silveradept | December Days #17: How To Be A Consumate Professional To Those You Work With

[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]

There's an entire genre of situation comedy that is all about how people in a dysfunctional workplace sabotage each other, harass each other, aggravate each other, and yet, somehow, the company manages to stay together and running (often because one of the characters is hypercompetent and can run the entire office by themselves without having to interact with the dead weight that's also along with her). While most of those comedies are set in corporate environments, there are enough of them that take place in the government or nonprofit worlds that this is essentially a trope of storytelling in fiction.

The library profession, though, seems to have a popular opinion that the people who work there are more interested in the materials, the books, and the stuff on the shelves than in the people who they interact with, if they're in a setting that has them interacting with a group of people, whether students or the public. They don't make many library-related situation comedies, and Unshelved is the only cartoon strip that I know of that takes place in and around a public library and the people that work there and is intended as a comedy strip. For some reason, librarianship has mostly been spared the office comedy as a trope, and library school likes to assert that because you are all people who have a shared mission and a desire to be there (because they pay is crap), then the group of people at your branch or in your system are going to get along better than most other office environments.

This is entirely false, if for no other reason than there's not actually anything that exempts the library world from any and all of the things that get in the way of liking the people you work with . The library world has its own share of bosses who carry petty grudges, who micromanage everything, who cultivate and use rumors as the basis of their decisions, and coworkers who do those things that get underneath your skin, or who belittle you, or who are otherwise the kinds of people you don't actually want as your compatriots. There are plenty of people that I work with that I would not want to hand out with after work, because our personalities clash pretty badly. There are some approaches that make me cringe every time they happen, because taking that attitude with someone is a near-guarantee that they're not actually going to listen to you and correct their behavior for the next time they come in. There are some who clearly resist working with you or taking suggestions because that would make more work for them, and they're not taking on any more work because of what they're already doing. (Which, incidentally, is solid boundary enforcement. The part that grates is often the way of the rejection, and that's on me for being annoyed at perceiving like someone's just shutting me out without taking the time to listen.) There are people who are so focused on making sure the rules spell out everything in detail because they don't want to have to use their judgment. There are people that leave things too vague for us and blithely tell us to use our judgment, when they haven't done the work of proving to us that if we use our judgment on the matter, we're not going to be hauled up before a discipline hearing.

Co-workers misgender other co-workers, even with their pronouns displayed in easily readable type on their name badges. People get harassed by their bosses and their coworkers about their identities and for sticking up for themselves. There's plenty of dysfunction present in the library, but if we're doing our job, the people who come into the library won't know a thing about it, because for as much as we do or don't like the people we work with, we don't let it show. Because the customers are a completely different class of things to deal with. And, to some degree, we have tools that we can use to correct behavior from users when they do things that aren't okay. You can't ban your coworker from the building for a few days because they said something flagrantly insensitive to you.

I deal with it in my own way, as others do. My way is mostly just to let the stuff bounce off me. I might be hurt by it, but I don't generally pursue things because it's not really worth the effort in the long run, and many of the things that are going to get to me are fundamental parts of the personalities of the people. And, y'know, co-worker, not supervisor, not boss. It doesn't happen enough to be a thing that gets in the way of my work or creates a bad environment for me, and there's probably some residual from the first bad boss about the rumore mill and how it was weaponized to hurt me. There's still traces of that here and there, when the manager who does good things about giving heads-up about things that could become problems before they do mentions a thing or two about stuff that could be interpreted badly. There are definitely people who I work with that have definite opinions about how I should do my work and manage my time, and many of them don't ask about anything they're going to make complaint about, so as to see if the thing they're looking at is something that is a problem or is actual work that might look like a problem.

A large amount of how to be a consumate professional to your co-workers is to take the same attitude with them that you might with users - more often than not, the information being accessed or the things being done have a rational purpose behind them, or there's missing context that might be obtainable with further inquiry. I believe people can be aggravating and annoying unintentionally, bu I don't want to start in malice what can be explained sufficiently by ignorance. It can be tough, though - a co-worker mentioned that one of my previous co-workers was doing their level best to get me in trouble with the management while they were here. I didn't recall any hostile interactions, but I also have to take into stock that this particular co-worker left under circumstances that were not the best, either. Do I believe the co-worker that's telling me about this, or my own experiences?

Maybe it makes me a naif, or easy to be taken advantage of, but it's hard for me to see someone as actively malicious unless they demonstrate that capacity in a way that's not mistakable. It's probably why my last relationship lasted for as long as it did - I wasn't willing to see what was present to everyone else, and then I was too scared to act on it for a while. I'm paying the price for that now, but things will get better.

the annoyance is sharp, but also short. And if it's easier for me to just keep to myself and not generally seek our opportunities to work with them, that's my fault for taking the accumulated evidence of all those annoyances and drawing a conclusion about how much I'd like to work with that person. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to interact with them. It just means that things will never get to the point where we're a friendly team. A well-oiled one that runs on professionalism, definitely, but not the friendly group that library school wanted to sell me on.

And that's okay. There are plenty of other things about the job that I love that more than make up for the fact that I work with some people who suck some of the joy of that out of me.