ve trained, or recruited enough people to where when there’s enough people that know the rules of the road, it begins to perpetuate itself. Sometimes when you’re in a new situation, you’ve got to learn a whole new set of roads. You might be finding out that you’re in London and you’ve got to drive on the wrong side of the road—it might feel wrong for a while, but you’ve got to learn the rules of the road in the context of where you’re at.
Thank you so much again for this opportunity to talk with you. I hope that people can successfully navigate the potholes and everything else that they come across through leadership in libraries.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: It’s my pleasure, Sam. I’m so glad we’re talking about this today. In navigating this all, you’ve mentioned a couple of great book titles. Are there any other good books or resources you’d like to share and why? 24:45
Sam Passey:
Some of my favorites right now are—and you’ll have to forgive the author, but Getting To Yes. It’s probably in its 30th year plus of straight printing. It’s from the Harvard Conflict Resolution Group. It really helped contextualize that conflict is joint problem-solving rather than like win-lose—looking at people’s motivations and feelings. Sometimes we’re taught to separate the feelings—separate your feelings from the issue we’re debating. But, if the issue that we’re debating has to do with something that might impact the way they feel about their state of life, their autonomy, their authority, their title—so many of these things, yeah, might manifest itself as a conflict about a given decision. But, let’s back up and let’s look at the context and figure out how we can really listen to one another—where they’re coming from, where we’re coming from, and start finding alternatives that work together.
A couple other books that I really like right now—L David Marquet was a naval commander of the Santa Fe. He’s got a couple of books that I really like. One’s called Turn the Ship Around! And again, it’s really about this intentional declarative style, where they focus on creating the system where everyone knows the rules. In the Navy, this is the little Reading Rainbow moment from Sam, but David Marquet was in the Navy his whole career, and he had trained for over a year to command a different type of submarine than the one that the Navy ultimately needed him to command. The commander of the sub is supposed to know all the procedures and all the processes, but he was put on this ship that he knew—I mean he knew it was a submarine and the basics of how submarines work, but he didn’t have all the technical manuals memorized the way he had for the ship he thought he was going to be on. So that put him in a position of not being this expert. He was the leader, but he wasn’t the expert. The short of this is he had to say, Look, I’m not making orders If something needs to be done, I want you to state, Sir, it is my intention to do fill in the blank, and I will affirm that, or I will counter it and say, come up with something else.
But, it created this whole different dynamic of accountability. The Santa Fe had some of the most performance issues in the Navy, and it went on to be one of the top ships. And anyway, his book is called Turn the Ship Around and there’s so many more. Brené Brown’s a favorite right now. Adam Grant—any of his books. Just books that really emphasize on understanding one another, understanding ourselves, and working to build fair systems, so we’re not being arbitrary or capricious in our decision-making.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: Thank you for those, Sam. They sound fantastic. In closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 28:10
Sam Passey:
I grew up using libraries. I’ve brought my kids to libraries. My wife and I brought our kids to libraries throughout their lives. In fact, they just went today. Libraries are one of the last civic spaces where everyone’s welcome. There’s no pressure to buy anything. No one’s selling anything. And, for the most part, the people that work there feel called to work there. They’re all very clear on their why. Libraries are my professional home, they are a personal anchor. I love the freedom that libraries have always given me to have room to roam in my mind and throughout the stacks. It’s been really fun to watch libraries continue to evolve and transition and embrace some of these third space concepts that are now so central to libraries. I love libraries.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: I love libraries, too. And I love what you say—they give us room to roam, as does the pathway you’re giving us for navigating the highways and backroads of organizational life and leadership, based on what you’ve shared today. We can all do this smoothly, avoid those stoplights, understand the roundabouts, and make all the traffic patterns of organizational life flow well. So thank you for being here today, Sam. 29:11
Sam Passey:
Thank you. Thank you so much.
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.
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