1. Culture Eats
Strategy
for Lunch
Connections
MLA Quad Chapter
Meeting
October 16, 2012

2. If anything is certain,
it is that
change is certain.
The world we are planning for
today
will not exist
in this form tomorrow.
2

3. Planning is bringing the
future into the present so
that you can do something
about it now.
3

4. Traditional Strategic Planning Elements
Mission –What the Library needs and wants Mission
to fulfill. (Words)
Goals – The specific results needed to
achieve mission. Goals are specific, time Goals
bound and measurable (Numbers/Dates)
Strategies – How the Library will achieve
its goals. Strategies must require us to Strategies
make a specific decision. (Words)
Metrics – How the Library will know if the
strategies are working and thus achieving
predetermined goals. Metrics serve as the Metrics
basis for management success. (Numbers)
Action Plans – Specific steps to be taken Action Plans
for each strategy with deadline dates and
person(s) responsible for execution.
4

5. Leading Organizational Change
Environmental Forces
Marketplace Requirements
Business Imperatives
Organizational Imperatives
Cultural Imperatives
Leadership/Employee Behavior
Leadership/Employee Mindset
5

9. Competing Values Framework
• Leaders understand and appreciate
conflicting values and integrate them
successfully so that the organization is
open to collaboration and growth.
• Framework inventor, Jeff DeGraff, the
Dean of Innovation, advocates
ambidextrous leadership—leaders adroit
at two conflicting values
• Integrating values when the timing is
right results is organizations that are
creative, while meeting high quality
control standards, and that are open and
collaborative, but also maintain their
competitive edge.

10. Library Transformation Phases
Design
Assess key stakeholders and Implement
external environment
Coalesce new units, staff and Change Management
Involve key stakeholders in
fleshing proposed new leadership
Cultural integration
models and next level Initiate horizontal structural
structure elements Leadership and team
Determine leadership needs Develop shared vision related development
and appoint/recruit to space allocation and Continue to adapt and expand
Identify key positions; programs aligned with structure
critically needed knowledge curricular and research needs
Continue to develop shared
and skills Execute on “targets of vision and goals for Library
opportunity” and achieve
near-term successes Continuously align with
changing faculty and student
endeavors (evolving curriculum
and online learning, research
developments, etc.)
Contribute to overall success of
parent institution

11. Environmental Scan
• What are some of the major issues/trends impacting the
academic health science library in the next 5 years? 10 years? 20
years?
• How do you see the relationship of libraries and computing in the
future?
• What are some of the issues and implications related with the
change to electronic everything—medical records, collections,
need for research repositories, online curricula and learning, etc.
• What are some of the issues and implications with supporting
researchers? data management? translational medicine?
• What are some of the trends you are observing about students—
needs? Preparation? Behaviors? Expectations?

12. Environmental Scan
• What will be some of the issues that surface related to health
and healthcare costs and changes in reimbursement, 50
million uninsured?
• Equally big for many of our academic centers is the leveling or
reduction in funds for research which fuels many of our
institutions.
• How will bio-informatics/medical informatics continue to
evolve? Collaboration or competition?
• What are the implications of the patient empowerment
movement?
• Directly to the implementation of electronic health records where
patients will have much better access to their own information.

13. A Model for High Performance
Strategic Direction
• Mission
• Assessment
Strategy • Short and Long-Term Goals
• Measures
• Implementation
A Implementation Support
L • Library Heads
I • Affinity Groups
G • Human Resources
Structure • Senior Leadership
N
• Policies/Procedures
M • Systems/Processes
E • Communications
N
Personality of the Organization
T • Shared Values
• History and Identity
• Faculty Support
Culture • Attitudes/Beliefs
• Behaviors

14. Vision
CM Process Map
Wake up calls:
feedback to learn from
and guide course correction
Current reality

15. Creating Shared Vision
What:
a commonly held picture of a collectively desired future to
which each member can
feel a personal connection.
How:
1. build on personal visions to capture staff commitment and
energy;
2. use shared values as the "glue" to bind individuals into
teams.

16. Two types of shared visions in
organizations:
1. the products and services it provides;
2. the values its staff lives in daily
interactions internally and with clientele.

17. Why is shared vision needed?
Because:
• people desire to be connected to an
important undertaking;
• shared vision creates a sense of collective
ownership;
• shared vision elicits staff energy and
creativity.

18. Why is shared vision needed?
Because without it:
• forces in support of the status quo can
overwhelm;
• no staff commitment (compliance at best,
outright cynicism likely);
• pettiness prevails when the greatness of a
vision disappears.

19. Structural Tension Model
Vision Current Fear
(what is Reality (what is
wanted) (what is) not wanted)
emotional tension creative tension
Engagement
Adapted from Robert Fritz

20. The power of shared vision:
Personal visions derive their power from
an individual's deep caring for the vision.
Shared visions derive their power from
a common caring.
A vision is truly shared when you and I have
a similar picture and are committed to each
other having it, not just to each of us
individually having it.

21. The test of a shared vision
is not in the statement,
but in the directional force
it gives the organization.
Directional forces
1. Commitment
• professional identification with organization’s
goals;
• taking a long view;

22. Questions to Surface Shared Values
 Describe one or two situations in which you’ve observed the
values of your organization in action.
 Describe one or two situations in which you felt most valued
by this organization.

23. Strategic change
A shared vision is made achievable
through the development of strategic
priorities, i.e., chunks of work that
address critical gaps (creative tensions)
between current reality and vision.

24. Characteristics of good strategic priorities:
• linked to shared vision very clearly;
• galvanize commitment from as least the
implementation team;
• are limited enough to be doable;
• are quantifiable or at least observable.

25. A lot of questions about the
woods can’t be answered by
staying all the time in the
woods…
Norman MacLean
A River Runs Through It

26. Organizational Culture is
a pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or
developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of
external adaptation and internal integration" that have worked well
enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new
members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to
those problems”

27. Formal Intervention:
Initiating Culture Change
• What results and new ways of working do you want
to create?
• What characteristics of the culture are most likely to
hinder the change?
• And which are most likely to help?
• What attitudes have to shift in order to develop the
results you want?

28. Definitions
• Artifacts: visible signifiers of culture
• Espoused values: what we say we value
• Values in action: how we behave
• Cultural assumptions: neutral “givens” upon which culture is
built

29. Aspects of Culture
• Culture is learned.
• Cultures are inherently logical.
• Culture forms our self-identity and community.
• Culture combines the visible and the invisible.
• Culture is dynamic.

30. Important to know
• The power of story
• “How things work around here”
• Culture and climate are not the same thing
• Difficult to have a direct impact on culture
• Culture seeks stasis

31. Organizational Structures
Reporting relationship with parent institution
School of Medicine
University Library
Combined
*Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, UNC Chapel Hill—
combined University and Health Sciences Libraries
Internal structure:
• Functional
• Divisional
• Matrix
• Hybrid
• Team
• Virtual

32. Culture Eats Strategy
for Lunch

33. Making the Connections
Profession
University/
Hospital
Library

34. Connections with the Profession
Take-Away #1: Conduct a Professional Scan
1. Identify 5 - 8 peer and aspirant peer institutions
2. Assign institutions to investigative team
members. Each pair:
• Examine general web and published LIS sources to see
how the library is being discussed; what the library is
known for
• Examine the web site of the library in some depth
• Examine the library’s strategic plan, if developed within
the past 3 years
• Examine the library’s organizational structure

35. Professional Scanning
Examine 5 – 10 peer or aspirant peer libraries
John Hopkins
Duke
UC Berkeley Maryland
Michigan
Minnesota
NCSU
Stanford
Pittsburgh
U Southern Cal
UC San
Francisco
Virginia U Washington

36. Conduct a Professional Scan
3. Consider these questions about peers/aspirant
peers:
• In what ways is the library setting out to create change,
undertake new initiatives, reallocate resources, etc.?
• Identify innovative and “radical” initiatives underway in
the library that should inform and inspire our planning
• Are there initiatives that we should consider?
• Collect data to identify resource needs for new goals
• What resources (staff, budget) are other libraries devoting to some
key areas, (e.g. digitization, scholarly communication, e-books),
compared to our current staffing and budget levels?
• Begin to validate/evaluate our developing ideas for your
against developments seen in other health science
libraries
• Are others doing what we are proposing?

37. Conduct a Professional Scan
4. Record your observations and analysis, highlighting
your assessment of the library’s most significant
strategic directions for the future

38. Your Library’s Professional Scan
Professional Scanning: a consideration of key health science library strategic directions/initiatives
Institution (peer or
aspirant?)
Summarize the library’s vision
Vision
What are the major new initiatives, priorities, where is this
library putting its new resources?
Strategic Initiatives
THIS IS THE HARD PART! Consider to what extent, if any, the
libraries may want to pursue one or more strategic
Potential for Library directions/initiatives similar to those in the peer/aspirant
peer library. In particular consider what positive impact these
initiatives may have on your library’s faculty, students,
academic and health professionals. A full discussion of the
Strategic Planning Committee will help to flesh out the
appropriateness of these initiatives for the libraries.
Strategies and goals will be based on these considerations.

39. Connections with your
institution
Take-Away #2: Conduct your own Cultural Awareness Audit
Exercise, Part One:
• Briefly describe your organizational culture—at the library and at the parent
organization levels, the way you would if you were summarizing for an external
candidate for a position.
Library:
Parent Organization:
• Now list one or two things about your organization that you came to know only
after operating in that culture for period of time.
• How did you discover these things?
Part Two: Reflect on a change effort within your organization (at the library and/or
parent organization level). Was it met with resistance? Was it successful? How did
the acknowledgment of the culture (or lack of) affect the change effort’s success?

40. Connections within Your Library
Take-Away #3: Create Opportunities to Build Positive
Emotional Reservoirs
Examples:
 Describe a peak experience or high point of the Library’s
existence.
 Identify a time in your experience when you felt most
effective and engaged.
 What are three wishes you have to enhance the health and
vitality of your organization?

42. Positive Organizational
Development
There are three basics of positive organizational development:
1. Individualization promotes employee growth.
2. The emotional climate of an organization defines the outer
limits of productivity.
3. Monitoring movement toward organizational goals promotes
organizational growth.

43. Leadership Role
• Be optimistic yet realistic
• Plan carefully, but don’t hesitate to engage
• Share plan at big picture level and detailed level
• Tie to vision, and to employee’s job/role at individual
level
• Make sure that process includes opportunities
for small successes early
• Celebrate/recognize successes and progress
• Communicate that course corrections are
necessary in any change effort

44. Leadership Skills
• Vision
• Strategic thinking
• Analytical thinking
• Management
• Effective communication
• Group and process facilitation