#17: Learn from the best →

From Emma:

This exercise is a little more informal and less clear-cut than a lot of the others, so I’ve practiced it several times with varying degrees of focus. Since the library where I work now and the one before that both had gone to a one-desk model with circulation and reference staff sharing a space, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to listen to how circulation staff members interact with patrons. There are compelling arguments both for and against the one-desk model, and I don’t want to come down on one side or the other overall, but anecdotally, something I’ve noticed is that having two staff members at the same service point seems to encourage them to be more welcoming and patient with patrons than they might be on their own. In my experience, the ‘worse’ staff person seems to behave better when her ‘better’ colleague is in earshot, rather than the ‘better’ staff member dropping down to her ‘worse’ colleague’s level. Not the point of this post, but an interesting thing to think about.

Anyway, the thing I have personally noticed that my coworkers do effectively that I don’t do is wait comfortably in silence. I am proud of my ability to adapt my vocabulary and communication style to patrons and my reference interview skills, but I am not good at long stretches of quiet while I wait for a patron to respond or to be ready to do something. If I ask a question and don’t get a pretty immediate response, I tend to feel like I am failing the patron, and I have a strong urge to rephrase and repeat what I said, or to offer a different suggestion because I assume that the patron didn’t understand or like my initial question or answer. However, from watching my coworkers, I’ve observed that some patrons just need more time to process what I’ve said, and giving them new inputs, however helpfully it is intended, just distracts them and slows them down. This is the case not just for patrons who might have developmental disabilities, but also with patrons who might have another reason to need to think about communication a little more, like someone talking to you in her second language or someone whose hearing isn’t great so he needs to consciously infer what exactly you said to him.

So far I’ve been doing my “learn from the best” observations covertly rather than explicitly. I’m a supervisor right now, so asking a coworker directly for their insights takes on a bit of a different tone than it would if I were asking peer-to-peer. I’d be grateful to hear form anyone who straight-out asked a coworker how they do it and how that conversation went.