 Next up on our lightning rounds is Betsy Davis. She is from Moundridge Public Library in Kansas. Population served 2000, talk about growth mindset and staff development. So thank you for having me. Again, my name is Betsy Davis. I am a tiny library director in Moundridge, Kansas. And we're gonna be talking about something that has been kind of a buzzword in the education system for quite some time, growth mindset. So the first thing to know is that, so Carol Dweck is the originator of the growth mindset. And she says that there are two kinds of mindsets, growth mindset and fixed mindset. And a fixed mindset assumes that all of your character, intelligence, creative ability are all static. So this is somebody who has a fixed mindset is tries to avoid failure and to maintain the appearance of being smart or strong or fast or whatever. So they're trying to only do things that they are strong in to keep up appearances. However, somebody with a growth mindset is quite the opposite where they thrive and enjoy challenges and views failure as a springboard for stretching existing abilities. And so what was really interesting when reading Dweck is she actually says that both of these mindsets can be present in a person at the same time. So for example, myself as an example, in baking, I really enjoy baking and I do a lot of experimentation and I like to share my food with people and I like to hear feedback and through their feedback and my experimentation, I have become a better baker. Now some of the things, especially in the beginning what I would serve was not good but I am getting a lot better. There I have a growth mindset where I'm willing to experiment and try different things. Where I have a fixed mindset is in chemistry. I am not strong in chemistry and I do not actively engage people in conversations about chemistry because I don't want to look dumb. So in the library, we find fixed mindsets when we hear things like, oh, I have an e-reader question and immediately instead of trying to help the patron, you defer it to the techie or the younger employee because of course they know technology better than you do instead of trying and helping them. A library example of growth mindset would be assisting a patron in gathering genealogical research and using multiple resources that you may not have used before but you're willing to try and help them and kind of walk them through the process in finding those resources. So my thought, because libraries have long been a place for information retrieval and where people go to find out more information on anything is a library and so they're kind of an inherent place of growth. So why shouldn't the workers at the library also have a growth mindset? But how do we get library workers to embrace this idea? Well, that is where motivation comes in. So staff as learners, you know, if you expect the status quo you're gonna get the status quo and many people are really scared of failing and are doomed to stay average because of that fear but if you encourage learning and encourage growth mindset, I think that you can have really active learners and grow your profession. So if you look at Hertzberg's hygiene theory he suggests that making sure that all backgrounds are the same. So giving people a baseline for growth. So getting rid of policies that inhibit learning or getting rid of other things that make their jobs a little bit more difficult really open up the idea that patrons, excuse me, that employees will have motivation and will have satisfaction with their jobs. So something else that is suggested in a book called Drive by Daniel Pink is in goal setting. So a lot of us have goals like annual reviews where there are performance objectives. So you need to increase XYZ by this date but that if you don't meet them then you fail and there's not really, anyway, there's that failure if you don't meet those goals. So Daniel Pink suggests that instead of doing performance objectives or performance learning goal set, excuse me, instead of performance goal setting to do learning goal settings and so instead of having I will achieve XYZ by March 1st it's I will learn more about how to use different e-reader formats. And so then you're kind of giving yourself grace to fail by having a learning objective rather than having performance objectives. So Dweck found that when children focused more on measuring themselves in performance like grade cards, that failure is more likely to provoke helplessness but when children focused on learning failure was more likely to provoke continued effort. And I thought that was really interesting and think that you could probably translate that from child learners to adult learners. So go with growth. How do you motivate and inspire foster desire to learn? So first what we need to do as library directors or library leaders or just employees in general listen for those fixed mindset language use. So I can't do that. I didn't grow up with computers. I'm not good at math. Those are all things that suggest that nope, I'm shut down, I'm not willing to learn I'm not willing to improve in whatever way you're asking me to improve on but instead try to go and encourage growth mindset kind of language. Like I'm not sure I can do it now but with a little time and effort it is attainable. And this is something you can actually coach your employees with or yourself. You can say, well, I might not be good at now or you know what you took baby steps you're doing a little bit better than you did last time. I bet you'll be even better next week. Use incremental language when you're doing language of growth and in goal setting. They have found that to be very helpful as well. So what have I tried? One of the big questions I have asked is what happens if it fails? I think there's a lot of stigma about failure and how it's just a terrible thing and you don't wanna deal with it but a lot of times the stakes are not that high. So what happens if a program fails if only five kids show up and you're expecting 20? Well, you'll learn that maybe we didn't promote it the way we should have or maybe the topic wasn't what the kids were actually interested in. So turn it around to be like, oh, this is a perceived failure but really what did we learn from it? What happens if it fails? We're probably still okay. Give autonomy to what is learned. So one of the things that motivates people is according to Daniel Pink is giving autonomy. So letting people actually learn what they're interested in learning. Now, I guess in a library setting there's a lot of, you can have a lot of wiggle room between learning about reader advisory or database usage or patron customer service and things like that but giving the staff some autonomy in what they're learning rather than saying, you will do this. Now there are some times when that is not an option but giving autonomy I think can really help with motivation. Praise effort and strategy, not success. This goes back to the learning goals rather than the performance goals. Maybe your staff is getting better or yourself you are getting better but you're not quite where you want to be but if you could look at, oh, I am doing better than I was then that keeps you motivated to continue going. Also make sure you get buy-in when you're doing things like this. All having somebody model it is one thing but making sure the staff can also see it and can start using the same language of growth and then model curiosity and failure and this is something that is incredibly hard to do. Maybe not modeling curiosity but modeling failure and so this comes from the book, Radical Candor by Kim Scott and it encourages, she encourages sharing mistakes or things that didn't quite go as expected and she encourages praising and self-admitted critique. So at staff means I just started doing this, asking my staff, so what went well this week and then what didn't go as expected? So what didn't go as expected is our failure not really failure but just something that we didn't do it didn't quite go as we'd wanted and sharing it for yourself saying, oh, I tried this and it was awful. That is really hard to do because it just is, admitting that you are failing is a tricky thing but I think that if you continue at it and you're very open about failure and supportive of staff to get some education and to grow and learn different skills then I think it can be very beneficial for both the staff and for the library as a whole and these are the resources that I use, I read quite a bit and this actually is my exercise in growth mindset. I listened to motivating your team with Lauren Hayes, a podcast back in September and I thought, oh, that's really interesting, I want to know more and then I pushed myself a little bit and thought, okay, so I have a learning objective, I'm going to learn more about this and then I saw the big talk from tiny libraries and I thought that's going to be my goal as I'm going to learn enough that I can present my findings in February and so this is my exploration and my own growth mindset. Awesome, we're glad we were able to do it. So we feel free to like us on the Facebook or follow us on Instagram, we put up some pretty cool things and I guess questions, I hope I didn't go too far over, I went way over, I'm sorry. You're fine, that's all good, I think that was great, especially going outside of your comfort zone, I know it's a thing that lots of people have issues with. I say things like, oh, I don't do math, I can, you sound like you're talking about me. Yeah, yeah, I take it a bit, but you can't. Yeah, great perspective on failure as it is. So people have asked, the slides will be available afterwards, so all those resources you have there, if you didn't touch that, don't worry about it, we'll include the slides when we do the archive recording later. All right, so let's move on to, so thank you so much Betsy, that was awesome, great info, we got some lots of comments saying great information, great perspective, success. Awesome, thank you so much.