Arrakis County Library System Library Reorganization Plan

Section Two - Organizational Culture

Theresa Bird, Alex Brooks-Schrauth, Patrick Cook, Sarah Thomas

Looking back at the Arrakis County Library System years ago compared to today,

one may hardly recognize the organization’s culture and norms. However, the culture

that exists today was always present, it just needed to be fostered. With employee and

community involvement throughout the reorganization plan, we were able to ensure that

all stakeholders were heard and their concerns and contributions tended to. Simple, but

not necessarily easy, changes to leadership styles and practices, as well as ensuring up

to date technical and professional knowledge has helped to guide our growth as an

organization. By utilizing our leaders and managers for their knowledge and ability to

inspire, we were able to guide our organizational culture into its current incarnation with

minimal growing pains. The Arrakis County Library System is now a progressive,

innovative, inclusive organization that upholds not only professional values and ethics,

but fosters community and employee growth and engagement.

In general, a dominant organizational culture may either impede or facilitate

organizational change, depending upon the organization’s existing culture. As stated by

Katzenbach et al. (2016), “a company’s culture is its basic personality, the essence of

how its people interact and work… Culture is the self-sustaining pattern of behavior that

determines how things are done”. In other words, if the culture of an organization is

geared toward facilitating change, then the organization will be ready and willing to
make necessary changes. If the culture of the organization is not, then it will be at the

very least resistant to change, if not actively attempting to subvert it. In other words,

culture “can provide insights into why an organization or department is successful, or if it

is not achieving the desired results” (Farrell, 2018, p. 864). There is and will be a

dominant culture in either situation, it’s just a matter of whether or not that culture is

conducive to the necessary changes.

In the case of the Arrakis County Library System, the organizational culture made

rapid change challenging at the onset. There was much mistrust among employees,

due largely to issues of favoritism. We knew that merely making a good show of laying

down the law of a new culture would not be sufficient to establish new workflows. It was

important to recognize that “formal efforts to change a culture … seldom manage to get

to the heart of what motivates people,” but you can make “use of what you cannot

change by using some of the emotional forces within your current culture differently”

(Katzenbach et al., 2016). With refocusing efforts to take advantage of the employees

dissatisfaction, it was possible to turn the general complaints into plans of action which

enabled our system to begin developing a more positive organizational culture.

The Arrakis County Library System now maintains an adaptive organizational

culture with values of ongoing respect, clear communication, openness, and the

continuing education of our staff. We believe that a workforce that feels empowered to

make decisions with a high degree of self-efficacy will serve our mission well (Kumar &

Uzkurt, 2010). We also consistently perform our work with a growth mindset that applies

to both internal processes and public-facing interactions. These are essential

components for our library to remain relevant and adaptive in an ever-changing

economic and socio-political environment (Moran & Morner, 2018).

Within our library system, we believe that each staff member’s perspective is

needed for the library to prosper and serve the needs of the Arrakis County community

fully. Therefore, each of our managers regularly elicits direct feedback from their

employees. Because of the restructuring we’ve done with each manager’s workload and

span of control (Moran & Morner, 2018), managers have enough bandwidth to engage

each employee in this way on a weekly to bi-monthly basis. Regardless whether our

management team ends up implementing changes based on this feedback, clear and

direct communication is our consistent goal.

From the outset of the restructure, we made sure to take sufficient time to

understand the cultural backgrounds of each staff member and how we might leverage

their perspective with the end goal of a stronger overall culture. Our service philosophy

holds that we are stewards of our libraries’ community space and resources (both digital

and physical). Therefore, we continually strive to focus our attention towards the goal of

meeting our community’s needs.

In embracing our current values and norms, the importance of our leadership

cannot be overstated. Our administration and management’s wilingness to exemplify

our standards of service, such as equity, integrity, open communication, has been

integral to developing our current organizational culture. The time and consideration that

we took to ensure everyone understood the “why” of the reorganization plan, along with

our willingness to listen to community input throughout the process, was a major factor
in allowing our organization to grow into the welcoming, innovative institution that it has

become.

Our staff’s continued recognition “that individuals have aspirations that can be

pursued and must be actively supported in the context of and in service to

organizational goals or needs” (Montgomery, 2020), has helped our employees develop

their strengths while allowing our organization to continue growing despite funding

challenges faced in recent years. The example set by not only our management team,

but each employee, helps showcase our commitment to excellence for our library

patrons, new employees, and volunteers.

As we undertook our organizational overhaul, equity and diversity were kept at

the forefront of all of our decisions. Our revised vision statement emphasized our desire

to foster a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere that enriches our entire community. We

knew that we would only be able to enact these stated values by centering diversity as a

pivotal value of our organizational culture. We have made promising headway in shifting

the dominant culture within our library system.

Despite our progress, there are pockets of resistance. In addition to the rampant

favoritism, cronyism and hostility to innovation and change, our organization was rife

with deep seeded biases which favor those who have historically held power, eg white,

cisgender males. As noted by Henry, Eshleman, & Moniz (2018),

The larger theme of favoritism, and its cousins nepotism, cronyism, and sexism,

can arise when personnel choices are considered. Each has the potential to sour

teams at their very beginning. This sense of unfairness can occur when certain
 members of a team are favored over others can create animosity and diminish

morale. All of these share similarities, and also have their own unique pernicious

effects, which contribute to dysfunction (p. 148).

Differing subcultures are inevitable in any organization; this is not always a

negative, particularly when they reflect diverse perspectives which challenge the status-

quo. However, organizational subcultures which are based on sociocultural biases

surrounding race and gender contribute to a toxic environment for both staff and

patrons. Prior to the reorganization our libraries were steeped in patriarchal cultural

values, which was reflected in a rigid hierarchical organizational structure. Given that

these structures and beliefs are in direct opposition to our core values, any employees

who don’t grasp the importance of these pivotal values will require ongoing training and

potential interventions.

Though the library profession is predominantly made up of white cisgender

women, male staff disproportionately hold positions of authority and power in library

organizations. This was evident in our previous staffing decisions. Ladybird Johnson

was the only manager, with Jacqueline Kennedy and Jane Austin rounding out the three

female employees in positions of authority. This was in stark contrast to the seven

males in managerial and supervisory roles. As Henry et al. (2018) point out,

Sexism, like racism, creates imbalances, foments mistrust, erodes morale and

creates a great deal of librarian dysfunction. These can be connected to teams

but can also apply to general work relationships. Communication that helps to

build trust is the primary way to alleviate these types of problems (p. 152).
 There will inevitably be employees who cling to the old underlying “values-in-use”

(Center for Innovative Cultures). We are attempting to ‘call in’ problematic employees in

an attempt to diffuse knee-jerk defensive reactions.However, if ongoing behaviors and

attitudes impede our goals of inclusivity and acceptance then performance action plans

will be implemented during evaluations, which could ultimately result in dismissal. It is

crucial to have strong leadership that embodies and models these values if we hope to

implement lasting cultural change. Only by challenging overt bigotry and implicit bias

alike can we root out these deeply ingrained beliefs which are prevalent in our culture at

large.

In order to rectify these inequities, we have flattened the hierarchy of our

organizational structure, which allowed us to promote existing female staff members to

higher positions. We also focused our efforts on recruiting new employees of different

races, genders, and cultural backgrounds, taking care to better reflect the makeup of

our broader community’s population. We have made substantial progress in this regard,

hiring Latinx, African-American and trans/nonbinary individuals.

For employees to succeed when first starting any job, they must be able to get

their footing in the everyday operations of whatever line of work they are performing. As

stated by Farrell (2018), “understanding the culture explains the social structures,

reporting lines, and effectiveness of an organization … new employees are oriented to

an organization through language and established patterns” (p. 863). Because new

employees are expected to prioritize professional development and participate in

consistent performance reviews, individuals who aren’t used to this culture might find

the Arrakis system overly bureaucratic or difficult to work within.

We have consistently worked to implement changes, such as eliminating

favoritism and information silos, in order to create an open and respectful environment.

A new employee would not do well to expect preferential treatment just because they

had an association or friendship with a manager or other leader. With the previous

change in leadership, we recognized that we “cannot control the culture but a leader

can contribute to and hopefully direct the culture to create a positive working

environment” (Farrell, 2018, p. 865). That is, a positive and progressive culture isn’t

effective without a leader to exemplify those attributes. If this optimistic approach is

contrary to the individual employee’s personality, they may find the work culture too

different from their past experiences to be comfortable.

The Arrakis County Library has flourished since the implementation of the

reorganization plan. The culture we have developed is present in all of our actions and

has already become part of our daily operating values and norms. Through mutual

support and a willingness to listen to each other and our community, we have improved

tremendously - we are a library system that patrons are excited to use and library

professionals are eager to work within. With leadership that exemplifies our values,

such as innovation, equity and open communication, we are able to act as good

stewards of our community resources. By keeping these goals at the forefront of our

decisions, we have ensured our present success and a bright future.

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