Building Trust with IT Staff

A while back the LITA blog has a great post about a presentation at ALA entitled “Do You Trust Your IT Staff? Do They Trust you?” This is an issue that is very dear to my heart for a number of reasons. As a techie librarian I’ve faced with the challenge of getting the public services staff to trust me as well as the task of winning the trust of the campus IT folk. I often find myself playing translator and trying to each group to understand the others’ concerns. The biggest challenge in this is having to switch back and forth between my techie hat and my librarian hat. As hard as I’ve tried over the course of the last four years at Cortland, I’ve never really found a way to wear both at once. I have to take a point of view otherwise I lose trust by being disingenous.

To build trust you really need to get people to feel like they are being heard and that you understand their point of view. You can go even farther if you can discuss things with them on their terms. Hence the two hats issue. When I talk to the campus IT staff I tend to try to wear my techie hat. I talk the talk and walk the walk. So much so that at one point a frustrated fellow librarian asked me “why I didn’t just go work in IT”. The comment hurt because I’d just had a meeting early in the week with the IT staff where I had been accused of “thinking too much like a librarian”. From my point of view, I’m in the middle of no-man’s land and there is no going back. I suppose that I’ve always sort of been here. However, when I got a second masters in Information Management at SU the issue became even more clouded.

Where exactly does some one like me belong? In the library or in IT? My personal choice would be in IT in the library. Preferrably a systems department, which is what I will be getting with my new job. However, a wise and weathered systems colleague at another SUNY pointed out to me that even within the library there can be trust issues between the people working in system and the rest of the library. So I’m starting to realize that no matter where I am at I’m going to be having to act as a bridge. My ability and willingness to do this might be one of the reasons I got hired in the first place.

So here are my personal suggestions on how to build trust with IT.

1. Appreciate and respect their expertise. This will help them to respect your expertise.
2. Be honest about your needs but flexible about your demands. Make it clear what your needs are and the priorities in which they come. Don’t set rigid demands and deadlines on IT without understanding what they’re current workload and resources are.
3. Be actively involved in the process. For individual librarians this means when IT asks for feedback give it. If you are in IT then you need to ask for continous feedback throughout the process of building and/or implementing new systems or changing old ones.
4. Walk a day in the other’s shoes. It will help you to better understand and respect what they do. If they do the same they will understand your point of view better as well.
5. Keep the dialog going no matter what. Both IT and librarians can get frustrated and stop communicating with one another. This is not the solution it only worsen the problem. Try to find a constructive way to have a conversation about your frustrations and build a middle ground to work on problems from.