A Good Mix: Merging Collections & Blending People

A Good Mix: Merging Collections & Blending People Linda Garnets, Ph.D. Angelo + Garnets Consulting Sustainable Archives Conference Austin, August 13, 2009

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar… “I—I hardly know, Sir, just at present, “ Alice replied rather shyly, “at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Reasons for Combining Archives and Special Collections • Meeting users/patrons changing needs • Accessibility of collections • Financial/budgetary factors • Technological changes • Operational flexibility • Improving efficiency • Resource sharing • Innovation and learning • Downsizing

Continuum of Organizational Combinations Alliances Joint Ventures Mergers Acquisitions As go along continuum from left to right, greater degree of: • Investment of effort • Commitment • Control • Complexity • Impact • Integration • Risk

“True collaboration engenders a transformative change that is akin to letting go on one trapeze in mid-air before another swings not view.” Ken Soehner, Chief Librarian at the Metropolitan Museums of Art Thomas J. Watson Library, 2005 RLG Conference.

Staff Concerns • What will happen to me? • What’s in it for me? • Will I still have a job? Will my job change? • Will my work experience get worse, better, stay the same? • Will I get a new boss? What will that be like?

Guiding Assumptions about Workplace Transitions • Definition: Implementation of a new state, which requires dismantling the present ways of operating and introducing new ways • Adaptation to transitions is a natural and deliberate process that can not be circumvented

Transition Realities • Mismanaged transitions have a negative, not a neutral, impact on people and organizations • A post-transition culture will emerge—either the status quo or a modified one by design or by default

Bottom Line Either you manage change, or change will manage you!

Model for Managing Workplace TransitionsAdapted from Mitchell Marks (2003), Charging up hill: Workplace recovery after mergers, acquisitions, and downsizings

Model for Managing Workplace Transitions Goal: • Weaken forces for the old organizational order • Strengthen forces for the new one

Model for Managing Workplace Transitions Levels: • Emotional realities • Ways in which people experience transitions in the workplace • Business imperatives • Things that need to get done for organizational success to occur

Empathy Objective: • Let people know that leadership acknowledges that: • The transition has been, is, and continues to be difficult • People need—and will be allowed—time to recover from the difficulty

Empathy Key tasks: • Acknowledge realities and difficulties of transition and recovery • Offer workshops to raise awareness of transition process and help people understand where they do and do not have control • Use symbols, ceremonies, and forums to end the old

Engagement Objective: • Create understanding of and support for the need to end the old and accept the new organizational order

Engagement Key tasks: • Help people get their work done • Communicate and provide opportunities for involvement • Diagnose and eliminate barriers to adaptation

Engagement Guidelines for communication: • Provide a compelling rationale for why the status quo is no good • Describe the change as completely as you can • Assure people of what is not changing • Share information again and again • Be comfortable saying “I don’t know.”

Energy Objective: • Get people excited about the new organizational order and support them in realizing it

Energy Key tasks: • Clarify a vision of a new and better organization

Dimensions of New Organizational Order • Direction • Mission • Culture • Core competencies • Social and work systems

Making the Case for Change What Staff Members Tend to Want To Know: • What are we doing? • Why? • To what end? • When are we doing it? How will we do it? • What is it going to take for us to do this?

Energy Key tasks: • Create a learning environment that: • Motivates people to experiment & open up to new ways of doing things • Create opportunities for short-term wins • Connect with people & provide support • Accept confusion & backsliding • Give people time to move through adaptation

Alignment Objective: • Solidify new mental models that are congruent with the new desired organizational order

Alignment Key tasks: • Align systems and operating standards with the new organizational order • Involve people in bringing the vision to life • Track the development of the new organizational order

Principles of ManagingWorkplace Transitions • Provide straight talk about the transition process, and keep employees involved in it • Track the recovery process, learn from the mistakes, and disseminate the knowledge throughout the organization • Give transition process high-priority status, and help managers determine how to prioritize it within the context of current organizational requirements

Principles of ManagingWorkplace Transitions You pay now, or you pay later • Task: You pay now by giving people time to express their experience and mourn the loss of the old, and to participate in creating the new… • Or you pay later by having a workforce that continues to hold on to the past rather than look ahead for the future • Action: Do it now!

A Good Mix: Merging Collections & Blending People