The A-B-Cs of Great Non-Sales Salesmen: Attunement

This is a continuation on the two previous posts on libraries/librarians as non-sales salesmen as the concept of non-sales selling was introduced by Dan Pink in his ASTD webinar last week. In this post, I want to study and apply the A-B-Cs, as explained by Dan Pink, to libraries and librarians and I'm also interested in exploring on whose shoulders these traits fall or are they (should they be) on every single library employee's shoulders?

I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comment area provided.

The A-B-Cs of non-sales selling are:

1. Attunement: perspective taking, being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes
2. Buoyancy: resilience in the face of rejection and/or failure, being able to stay afloat
3. Clarity: the ability to curate information and make sense of it, to sift through the superfluous to find the truly important pieces

Attunement:
How well, and in which situations, do librarians (aka anyone working in a library) put ourselves in the shoes of 1) our customers, 2) our competitors, 3) our colleagues?

Since I can only speak for myself, I will speculate that every single library employee should be attuning themselves to our customers and our colleagues. There isn't a single role in the library that I can think of that doesn't impact either group. Attuning to our competitors is a different story. I think most people reading this might say that our directors and department heads are probably (or should be) the ones who have our competitors at the front and center of their minds. These are the big-picture folks, right? These are our colleagues who are watching for trends and niches where libraries can fill needs as well as niches where libraries are no longer needed.

However, I will go out on a short limb here and say that if the directors and department heads continue to be the only ones thinking about our competitors, libraries will be destined to close up shop. Maybe not today or tomorrow but eventually. Dan Pink made a good point in his webcast about how access to information has changed from a model of information asymmetry to one of information parity. He illustrated this using car salesmen and the act of buying a car: back in the day, car dealers held all the information which made buying a car very tricky for the buyer. Today, consumers have an equal amount of information as the dealers which puts them on even ground which makes it more difficult for the dealers to gain the upper hand on a sale.

This model could also be applied to library administrators and the non-administrative staff: everyone is pretty much on level ground when it comes to access to information. I believe that in order for libraries to succeed and thrive, the big-picture-takers (those attuning themselves with our competitors) need to still be the directors and the department heads but they also need to be the building maintenance staff, the circulation staff, the children's specialists, the IT staff, the archivists, the catalogers, etc. In short, everyone who works in a library is responsible for its success and therefore needs to be aware of the environment in which it exists, including its competitors.

How well are we currently attuning? This depends on how we define success. If we take the low-hanging fruit and simply look at which libraries have closed in the past couple of years, then some libraries are doing better than others. But that's a very skewed and narrow approach. We could also look at budgets and number of library card users and the frequency with which they use those library cards. Maybe those measures aren't even what we should use to operationalize our attunement proficiency.

What are your thoughts on this? 

Coming up in the next two posts, buoyancy and clarity.