on activity-based or activity-driven employees

I had a thought the other day (yes, I occasionally have these and frequently wish I didn’t). What if we divide all the people in our respective libraries into two groups: those with an impact on our relationship with the infrastructure and those who are absorbed in day-to-day activities? Why? There are those who set the patterns within which activities occur, aka those who help build the infrastructure of an organization, be it conceptual, technical, organizational, etc., and those who don’t. This division may help illustrate how your library operates based on the category into which the greater number of individuals fall, and may assist in identifying the change agents and potential change agents in your library (those who set or create patterns).

The process of associating individuals with these two categories may be problematic. Sometimes activity-driven individuals try to enforce a structure based on their activities and they sometimes successfully implement activity-based patterns. In my opinion, these activity-driven patterns are “from the ground up” and lack flexibility and a recognition of “the big picture”. They rarely speak to the mandate of the library and how their activities fit within a strategic direction or lend themselves to an established goal. I believe their approach is not the most effective way to implement structure, because it is piecemeal.

Do you see “activities” that have become entrenched your organization, activities that may even drive a section of a department, a department or the whole library? They are contained within statements such as “I am a collections librarian,” “I am an acquisitions librarian,” “I only do x.” When you ask them to describe what they do they default to a description of activities they are mandated to fulfill. Paul Levy described in his 2001 article the negative impacts resulting from a disassociation with “the bigger picture” and the corresponding people who create and modify infrastructure.

Are activity-driven people capable of becoming change agents? I believe it is possible. The difficulty, I suspect, is that the longer activity-driven people are in charge of themselves, the more difficult it is to change their culture. Ironically, they are quite correct in saying that their structure is appropriate or correct, because it is appropriate for what they want to do, especially because their locus is activity-based. How do you shift these people into change agents, less disassociated from the structure of their library? That is the million dollar question and since I’m not rich, I obviously have no correct answer at this time. I do have ideas but how to practicably implement them….

Levy, Paul F. (2001).“The Nut Island effect: when good teams go wrong” Harvard Business Review, v. 79(3), 51-59.