Discover your strengths

My coach at work recommended the book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton to me. It is an easy and good read. You also get to do a Strengthsfinder profile online to identify your five strong “themes”. The theory is you can shape your role in any industry to maximise your strengths, and therefore excel at what you do and live a strong life.

People need to maximise their strengths to perform at their best; not to fix their weaknesses. Damage control i.e. fixing weaknesses can prevent failure; but not bring about excellence.

You must be able to perform an activity consistently for it to be your strength. Nevertheless, you can excel without strengths in every aspect of your role.

Strengths are made up of three elements:

1. Talent – naturally recurring thought, feeling, or behaviour
2. Knowledge – facts acquired (factual knowledge) and lessons learned (experiential knowledge)
3. Skills – steps of an activity; brings structure to experiential knowledge

To develop and maximise strengths, the balanced scorecard of an employee should provide objective picture of performance in three areas: business results, impact on the customer, and impact on the culture. Note that the talent of individual is unique, therefore performance measurement should focus on outcomes; not procedures and competencies.

Ask internal and external clients to provide ratings for three questions to measure impact on customer:

1. How well did the service meet expectations overall?
2. How likely would you recommend this produce/service to others?
3. How likely would you continue using this product/service?

Ask the peers of employee to give ratings for four questions to measure impact on culture:

Is the performance of this person

1. timely?
2. accurate?
3. positive & helpful?
4. making you feel your opinions count?

Immediate line manager should have regular and productive meetings with employee to develop strengths. Focus on three questions in every meeting:

1. What is the focus of the employee in the next quarter?
2. What new discoveries or learning have been planned?
3. Who does the employee hope to build new relationship with? 

The whole balanced scorecard process should be repeated every six months at least.

The manager of the employee should also strive to achieve highest rating out of 5 to twelve questions:

1. Does the employee know what is expected of him/her at work?
2. Does the employee have the materials and equipment to do the work properly?
3. Does the employee have the opportunity to do what s/he does best every day?
4. Has the employee received recognition or praise for good work in the last seven days?
5. Does the employee have someone or a supervisor who seems to care about him/her as a person at work?
6. Is there someone at work who encourages the development of the employee?
7. Does the opinions of the employee seems to count at work?
8. Does the mission of the company make the employee feels like his/her work is important?
9. Does the employee feel that the co-workers are committed to do quality work?
10. Does the employee have a best friend at work?
11. In the last six months the employee has talked with someone about progress?
12. Does the employee feel that s/he had the opportunities in the last year to learn and grow at work?

Finally, the book intends to make you realise what is right about you and your employees.

The new St. Gallen management model

Basic categories of an integrated management ~ by Johannes Ruegg-Sturm

A management model is like map designed to achieve particular tasks. It also accounts for all the dynamic interactions brought about by the elements that form the complex systems in organisations. A good model enables a company to react to change adequately.

The St. Gallen management model is used by corporations worldwide to analyse their activities. The ‘activity chain’ demonstrates how the actions of a company are linked. The ‘process control’ assigns level of priority to these activities. There are 6 ‘central descriptive categories’ – environmental spheres, stakeholders, interaction issues, structuring forces, processes and organisational change. The 4 ‘environmental spheres’ are social norms, nature, technology and the economy. The company stakeholders share ‘culture’ or sense of meaning. The company needs to meet it stakeholders’ long term needs to succeed.

The first step to create a model is establishing its purpose. Generally, models:

• represent the elements that really matter in managerial tasks
• depict the cause-and-effect relationships of these elements
• provide direction and focus for the content of communication
• make available common company language and enable quicker responses

The 4 environmental spheres in detail:

Society

- technological developments

- regulations and laws

- competitive environment

- e.g. work force and its age, risk tolerance, innovation, distribution of wealth, political forces, culture and infrastructure, social unrest

Nature

- climate and pollution

- raw materials

- access to waterways

Technology

- dynamic and rapidly growing technological development

Economy

- markets and competitive pressures

- capital

- demand

There are two approaches to model the stakeholders elements:

Strategic stakeholder value – where the best way to maximise shareholder value is to balance the long term needs of all stakeholders from employees to shareholders

Ethically critical stakeholder value – considers all stakeholders’ needs equally

The model will identify the many interactions between the stakeholders and the company: commercial, cultural and political. A company has to decide its ’strategic positioning’ in all these relationships.

The next step would be to create a structuring force by developing a company strategy that states:

• its stakeholders and their needs
• its products and services
• the aspects that it will focus on creating value for
• its core competencies

The ‘outside-in’ approach devises a company strategy by looking at its market and industry. Whilst the ‘inside-out’ approach develops unique capabilities and resources of the company to sustain competitive edge.

Activity modeling examines processes and establishes:

• ‘activity chain’ – connections among activities
• ‘process control’ – the operational priorities
• ‘process development’ – how processes evolve into ‘process architecture’ that involves the company’s suppliers, employees and customers

A company is influenced by two dimensions of change that affect one another: the ‘analytical-technical’ and the ‘cultural-relational’ perspectives. In turn,  three elements affect the level of change in the organisation:

• scope – number of people and processes
• scale – fundamental or superficial changes in the view of those who will implement them
• intensity – the speed of the change and if ‘rest period’ is available to employees

Company leaders must weigh the purpose of the organisation against the need for organisational change. 

The model was developed in the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland which was once a monastery. The criticism of the model is that it can be too theoretical for the real business world.

Chartership and Beyond

The slides of my ten-minute presentation to share chartership experience with fellow CILIP members in London are as followed:

Chartership and Beyond

Librarian Without Borders – www.lwb-online.org

The official mission of LWB:

Librarians Without Borders (LWB) is a non-profit organization that strives to improve access to information resources regardless of language, geography, or religion, by forming partnerships with community organizations in developing regions.

It was forged by Melanie Sellar who was inspired by her colleague Jorge Chimbinda to resolve international deficits in library resources. Sellar was a Master of Library and Information Science student at the University of Western Ontario, while Chimbinda was an anthropology graduate student. Source at Western News.

what ailment are you checking on the internet?

Most of the nine million enquirers (111,800) who visited the NHS Direct website six months before November 2006 clicked on – chickenpox!

See the full report by Nic Fleming on the Daily Telegraph online.

Standards representing all the world’s languages on WWW completed

A global consortium of engineers and linguists have made the final decision on a document that enables all the languages in the world to be fully represented on the World Wide Web/WWW, after a decade of work. This announcement was made by a Swede, Patrik Fältström, to the Internet Governance Forum during a United Nations meeting in October 2006. The full report by Kieren McCarthy is available online from Guardian Technology.

Thinking outside the box

I learned at the staff management seminar by Zoinul Abidin on 24 October 2006, organised by CILIP Career Development Group:

• Successful managers communicate their visions tirelessly
• They take risk, and take responsibility for the consequences resulted by the action of the team
• They work with, not against, the bureaucracy
• They mix play with work
• They treat staff equally and fairly
• They provide their staff the adequate resources for the job
• They believe in common sense and logic
• They promote excellent customer service, as part of the drive to meet the service target
• They go the extra mile to engage customers, to maximise the success of projects and the service

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

This University of Cambridge website led by Dr John van Wyhe is a fine example of manuscript catalogue in my view because:

• It is a well-designed and informative website
• There is an option to view scans of text and images side by side
• Links for catalogues are positioned next to the catogery headings, together with the introduction and browse option; this feature accommodates browsability and serendipity of a physical library 

Project Documentation

End-user project documents are often overlooked and this could contribute to the eventual downfall of the project. A good handbook that makes end-users feel part of things can become the prominent part of a project for them.   

Stephanie’s key advices in creating an end-user project handbook are:

• Focus on practical side by understanding how the project will fit into end-users’ workflow
• Create a all-in-one reference book and “how-to” guide
• Cover everything relevant to their tasks but exclude anything completely irrelevant

There are three parts to her guide for project handbook creation:

Part 1 – Research and scoping

1)     Identify end-user group and communicate to them about their entire workflow currently in reference to the project
Questions to answer:
-          Is the project completely new to end-user?
-          Will their existing way of carrying out a task change?
-          Does the project represent new technology or service or both?
-          Will other technologies be involved?
-          Will other operation procedures be involved?
2)     Compare the current tasks along with future tasks required under the influence of the project to explain in detail what is coming and what the end-users need to do 

Part 2 – Creating the handbook

1)     Project overview
-          Keep it short and refer readers to relevant documents detailing plans and ambitions of the project
2)     Scope
-          Short explanation of the current phase of the project, its purpose (why) and specific required tasks (e.g. testing, checking through for acceptance, etc.)
-          Include start and finish dates if applicable
-          Significant if only partial version of project was released
3)     Step-by-step guide
-          Largest section of the handbook detailing minute technical and operational procedures without any grey area
-          Divide it into manageable and logical sub-sections for ease of update
-          Useful tool to build confidence in change for end-user (and eventually the success of the project) by details that reassure them the handbook will guide them through every stage
4)     Checklist of requirements
-          List of everything basic and project-specific required, e.g. equipment, logins, internet access and permission, software version, technical specifications, agreements with third parties and pre-start testing
5)     Contact details
-          Provide help point for anything the handbook cannot answer
6)     Feedback
-          Enable end-user to send comments and impressions of the project, in printed form, email or online form formats.
-          State clearly that all positive good and bad comments are welcome
7)     Next steps
-          Inform the end-user on the next steps or phase and the schedule
-          Publish the time when updates are expected to engage their interest and sense of purpose 

Part 3 – Maintaining momentum

• Update the step-by-step guide regularly with improvements, decisions and practical changes and send out replacement pages or subsections for the handbook
• Create another version of the handbook if further project stages are involved to keep everything current (by including updates, revisions, amendments and appendices on the old version)

TAYLOR, S., 2006. The Project Handbook: How to Write Clear and Cogent End-User Documentation. Freepint 214 [online]. Available at: <URL:http://www.freepint.com/issues/210906.htm> [accessed 7 October 2006].

the Art of Negotiating

JOHNSON, C., 2006. Risky Business? Demonstrating the business case for your information service: A review. Impact, 9(3), 43-44. 

Gillian Leslie (Head of Knowledge Management, Biggart Baillie Solicitors) delivered a session on how to persuade key decision makers at the national conference of the CILIP Career Development Group in June 2006. She pinpointed positiveness, friendliness, and progressiveness as the key to successful negotiation. The author of the above article summarised it as below:

1.      Establish the goals and objectives of the negotiation

2.      Identify and contact key people with power; good to start from their assistants to gain respect and trust

3.      Introduce yourself by promoting your achievements, e.g. how you save money

4.      Establish the negotiation range i.e. what will you accept and reject

5.      Match the motivation and fear of the individual with your goals and objectives

6.      Prepare for objections by giving solid evidence, raise the issues yourself even

7.      If the answer is No, continue building the relationship and providing evidence through reports, etc. If Yes, provide feedback on the improvement