 Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live, I am Krista Burns at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event where we cover commission activities and any library topics that might be of interest to Nebraska librarians and their staff. We have commission staff that present as we will have today. We also bring in guest speakers sometimes. We do these sessions every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. They're free for about an hour or however long we last. We make sure we do presentations, interviews, book reviews, mini training sessions, whatever we can come up with that we think might be of use to you. Today we have, as I said, NLC staff. Richard Miller is with us who is going to talk about getting buy-in on staff members, board members, anybody to help support your library. So I am going to pass the mouse over to Richard and he's going to take over. No, no, no, no. There we go. We're all set. Go ahead. Thank you Krista. I'm here this morning and we're glad to have you with us on the session. One of the key factors in a successful project is buy-in. The process that gets staff, board members, and other participants to adopt the goals of the project as their own. Because buy-in is so important, even crucial, it's worth spending time to achieve it. We'll be discussing proven techniques for getting buy-in and make sure that everyone is on board. So an outline of the presentation today. First of all, we'll have a definition of buy-in. We'll have pertinent quotations scattered throughout the presentation from various and sundry people. I'll share some ideas with you from the business world on buy-in and then some ideas from the library world on buy-in and finally we'll have a chance for some questions at the end here. First of all, definition of buy-in. Buy-in is the process of gaining people's understanding, commitment, and action in support of your goals. In order to achieve your objectives for real process improvement, you'll need to empower employees to get involved in the process of improvement. We will need their buy-in to change the culture and change the results. Without buy-in, you're almost certain to fail. You can't just dictate results. People will resist and even try to stop your programs. Without buy-in, you have not really convinced anyone that it is in their interest to participate. So how do we get buy-in? Well, first, we use strategic stories of a positive future. You strategically design, target, and deliver a story that projects a positive future. It's all about the listener. They need to know what's in it for them. Address their agendas. Present your goals from their perspective. Suppose, for example, that you want to improve customer service. Staff may at first feel that this translates into more work for the same number of staff. You need to empower the staff such that they're part of determining how to reach the goal. If staff come to realize it is in their best interest as well, you've got buy-in. So how might this be beneficial to them? It might make their job more interesting. It might result in a more positive work environment. It might mean more job security because of increases in requests for help or interest in their area and so forth. For real process improvement, we need to change the business rules, the incentives, and the measurements or metrics that we use within the organization. To ensure the changes are effective, we need everyone's buy-in to the change program. Only if you empower employees to get involved in the process of improvement can you truly realize the goals and objectives you set. Author Lisa Boshu suggests that getting support is stronger than getting buy-in. She suggests that we ask for full participation in the planning process. Don't allow people to drop in and drop out of the process. Schedule meetings and review deadlines well in advance so the planning team knows what is expected and can plan around important checkpoints. Find a great facilitator. A great facilitator will be inclusive and respectful of everyone's opinion. Building consensus as the project progresses so there are not surprises at the end. Keep decision makers and funders in the loop. Although these people may not be at every meeting, plan regular opportunities to share what's happening. Speak up. The process can be inadvertently sabotaged by keeping quiet. It's better to speak up and have a discussion even if you find your ideas don't fly than to wind up with an inappropriate result. Let someone else own the idea. Excuse me, I skip one. Be prepared with facts and appropriate information. Come to meetings having reviewed relevant research, recommendations or examples to share. Keep up on the latest developments in the profession by attending conferences and training, reading publications or talking to others in the field so that you will be a reliable source. Let someone else own the idea. Let someone else appear to be the genius even if you came up with the idea first. Ultimately the point is to get support for the idea and it doesn't matter who came up with it. I'm going to read this to you even though you're not supposed to read what's on the screen. Now that you've decided to plan and have designed a culture friendly process that fits your strategic situation you have to make the pill easy to swallow. In short you have to overcome people's natural resistance to planning and motivate them to do a superlative job. This idea of natural resistance to planning appears in business literature and in library literature so it is something pretty common. And from the same author, what are the reasons for planning? These are the reasons that are usually accepted by most employees according to this author although this may be debatable as you see the list here. First of all the reasons for planning. Because it secures the future, it provides a roadmap, it sets priorities and it allocates resources. I have a few other things from this author as well and I think I'll just have you read them instead of my reading to you. These are the other points that he says are reasons that most people are accepting of planning. Just take a few minutes to scan through those. And some employees obviously don't agree that all of these, so there's some debate on whether employees do accept all of these. If for example, if we say that reasons for planning is to get input and ideas from all parts of the organization, that's only if it's done well. If you don't get information from all parts of the organization it's not going to be done well. Or gains commitment to implement the plan, that's if it's completed successfully. So there are sort of provisos on all of these things that I think we have to take into account. So I mentioned earlier that people have to see what's in it for them. So what is in it for employees personally? Well here again, I will not read these to you, but here are some of the things that he says. I'll review a few of them for you after you have a chance to scan through them. The first one, what's in it for employees personally? Resources to do what they want if they plan and if what they want to do is part of the plan I think is an important part. And then financial rewards, I think we probably all laugh at that in libraries because that's probably maybe not so much in libraries, but this is again from the business world. So what do we do to overcome resistance to planning? Again I'll let you read through these and then we'll talk about some of them and then a few more points from the author. The first one which says remove barriers and provide resources. It really does take commitment to the process. You must put resources into a planning process if you ever hope for it to succeed. The idea of identifying early tangible results and publicizing and reinforcing these is also very important because if you build on early successes that can really help to bring the planning process to a successful end. And establishing a tolerant climate that accepts and learns from mistakes is also an important point because this allows for experimentation and failure. This as much as anything will help ensure that people will feel supported when they try new approaches. If people are punished for making mistakes when they're trying something new, you're not going to have very good feedback on the planning process. Here are a few more thoughts from the author. Communication is only the first step in obtaining organization buy-in. Don't expect complete buy-in or as complete as you ever get in the change process until after you have finished training, assigned accountabilities, obtained significant results, rewarded heroes, slighted non-performers, and proven management's continued commitment to the process. And here's a statement I think you'll find interesting for the business world. Accomplishing all this takes at least one and a half to three years for a small company. And even after planning is underway, the need to communicate does not diminish. This is particularly important in the first three years when the organization is experiencing unfreezing and muddling through the change process often without clear cut gains and rewards. I think his comments are really instructive on how long planning does take. Especially for a lot of our really smaller libraries, they got to think big picture and weigh into the futures when you're going to see the results of what you're doing. That's right, but even in the larger libraries, if you've got more staff to bring along, you've got a whole variety of people within that organization that need to be brought along as well. Here's a quote from Alexander Hamilton. Men often oppose the thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike. I won't make any comments about disliking supervisors or whatever, because I think that's part of the territory. That happens at times. But I think the first part about having no agency in the planning is the most important part of this quotation. Author Roon Arsevic addresses why external consultants often have success at getting buy-in for their conclusions and recommendations while internal teams do not. According to him, internal teams do not know that communication process is required. Getting buy-in for their conclusions is part of the project deliverables. And note here that he says the project conclusions, not just the process itself. Internal teams often have a low understanding of the political processes or issues related to their projects. They often will typically develop final presentations that focus on the process rather than on the conclusions. This is because they're not used to dealing with complex projects and they fall back on what they did rather than what they decided. And more comments from this author. Internal teams usually do not have any experience dealing with group processes that typically should take place within a steering committee. And usually they don't think about also presenting to other stakeholders who may not have been represented in the steering committee. This can be a real fatal oversight. It is especially important to identify stakeholders likely to be negative toward the results. Again, a quote from the business world, three simple steps will multiply your chances of success. How do I get buy-in for this project? Involvement, involvement, involvement. And I'd like to turn to some ideas from the library world. Donald Riggs in his strategic planning for library managers lists typical planning fears. And I'll comment on these as we go through here. First of all, a fear is that it is hard to plan and I might not do a good job. It puts constraints on my actions. And if it's not in the plan, I can't do it. It forces me to make decisions and that makes me vulnerable. Making a plan provides a yardstick for critique and evaluation and I might not measure up. Planning brings direction and organization out of chaos and removes a very good excuse. Planning brings its own chaos and disruption when managers resist or choose not to follow the plans. Riggs emphasizes again, you must keep the staff informed throughout the different stages of the planning process. The rest of the ideas we'll be talking about today are from Sandra Nelson's planning for results. And task five of that 10 part planning process is entitled Prepare for Change. It directly addresses how to go about achieving buy-in for the planning process. So for the rest of this presentation, that's the buy-in we'll be discussing. There are four steps which she says is within this task five. And you can read those yourself. I don't need to read those to you because we'll be going through those as we go through the process here. So just take a few minutes and scan through those. Nelson emphasizes these steps can be initiated anytime in the planning process before task six and later steps which include things such as setting the mission and goals and objectives and so forth. Let's take these steps one at a time. Step 5.1, assess the library's readiness for change. She defines change readiness as the current beliefs, attitudes and expectations of staff regarding the need, value and probable result of a change major or minor. She notes that library staff are generally not enthusiastic about change and in this they appear to mirror workers in other organizations and industries. Staff are inclined to greet every change no matter how minor as a crisis. She tells the story of a group of office workers who were asked to list what might cause them the most stress in the workplace. The top concern, changing their office chair. She also notes a few other corollaries. She says the change that affects someone else is less traumatic than change that affects me. Changes that will alter things that have been changed recently may be harder to implement than changes in things that have been unchanged for a long time. And past experiences with similar changes will also affect the staff's attitude about the current change. She says that one can measure change readiness by gathering information most of it anecdotal on staff feelings, attitudes, expectations and past reactions. The information will focus on the following. Previous planning processes and recent major changes. Under previous planning processes this is especially significant in the way any proceeding planning processes were managed. For example, a plan that was developed without any staff input is probably not well supported by the staff. If asked, could staff point to any changes that resulted from the strategic plan? If staff members have seen no changes that can be attributed to the most recent strategic plan they are unlikely to believe that the plan you are developing will make any difference in the future. Under recent major changes if your recent change efforts have been successful you're in a stronger position when you initiate a new planning process. The organizational culture is very important. These shared assumptions and beliefs which evolved over time are difficult to change quickly. A risk taking environment, which I think you heard about when we were talking about the business plans. A determination of the degree to which the library supports risk taking is a critical part of your assessment of change readiness. Staff morale is also important. This also affects the library's change readiness but it's more personal than institutional and is somewhat easier to modify than the library's organizational culture. And staff reactions to change are important as well. Nelson says that staff tend to be divided into four groups. There are those who enthusiastically support change, which is about 10 to 15 percent of the staff. Those who are relatively positive about change, those who have reservations about change and those who actively oppose change, another 10 to 15 percent of the staff. And according to her, change battles in most libraries are won or lost with a middle 70 percent of the staff. Those are the swing votes. This is the centrist vote. That's right. If you're talking about politics, we were talking about politics earlier, that's exactly right. So these in the middle, those who are relatively positive about change and those who are reservation about change are the ones in that 70 percent of the staff. If you wait until 100 percent of the staff affected by a change agrees on something, you will never carry out any change. If you wait even for 75 percent of your staff to agree on something, you are still unlikely to do it. As a general rule, if more than 50 percent of the staff who will be affected by a change are supportive, move forward. Many of the people who still have reservations will accept the change once it becomes a reality. Those who totally oppose the change will remain opposed until the next change comes along and then they'll shift their attention to opposing the new change instead. That's just the way it is. In her book, she has something called Workform F, which is a structured method to analyze change readiness. I'm going to explain or show this form here. It's a little bit hard to read, so I'm going to read some portion of it to you. This didn't scan very well. I tried to scan it in. But this is a workform to analyze change readiness. It says on the form, basically, use this workform to analyze the information you gathered about the change environment in your library. In column A, which is on the left, list the factors that you think will make it easier to implement the changes that will result from your planning process. And then use a scale of 1 to 3 to indicate how critical this factor is to creating an environment that will support change. If it's minimal, give it a 1. If it's moderate, give it a 2. And if it's significant, give it a 3. In column C, list the factors that you think will make it difficult to implement the changes that will result from your planning process. And using, again, that scale of 1 to 3 indicate how critical this factor is to impeding an environment that will support change. What she recommends that you do is to have senior staff complete this form on their own and then individually and then get together to create a composite workform that lists and weighs all the factors supporting and impeding change. This is a really good exercise to go through, and I think you'll find it very useful. So again, you can get the book, we have multiple copies of this book in our collection here. You can get a copy of the book to look at this and actually read it for yourself. Yes, we have these and each of the system offices has a copy as well. Step 5.2, plan to create a positive environment for change. She lists two ways to do this. Either eliminate or minimize the factors that impede the change environment or add to or enhance the factors that support creating such an environment. And those that workform F will give you an opportunity to identify those and perhaps deal with those in your setting. She makes a point here that's very interesting though. If you look at this, you can try to eliminate those that will impede, try to enhance those that will support. But what she says is that managers often put more of their energies onto the negative side of this equation, which is not always the most effective approach. The most successful efforts might be those that accentuate the positive. That's like the old song accentuates positive, remember that song? Yeah, positive reinforcement, not negative. Positive reinforcement, that's right. So put more of your energies on the positive side. So how do we accentuate the positive? Well, if there was a previous plan, identify the three most positive changes that occurred. She suggests appointing a cross-functional team to work with the staff in each unit. Post the changes on the library's intranet or have a printed form for the staff to use. She suggests personalizing the messages you send. Name the staff members responsible for the successes. Give specific examples of successes. Include testimonials from users. Use photos if possible. Celebrate the staff members achievements. Work with senior management to develop talking points that capture the group's positive feelings about the planning process. In this, you should encourage senior staff to use these to describe the planning process when talking to other staff. Don't be afraid to repeat things again and again and again. You really have to do that if you're going to bring about a change process. How else do you accentuate the positive? Initiative rewards program to recognize innovative, creative changes proposed and implemented by staff. Again, don't base this solely on the ultimate success of a change. Remember, staff can learn as much from a project that didn't succeed than from one that did. And this shows that you invite experimentation. But don't apply a bandage to a negative and declare it solved or declare it insoluble. Remember, the dealing with negatives will require sustained and focused efforts to address them. So again, back to what she suggests. Don't emphasize the negatives too much. But when you're dealing with the negatives, it will require sustained and focused efforts. Step 5.3. I'm going to show you another work form. This one came out a little bit better. Review and revise communication plans. Communicate, communicate, communicate. You'll see that later on. Workform A is a communication plan. I think you can read this pretty well. This is a filled out one. What you will do down the left-hand portion of the work form is to list those groups, those stakeholders that are involved in the plan, and then you will answer six questions across the top here. Now communication problems abound in any organization. We can't assume that communication has taken place successfully when we plan it. During this step you will revise your communication plan to reflect what you've learned about the planning process and about the library's readiness for change. Workform A will help to solidify the buy-in to the planning process for all the stakeholder groups in the planning process. She suggests that you develop a communication plan for each of the 10 tasks. I mentioned that there are 10 tasks in the planning for results and answer the following questions for all affected groups. This means you would be doing this 10 times. It seems like a lot, but it really does keep the communication going and flowing. So the questions are why do group members need to know this task? What do they need to know? What will they need to know? When will they need to know it? How will you inform them and who will be responsible for informing them? Remember also that real communication does not occur until the message has been received by the person to whom it was sent and that person has been affected by it. She says that remember the library staff are more likely to support a strategic plan that they helped to shape them a plan developed for them. If you expect staff to support the final strategic plan you will have to involve them in the planning process. That's the buy-in. Step four is to train supervisors and managers. Managers and staff need formal training and organizational communication to be able to develop and maintain a library culture that supports change. The strategic planning process provides an excellent opportunity to enhance the skills of supervisors and management of staff. And the reason I say this is because some libraries work with an outside trainer or facilitator. Some work with their own staff. You have to decide yourself what would be the most effective for you. But just remember that if you have an outside facilitator this person has to have at least some knowledge of the library world in order to be effective. If you use your staff make sure that you're choosing people who are able to be inclusive and open minded and have everybody share their ideas. That's extremely important. The training could be designed around the projects identified in step 5.1. The readiness to change step and thereby appear more pragmatic than theoretical. I didn't go over point two here because I just sort of described it as we were talking about point one. Any training that you provide should be learner focused, should model productive behavior and effective skills, should inspire and motivate. Here's that word again. Should celebrate personal and group achievements. It's very important to keep people interested involved and engaged when you do this sort of thing. If you're not celebrating the personal achievements or group achievements, you're probably not going to get anywhere. And a key point to achieve and buy it. Communicate, communicate, communicate. A last quote from a famous American. Public sentiment is everything. With it nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. You could put the planning process in there. Or you could put buy-in in there. And buy-in is what you have to have. That's the public sentiment that Abraham Lincoln was talking about. I don't think he was talking to us directly, but I found it interesting. We quoted Alexander Hamilton before and Abraham Lincoln now. Both of them were shot to death. I'm afraid I'm sorry to put that in there. Now what I've done here is we're not going to look at this, but if you have any questions, let's do that. I have the resources listed after this so that if somebody wants to find the resources, they can do that. We will not go over the names of the resources here, but let's see if there... Any of the books that you listed also, this PowerPoint presentation will be posted up on our website as part of the recording. So don't try and like scribble down all the info. We'll have it out there for you in the next day or so, so you'll be able to get all the details you need from that. Now what should I hit? Go ahead. Let's see if we have any questions from folks. Are those questions that you really have or those from before? Let's see here. And the mouse over here. So does anybody have any questions? I can... I'm not sure who may have a microphone or not, but I can unmute you all and we'll see if anyone does have any questions. Feel free to ask or if you do not have a microphone you can type it into the questions section of your go-to webinar interface and we'll see your questions from there as well. So any questions or comments or suggestions and how you might have done this if you've been through this process? All right. If nobody has any questions that's fine. Let me show you the resources. There's a lot of good, deep information we've got here, so you might need time to absorb it and whatever. Think about it for a little while. You know you can always contact Richard if you do have questions afterwards, but go ahead and... I'm going to show the resources. There we are. These resources were in blue. I don't know why the links are in yellow but you can copy and paste them and put them in blue and go to these resources. The business resources are first followed by and they go down to these last two. These last two are the library resources in case you'd like to see it. Either one of those. We'll add all these links and the book information to our recording website when that goes up as well. We'll put direct links to these. Okay. Anything else? That's it. Anybody have anything they need to say? Want to say any questions Richard on any of this process? I need to see if they're typing or anything. Okay. Well, you're welcome. Library resources, thank you. Thank you very much for attending. As I said, this was recorded and we'll be available to you to listen to and watch again at your leisure. We'll hope we'll join you... join us next week when we'll be doing a session that we just started working on today on the libraries in Nebraska who are using Twitter to communicate with their users and get the word out about what they're doing. We're going to have some examples of that. People doing that. So if you are a library doing that, give us give me a call or an email and we'll want to get some libraries actually talking about it. We are already reaching out to some libraries but if we haven't and you know you are using it, give me a ring or email and we'll see if we can get you logged in and talking about sharing with your colleagues what you're doing. Other than that, thank you very much. Thank you much Richard. There's a lot of good work phone. Definitely need to do a lot of work on that. Thanks a lot. Bye bye.