by Ulla de Stricker
Looking back over a long, rewarding, and busy career in the information industry and as a consultant, I am grateful for all the personal connections it allowed me to form, and amazed at the power those connections have demonstrated time and again. "Name the challenge—if I can't meet it myself I'll get you someone who can" is a common response in our profession, and we don't just mean "find you the name of." Oh no, we mean "I'll call on a friend who, because he or she respects and regards me, will go to great lengths to help you."
Looking at our profession's most pressing current challenge through the lens of strategic planning, I wonder if we took for granted our ability to build and keep good relationships and failed to appreciate how strong a role they played in allowing us to be professionally effective. If so, now is a good time to examine that ability and put it to deliberate use. The challenge I am referring to is a familiar one: As technology brings along greater client self-sufficiency (whether we feel it's justified or not!), and as IT departments increasingly concern themselves with knowledge management initiatives, our strategic role and contribution to the bottom line can get lost on the very cluttered radar screens of decision makers. Many information professionals enjoy an appreciated, highly visible placement within the organizations they serve; but many others feel their work is misunderstood or underappreciated. The bottom line—I'm not telling anyone anything that isn't already obvious—is that in many cases, the information services unit is not deployed strategically by the organization that is (still) funding it.
Our professional literature and lineup of continuing education seminars have no shortage of coverage in the subject of marketing. Yet Larry Besant and Deborah Sharp explained relationship marketing in these pages in March 2000 and said pointedly, "Herb White is right. Librarians do not market and they never have."
Let me just jump in and say it now: Marketing isn't our issue. Relationships are. Marketing is misunderstood and misplaced if it isn't seen as a natural consequence of everything else we do—the systematic efforts we make to understand our organizations' inner workings; the probes we mount to ferret out our clients' and non-clients' challenges and deliverables; the ongoing conversations we have with stakeholders. In other words, if relationships are done right, marketing takes care of itself.
Now isn't that a relief? No marketing, no selling? No kidding. But there is serious work to be done in the relationship department.
A quick mental experiment: What is the approximate total number of "non-family personal connections" represented by you and your colleagues in the information services unit? How many personal friends, school chums, hobby and sports acquaintances, professionally based friendships (think physical therapist, music teacher), and Rol-A-Dex linkages (think colleagues you helped in a bigtime pinch) can be counted? Trust me, it's a staggering number. Now, how many of that number exist within the unit's key stakeholder groups? How many people in leadership or influence positions could you count on to drop what they were doing if you called and said, "Got a minute?"
Some of my colleagues have expressed queasiness at the prospect of needing to become well connected "upstairs." I point out that in the absence of such connectedness, we just might soon be disconnected altogether. And I point out that every member of the senior management team is a human being who will respond humanly to expressions of expert care. But lest any reader feel uncomfortable with the notion of ‘strategically planned friendships,' let me hasten to say that the emphasis is first on "what can I do for him or her"; the "will he or she lend crucial support at budget time or champion the unit if downsizing were to get on the agenda" part tends to fall in place naturally. It can be difficult to determine how we can contribute meaningfully to key leaders' working lives if we don't know them as persons—hence the need to work on, as opposed to just letting happen accidentally, the relationships we want.
When we have the proper relationships in place, our organizations are the winners because we become able to function at a completely different level than we have in the past. Building solid personal linkages with the movers, shakers, and decision makers—on a foundation of top notch, tailored professional service—enables us to have direct positive influence at critical junctures and day to day alike. Well tended relationships and lines of communication create a natural, comfortable environment for the give-and-take involved in having an impact on the organization's current success and future direction. Good relationships allow us to be entwined in the business process of the organization so that we know what's going on—a prerequisite for proactive service—and good relationships ensure we're invited to join the team long before any new project is launched.
Of course, it's a professional challenge to "work with the big boys." That was the title of a presentation in which I encouraged the audience to step out of the excellent-service role and adopt an interpretive, analytical, "here's something that could impact us down the road and how I think we might deal with it" approach. The increased awareness of the need for competitive intelligence (I prefer the term contextual intelligence) has shed light on the extent to which we can offer advice rather than just information; I believe the business world as we know it demands that we upgrade our contributions to contain bottom-line digests of key issues and reasoned recommendations for decision makers. Doing so is a great deal easier when we have accumulated a healthy dose of their trust and respect.
But aren't we all about rising to professional challenges? The beauty here is that the task of building good personal relationships isn't difficult; most of us do it effortlessly, without a second thought, and well. The stretch might be putting the relationship portfolio at the top of our priority list. Why wouldn't we, when the outcome is such a win-win?
For more information, contact Ulla de Stricker (uds@xe.net).
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