CHAPTER 10
SERVICE LEADERSHIP IN LIBRARIES
Poor service has no redeeming virtue, nor does mediocre service for that matter. Service excellence is more profitable, more fun, and more conducive to a better future.
––Leonard Berry1
The quote above is from On Great Service: A Framework for Action, Leonard Berry’s well-known book that explains how important it is for service organizations, such as libraries, to improve their service quality so that they can deliver what they promise and more. Librarians know that every service encounter consists of an interaction between the library and its users. This encounter, however, is no longer the traditional face-to-face interaction. Today library users are experiencing their libraries more and more through technology. In fact, ARL statistics show the dwindling face-to-face contact between librarians and their users. The increased use of electronic interfaces and material has empowered library patrons to find the information they need anywhere and at any time, not just when the library is open, and without the help of a librarian. Services and systems, such as the electronic interlibrary loan or even self-checkout of library material, that were traditionally behind the scenes and required face-to-face interaction with a librarian, are now available from the library’s web page. When these behind-the-scenes library services, or any service, falls short and does not perform its promised functions, that service is not meeting the users’ expectations. The user, unhappy with his experience with the service, may turn his back on the service and possibly the library. A user might even let others know about the bad service they received from the library. That is why the adage “You only have one time to create a good first impression” rings true. The interaction between the library and its patrons is critical to the library’s success. User satisfaction is so important to any service industry. Rust, Moorman, and Dickson believe that corporations that focus on their customer’s satisfaction and on the quality of service are generally more successful than companies that focus on cutting costs.2 The reason for this is that higher satisfaction will increase patron loyalty to the company, helping to insulate a company’s current market share from competitors, reduce operation costs, and reduce failure costs and thus the cost of attracting new customers, which will help build a firm’s reputation. While Dickinson et al. address a corporate model, user satisfaction is perhaps even more critical for a public organization. While profit-driven organizations have a concrete metric of success, public organizations, libraries included, are selling an intangible service, one that is a public good and, as such, is hard to quantify. This means that the only meaningful metric is patron satisfaction. Librarians have the value of libraries diminished in the eyes of faculty members across academic institutions in both Canada and the United States. In a survey of 555 faculty members from 350 higher education institutions in these two countries, 82.13 percent indicated that they did not think that their library should be spending more on additional librarians.3 This may indicate a disparity in expectation between librarians and those they serve—that fundamentally the library definition of service is not as relevant to our patrons. Many argue that service relates to encounters between the library and its patrons. Others equate service to the library profession itself, through activities performed in the library associations and committees. Some believe that it is service to each other—our colleagues and employees. However, service leaders would argue that service is all of these things and more. Service is not a transaction but a philosophy and a work ethic; it is a value that is modeled in all situations, regardless of the hierarchy or the power, regardless of the work environment.
Could the loss of value in academic institutions mentioned above indicate that libraries no longer know who they are serving and what they want? The key question that service leadership asks themselves is “Whom do libraries serve?” Despite the fact that this question is critical to the success of a service organization, it is often overlooked or dismissed with an arrogant and very short-sighted answer, such as “we know who our users are” or “we serve anyone who uses the library.” An academic librarian might say that the library serves the students and teaching faculty of their institution. However, what if the library is funded by the taxpayers of a particular state? Does the library serve the person who lives three towns over who is trying to connect to the library’s databases from their home computer but finds she can’t because she is not affiliated to the library? Are we saying that she is not our user? How does she feel when she can’t get the information she needs? Do these users believe that we don’t serve them, even though they are paying for the library with their tax dollars? Why would they continue to support the library economically when the library is not supporting them?
EMPLOYEE AS THE PATRON
What about the library employees? Are they considered library users as they perform the day-to-day library functions? It would be short-sighted to say that library employees are not library users.
SERVICE LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Samantha, an experienced electronic resource librarian, began negotiating a five-year licensing contract with a well-known journal publisher. After a hard negotiation Samantha was given 30 days to work out the contract logistics with her library administration. Pleased with the results and excited about her accomplishment, Samantha sent an e-mail requesting an appointment to discuss the contract agreements with her library business office. After three days without a response to her request, Samantha repeated her e-mail request and let the business office know that she had 30 days to finalize the agreement. Despite her urgent e-mail, once again her request for an e-mail response went unanswered. This silence continued, and after four e-mail attempts and multiple phone messages, Samantha turned to her supervisor for assistance. Even her supervisor was unsuccessful at organizing a meeting. Samantha was now distraught because she only had six days left to have the contract signed. Samantha was forced to speak to the dean about the lack of response and poor patron support from her colleagues in the business office. When asked about the lack of response by the dean, the business office said they were too busy with their patrons to help out Samantha. Surprised by the response, the dean was quick to reply that library employees in other units are the business office’s patrons.
In the vignette above it is easy to see that it is not only important to identify which services you perform but also who your users are. Now take this a step further. Imagine how Samantha feels about the business office. Do you think that she believes that the business office is service oriented? Probably not! When asked to support the business office, do you think Samantha will volunteer to help? Will her opinion of the business office forever be jaded? Probably! Think about the effect of the poor treatment on Samantha; will this trickle down to the service Samantha offers to library patrons? Unfortunately, it may. Covey believes that there is a correlation between the ways leaders treat their employees and how these employees treat not only others in their organization but also their customers.4 If employees are treated badly by their library colleagues, they will begin resenting how little they are valued and how badly they are being treated. Soon they will begin to model this bad treatment behavior to others, inside and outside of their organization. However, service leaders recognize that quality service, regardless of whether it is for an internal or external user, should be modeled by all employees to show that the patron is valued and respected by the service organization. Employees who are highly valued and well-trained by their organizations provide a higher level of service to their customers and patrons. A service leader’s inclination is to serve first by focusing on the needs of the individual and to “treat all people with radical equality, engaging with others as equal partners in the organization.”5 Service leaders must continually assess how well each unit in the library is servicing each other unit. Where there is a breakdown in service support, the leader must address the issue. Grönfeldt and Strother support this by suggest the following actions for strengthening internal and external customer service orientation:
• “Employees should never complain within earshot of customers. It gives them the impression your company is not well run, shaking their confidence in you.
• Employees should never complain to customers about employees in other departments. Who wants to patronize a company whose people do not get along with each other?
• Employees at every level should strive to build bridges between departments. This can be done through cross-training and joint picnics, as well as day-to-day niceties.
• Use postmortems after joint projects so everyone can learn from the experience. Fences can be mended and new understandings gleaned when everyone reviews what went right or wrong. Not doing so can result in lingering animosities that will exacerbate future collaborations.
• Consider letting your employees become Customer of the Day to experience firsthand what your customers experience when doing business with you.
• Remember that service recovery applies to all customers—both internal and external.”6
The key to building this relationship between units is for each employee to see the other employee not only as a team member but also as a customer who is playing a critical role in the organization’s service supply chain.
PATRON PERCEPTION OF THE SERVICE CULTURE
It is a well-known fact that what people perceive to be the truth is their reality. When they witness bad service or experience bad service firsthand, they generally perceive the incident as something negative and it influences their opinion of future interactions. According to Weingand, “Among the library’s customers, emotion is generally felt as a variation of anger or frustration.”7 Weingand believes that these twelve common interactions between the library and its customers that can produce these frustrations:
1. Customer is unable to locate materials or information.
2. Telephone is not answered promptly when customer calls.
3. Length of time until a reserved material is available seems too long.
4. Library staff is not friendly or helpful.
5. Library staff appears to be busy or unapproachable.
6. Parking is not available nearby.
7. Line at check-out is too long.
8. Librarian is not available to assist in locating material or information.
9. Customers are notified at inopportune times that requested items have arrived.
10. Library staff interpret policies literally and display a lack of flexibility.
11. Library hours are not convenient.
12. Customer must wait at the service desk while staff answers telephone.8
The above list, however, can be extended to include the following:
13. Customer is unable to maneuver through the library website.
14. Chat service technology does not work correctly and drops customers.
15. Library is too noisy.
16. Electronic material indicates availability but when tested is not available.
17. Electronic book and database layouts are not standardized making, it difficult to navigate between one technology and another.
No matter whether the user is an internal or external library patron, his perception becomes his reality and he has little or no desire to use or support the service again. The customer might even encourage others-—friends, family members, or colleagues—not to use the service. Think about it, when was the last time you heard positive feedback about a library? Now think about the last time you heard something negative about a library. Library patrons are more likely to voice their anger, disappointment, expectations, and frustration with a library, as well as the perceived lack of respect, than they are to praise its good service. According to Peter Hernon, this is because “satisfaction is an emotional reaction—the degree of contentment or discontentment—with a specific transaction or service encounter. Satisfaction may or may not be directly related to the performance of the library on a specific occasion. A customer can receive an answer to a query but be unsatisfied because of an upsetting or angry encounter. Conversely, although the query might remain unanswered, another customer might feel satisfied because the encounter was pleasant and the helper interested and polite.”9 Service leaders know that satisfaction with a service does not necessarily equate to quality of the service. Hernon stresses that service quality “is a global judgment relating to the superiority of a service as viewed in the context of specific statements that the library is willing to act on if customers find them of great value. The inference is that this satisfaction levels from a number of transactions or encounters that an individual experiences with a particular organization fuse to form an impression of service quality for that person. The collective experiences of many persons create an organization’s reputation for service quality.”10
Disneyland, for example, has a reputation for being the happiest place on earth. One can say that this reputation is born out of the fact that the company recognizes the need to deliver high-quality customer service while making sure that their customers not only attain what they wanted in their Disneyland vacation but also create happy memories, which create a desire to return. Service leaders know that in order to give their patrons quality service they need to ensure that the patron receives what they came to the library for and also has a good experience while in using the library services.
PATRON’S PERCEPTION OF EMPLOYEE’S INTERACTION
Interaction between patrons and employees is not the only concern that service leaders need to be attuned to. They also need to ensure that employees’ interaction with each other models the values of the library so that patrons identify quality patron service with the organization. This is especially true in today’s poor economic environment because it is commonplace to have student workers and support staff assigned to perform job duties that historically where handled by librarians. Gone are the days when it was solely the librarian who sat at the reference desk answering reference questions. In fact gone are the reference desks and reference collections in a large number of libraries in favor of a one service-desk model. Today the percentage of student workers and support staff working at public desks is extremely high, particularly during the nights, weekends, and holidays when most academic libraries experience the highest usage. A library patron rarely recognizes that it is not a librarian to whom they are speaking, and all the patron cares about is getting what he needs. Because of this staffing model shift, it is extremely important for service leaders to be aware of what happens at the desk at all times, not only between the library patron and the library employee but also between library employees.
Since patron service affects the organizational image, service leaders understand that delivering quality service is too important to be left to chance, and therefore, a plan must be created. In fact, delivering quality patron service is often the lifeblood of a library and therefore must be considered and constructed, when possible, before library patrons encounter the library. In the sidebar above, it is easy to see the initial impact of this type of poor patron service. The patron not only did not receive any service from the library but she left disappointed and frustrated at the employees’ lack of professionalism. When students, who may pay a library user fee on top of the public taxes that fund public academic libraries, experience poor patron service like Shannon did, they may feel like they are paying an employee that isn’t working.
SERVICE LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
Shannon, a freshman at a large academic institution, enters the library for the first time. Unsure of where to go and who to ask for help, she looks around shyly in hope of finding someone to help her. Within seconds she identifies a public service desk but is hesitant to approach it because she sees two employees deep in what looks like an argument. As she slowly approaches the desk, she begins to hear part of their conversation and is taken aback by the tone used by one librarian as he speaks to his colleague. Surprised that the two employees would be having such a heated conversation in public, Shannon shook her head in disappointment at their lack of professionalism. At no time did they make eye contact with her and at no time did they recognize her presence. As she stood there waiting for one of the two librarians to make eye contact with her, she began to feel uncomfortable while the librarians continued their verbal battle. Disappointed and frustrated, Shannon turned away from the desk thinking she wasn’t going to get help from this desk, so she better figure it out on her own.
PATRONS’ PERCEPTION OF LIBRARY SERVICE
From the example above, it is easy to see that that library patrons form attitudes about the library, its employees, and library services based on what they see and experience. It is important to note that not all services are delivered face-to-face. More and more library patrons come to the library virtually through the library website, chat, or phone reference and through electronic access of books and journals. Despite how the patron gains access to material, Zeithaml et al. identified five core criteria by which customers evaluate service quality. They are defined as follows:
1. Tangibles: physical facilities, equipment, and appearance of personnel;
2. Reliability: ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately;
3. Responsiveness: willingness to help customers and provide prompt service;
4. Assurance: knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to inspire trust and confidence; and
5. Empathy: caring, individualized attention the organization provides its customers.11
As more and more patrons demand that their library come to them, demands for electronic access will increase. Patron expectations of libraries will vary, however, according to what patrons want and how urgently they want it. Think about a time when you needed to help a patron find an article for a paper she was writing, but the patron waited until the night before the paper was due to get help from the library. It is easy to see that importance and urgency of the information need can influence how satisfied a patron is with a library service.
Leaders can help mitigate these negative service encounters by:
• setting and continually communicating the organization’s service vision, goals, and values to the library employees to foster organizational commitment;
• modeling the organization’s commitment to its service vision, goals, and values;
• committing to empowerment efforts so that employees can solve immediate problems;
• ensuring that each employee is sufficiently trained to perform his job duties;
• encouraging employees to try and not punishing them for failing;
• rewarding employees for service excellence;
• listening to the concerns of employees and acting on suggestions when necessary;
• supporting employees by recognizing that the patron is not always right;
• holding themselves and employees accountable for their actions; and
• admitting when they are wrong.
SERVICE QUALITY
In order to manage service quality, you need to be able to measure what service quality is and how it is applied to your library. Oakleaf stresses that “libraries have long argued that they are integral to the teaching and learning mission of higher education. Now, libraries must prove that they contribute to the production of quality graduates.”12 To do this libraries need to develop appropriate metrics to assess service. This will allow the library to measure service activities, making them visible and tangible, and to quantify the library’s service achievements and failures for its stakeholders.
However, trying to get librarians to agree on the metrics can be difficult and may be like trying to herd cats. Despite this disagreement, regardless of what metrics are chosen to benchmark the library services, the metrics need to identify performance strengths so that quality service performance is recognized and rewarded and at the same time identify performance weaknesses that need to be addressed. It is also critical that these balanced metrics help monitor progress toward the library’s mission, vision, and goals. According to Grönfeldt and Strother, “it is crucial that the organization make sure the metrics fit the company’s culture, values, and its way of doing things. For example, an organization known for teamwork and a collective sales approach might decide to apply measures of individual performance and even go as far as to link payments to those metrics only if it wants to change its ways. Such measures could destroy rather than reinforce its traditional way of operating. Furthermore, the metrics need to address results and direct behaviors so they can be used to develop or enhance individual or group performance.”13 Oakleaf stresses that “in the past, libraries have relied heavily on input, output, and process measures as key indicators of excellence. These measures are no longer considered adequate for assessing the impact of libraries’ services on college students. In a climate of outcomes-based measurement, university stakeholders are less interested in traditional measurements: the count of the volumes on library shelves, the number of students checking out books, or the speed with which reference questions are answered. Rather, they want libraries to determine what students know and are able to do as a result of their interaction with the library and its staff.”14 Service leaders must develop a way of identifying metrics so that they do not deviate from the library’s culture, values, and its way of doing things because deviation can create conflict, not only between the services and values but also between the employees who are performing the services. Grönfeldt and Strother believe that a strategic map, such as the one developed by Kaplan and Norton in the 1990s, is an effective way for a service leader to visualize how her organization can connect its goals and strategies and communicate clear cause-and-effect relationships for their employees.15 Once the goals and strategies are identified, a tool to gather the information, such as SERVQUAL, can be used to measure the service quality in the library and what library patrons value.
Building on the Millennium Librarian’s Standards of Behaviors, the following can be used to help librarians develop good patron service etiquette for their library.16
1. Greet patrons with a smile and a pleasant face as they enter the library. If you’re frowning, you are going to give the wrong impression.
2. Treat all patrons the same—provide equitable service and attention.
3. Expect your staff to treat patrons with courtesy and respect, to be polite, and to be willing to help. Never let them act rude or bossy.
4. Expect your staff to be treated with courtesy and respect.
5. Create welcoming physical and virtual spaces.
6. Encourage your staff to answer telephone calls and/or chat reference in a courteous and polite manner. Note that whether you are dealing with patrons in person or on the phone, the way you begin a conversation or interaction will affect how the patron treats you; first impressions are hard to change.
7. Generate rapport. When a client approaches you, your greeting should be short and to the point. But sometimes it is more appropriate to spend a bit of time in conversation before getting down to business. Spend a minute or two asking questions or talking about subjects other than the reason patron is there. The purpose is to establish a relationship with the individual or to recognize that a relationship already exists.
8. Encourage your staff to answer questions in a prompt and timely manner—don’t let the telephone ring more than twice.
9. Be firm if you need to be and remind patrons of policies, rules, and procedures.
10. Don’t break library policy or procedures. lf you do, how will you enforce those rules? Remember that it is hard to enforce a policy if employees are not abiding by it.
11. Encourage your staff to excuse themselves and get a supervisor if they are having difficulty with a patron or group of patron.
12. Encourage your staff to build a user-friendly website that is easy for patrons to navigate.
13. Encourage your staff to ensure that electronic access to items is working and that broken links are fixed.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
As discussed in previous chapters, each library develops its own organizational culture that is founded on the norms of the library employees and becomes manifested in their behavior and actions. The term organizational culture means “the collective assumptions, value systems, and norms that groups develop to cope with problems of external adaption and internal integrations.”17 Although the underlying values of libraries are the same, their organizational cultures vary considerably. One library may have a traditional organizational structure in which each employee must get the permission of their supervisor to sneeze. Other more forward-focused libraries have a less traditional organizational structure in which the library director encourages her employees to take risks and be empowered to make decisions. According to Moran et al., a library’s “organizational culture comes from three main sources: 1) the beliefs, assumptions, and values of the organization’s founder; 2) the learning experiences of group members as the organization evolves; and 3) fresh beliefs, values, and assumptions brought in by new members and leaders.”18 Consequently, it is easy to see how a library’s organizational culture can affect staff morale and how this can affect the way staff members interact with library patrons. According to Weingand, “Librarians with even the best service orientation will find it problematic to provide a high level of service if the operating environment does not encourage and empower the staff to provide this level of service. Conversely, library staff with less enthusiasm for customer service to begin with may be energized when management encourages and rewards a positive service attitude.”19
SERVICE LEADERSHIP IN PRACTICE
John, a 13-year veteran of access services, moves to a new departmental library on a large academic campus. John has heard his new supervisor say that she encourages her staff to embrace change and try new things. John is excited to work with a manager who promotes risk-taking performance and empowers them to make decisions. He couldn’t wait to jump into his new position. Two days after John begins his new position, he decides to make an exception for a library patron. He let the patron know that it was an exception and that the library would not be able to do this again. When Lillia, his supervisor, discovers what he did, she is upset and tells John that he stepped outside of his realm of responsibility and that he should have come to her to make sure the exception was acceptable. John was shocked. All he did was allow the patron to check out a low-use book for one extra day. He couldn’t understand why Lillia was making such a big deal about his decision. When he asked her why he was wrong, all Lillia could say was, “because I said so.”
In the sidebar above, it is easy to see what happens if library administration says one thing but models another. John witnessed firsthand how Lillia encouraged empowerment in her employees, but when he acts on that encouragement, she punishes him for showing initiative. When this happens it creates an organizational culture of distrust and frustration. In order to avoid this type of negative culture and sustain quality service, organizational culture service leaders must model the values they promote.
Figure 10.1 offers a representation of the interdependence of these values in the progression toward the ideal of service leadership. The ladder indicates the reliance of each upward stage on the preceding stage: if one step is removed, such as self-awareness, the individual regresses back to the previous stage, regardless of how far he had previously progressed. Note that the ladder’s rails are encouragement/accountability and service commitment respectively. These elements are critical to the development of the service leadership ethic: the individual must have internalized that service commitment and the environment in which they operate must support encouragement and accountability. Should the environment change, whether due to new management or changing values, the rail of encouragement and accountability is destabilized and the ladder of service leadership falls apart.
REFLECTIONS ON SERVICE LEADERSHIP IN LIBRARIES: TOOLS FOR DEVELOPMENT
1. When discussing an issue with your team members, try modeling the library’s mission values and goals to see if the team also begins modeling the same behavior.
2. Think about the official channels of communication: what is the message that is communicated? Now consider the unofficial channels of communication: is the message consistent or is the grapevine very active and critical? Does it paint a different and potentially more representative picture of actions and decisions in the library? What does this say about the organization?
3. The next time you enter the library, stop and sit down. Watch how your team members interact with one another. Think about what you know about the individuals. Does the interaction seem normal to you? Does one person have a stronger personality than the other? Now pretend you are a library patron and know nothing about these employees. Does the interaction between employees seem normal? Does the communication seem cordial? Is one team member helping out the other team member or are the interactions seem more like a conflict?
4. Consider cross-training as a way to help facilitate communication between different units, opening up dialog to incorporate a different perspective towards service. Have a cataloger sit at a public service desk and vice-versa so that each can get a perspective on the other’s idea of public service and how each’s regular duties impact the other unit.
NOTES
1. Leonard L. Berry, On Great Service: A Framework for Action (New York, NY: Free Press, 1995), 3.
2. Roland T. Rust, Christine Moorman, and Peter R. Dickson, “Getting Return on Quality: Revenue Expansion, Cost Reduction, or Both?,” Journal of Marketing 66, no. 4 (2002). 7.24.
3. Primary Research Group, The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Level of Faculty Satisfaction with the Academic Library (New York, N.Y.: Primary Research Group, 2009), 89.
4. Stephen R. Covey, “Serving the One: The Key to the Many Is the One,” Executive Excellence 11, no. 9(1994): 5–6.
5. Sen Sendjaya, James C. Sarros, and Joseph C. Santora, “Defining and Measuring Servant Leadership Behaviour in Organizations,” Journal of Management Studies 45, no. 2 (March 2008): 407.
6. Svafa Grönfeldt and Judith Strother, Service Leadership: The Quest for Competitive Advantage (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 167–168.
7. Darlene E. Weingand, Customer Service Excellence: A Concise Guide for Librarians (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1997), 73.
8. Ibid., 73.
9. Peter Hernon and Allen Altman, Assessing Service Quality: Satisfying the Expectations of Library Customers, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 2010), 5.
10. Ibid.
11. Valarie A. Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, and Leonard L. Berry, Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 26.
12. Megan Oakleaf, “Dangers and Opportunities: A Conceptual Map of Information Literacy Assessment Approaches,” portal: Libraries and the Academy 8, no. 3 (2008): 233.
13. Svafa Grönfeldt and Judith Strother, Service Leadership: The Quest for Competitive Advantage (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 177.
14. Megan Oakleaf, “Dangers and Opportunities: A Conceptual Map of Information Literacy Assessment Approaches,” portal: Libraries and the Academy, 8, no. 3 (2008): 233–234.
15. Svafa Grönfeldt and Judith Strother, Service Leadership: The Quest for Competitive Advantage (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), 177–178.
16. The Millennium Librarian, May 22, 2010, http://millenniumlibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/05/customer-service-in-libraries.html.
17. Barbara B. Moran, Robert D. Stueart, and Claudia J. Morner, Library and Information Center Management, 8th ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2013), 132.
18. Ibid., 132–333.
19. Darlene E. Weingand, Customer Service Excellence: A Concise Guide for Librarians. (Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1997), 5.