The opportunity to improve performance by recognising and integrating non-professional records management

In any field, work gets done by professionals and non-professionals.

In records management, we have had a significant swing in the way work gets done.

While in the custodial past, the confluence of two systemic factors - the cost of office space, and the need to act coherently through time - put most of the work in the hands of professionals, the removal of the barriers to accessing large capacity record storage space have now put most of the work in the hands of non-professionals.

We can do one of two things with this.

We can choose to recognise them as incompetent, and their work as not being worthy of consideration.

Or we can recognise that they are hard working professionals serving the same organisation, doing the best they can to deliver meaningful value, and make their work easier and better.

One of those is a dead end.

It leads to treating hardworking professionals with contempt.

And there is a body of research going back many decades that shows how destructive contempt is for relationships, it simply says that when there is contempt in a relationship, the relationship is over, and we can not succeed without good working relationships in modern organisations, we are a discipline that no longer has direct control of the work that delivers our key outcomes. If we can’t form a relationship to get the work done, and get people to take action through the relationship, we can not succeed, it doesn’t matter how good we are. This makes an assumption of competence critical for our success - when we treat people as incompetent, it leads to contempt, and we create a self-fulfilling prophecy for ourselves, because we need them to do specific work so that we can succeed, and they will not do it if we are treating like they are incompetent.

So we will fail.

And whether competent or incompetent, failure is a failure.

There are very large numbers of very competent records people failing in their organisations at the moment, it is a problem all of us have faced.

So what is the other option?

The other option, is to treat people as competent professionals doing their best work.

Sometimes, we’ll be wrong about this.

Sometimes people will be incompetent, lazy, unmotivated and a host of other negative things.

The problem with treating everyone as though they are lazy and incompetent, is that if you treat a hard-working, motivated professional like they are incompetent, they’ll fulfil the prophecy for you - because they’ll just refuse to work with you, to you, this might make them appear incompetent, what’s really going on though, is that they’re just refusing to work with you because they don’t feel like you have their best interests at heart, and that their competence won’t be respected in a relationship with you.

Assuming competence and positive intent gives you choices - you get to assess who falls into each bucket, and you get to choose where to spend your effort. The lazy and incompetent people aren’t going to do the work anyway - so there’s no point spending time on them, but there’s also very little lost in having a respectful working relationship with them. The secret to success comes from identifying the the hardworking, motivated professionals, and helping them deliver better work - because they want to deliver better work, so if you can show them how, they’ll do it.

There are three secrets to being successful through this avenue.

The first we’ve already described - assume competence and positive intent, then choose who to spend your time on.

The second is how you approach the conversation about doing better records management.

Many years ago, when I was young and had lots of rough edges, sharp corners, and thought I knew everything, I failed a lot. I failed because of what I’ve just described - even if it was under the surface, I was contemptuous of people who couldn’t see the pattern in the work that I thought was there, didn’t think it was obvious and logical like I did, didn’t think it would be easy to do better work etc. etc. Even when I learned to appreciate people for their effort and skills (began assuming competence and positive intent), I was still failing to get change to happen.

The change that I needed to make was subtle, and I was lucky enough to have a manager at the time (about 15 years ago), who saw the sincerity of my desire to help, and helped me see why I was failing. Simply put, the way I was presenting the problems to people required them to admit that the way they were working was wrong. Being wrong, is not something anyone wants to admit to - particularly when it is in response to their work, because the ideas of ‘wrong’ and ‘incompetent’ are pretty close together, and the ideas of ‘incompetent’ and ‘fired’ are closer together still. So starting with ‘wrong’, is just ‘wrong’ - at least if you want to succeed, a ‘wrong’ pattern can also come about as a result of organisational problems that are unresolvable to the people who have to act them out, there is no point blaming people for wrong actions.

The magic phrase that Sandi taught me, was ‘opportunity to improve performance’ - and the secret was really to think about the change I wanted like that, because what was going on already clearly working well enough for intelligent, competent, hard working professionals to continue doing it. This means that if we are looking to change something, it is because the work is being done well, and to a high standard - but we have identified an ‘opportunity to improve performance’. Note the use of ‘we’ - it is important - it says the manager you’re working with helped and was proactive, something that will make their management see them as competent, and something that is universally true even when it might not feel like it - if you want to change a team, you need their manager to support it.

15 years on, I am yet to find a manager in any organisation who won’t give me five minutes to explore whether there are opportunities to improve performance through better record keeping and management in their team.

My poor judgement from my early career taught me that it is a very rare person who will give you five minutes to talk about how they are wrong - so secret two requires that we avoid trying to.

The third secret to success is about integration.

It’s not about integrating technical systems, it is about integrating the practices and methods we use to complete our work, it’s necessary because we are not a custodial discipline any more. We don’t have direct managerial control of the work required to achieve records management objectives. This means that we can’t direct, and we have to respect that the primary outcome others are trying to achieve is not the same as the primary outcome we are trying to achieve. If we treat their work like the objective of their work is to achieve our outcomes, and try and change it so that it is, we will disappointed, and we will fail - this is the lesson of records management in organisations right now.

The skill of records management now, is to identify the small changes that can make our work achievable, and improve the work that others do.

It’s the subtle integration of the outcomes people are looking for, and the work required to achieve our outcomes.

To achieve it requires that we find problems that are meaningful to managers, and deliver solutions to them in ways that produce genuine and significant (i.e. measurable) performance improvements for those managers, while making our work achievable. The reason we have to approach it like this, is to prevent defensive reactions that come about because of fear of change.

People don’t like change - that is a fact. Not liking change though, isn’t about fearing change, people aren’t actually afraid of things changing. What they’re afraid of, is not knowing what to do - they are competent in the way things are done now, and they are afraid of appearing incompetent when those things change - because ‘incompetent’ and ‘fired’ are very close together, and when most people imagine losing their jobs, they imagine losing many other things that are very important to them. What this means, is that we have to calibrate the changes we are asking for, and we have to focus on the things that will make them look and feel more competent - the things that improve their performance. What’s in it for us, is that we get to tinker - just a little bit, so that the system of getting work done also delivers the things we need to deliver our outcomes.

A practical example of too much, is expecting people to change to a fully functional arrangement of their records, and adopt the full Dublin core overnight - that’s probably too much. If however, we need a file closure date as our key retention metadata, and a manager is struggling with understanding how much work is in progress, how long it takes, and facing consistent escalations because of broken legislative time frames (this is a real-life example), you might find that they are open to the systematic creation of open and close metadata against their ‘files’. To the right manager, the value this delivers might just be significant enough for them to spend time and effort getting their people and system of producing work to change - they’ll likely see a future in which they feel more competent and in control of what they are managing, and avoid all of the pain and suffering that comes with the broken deadlines. What we get out of it, is the metadata we need to drive retention outcomes. They change to get something they want, and we get what we want as a result. It might not be quite as good as just being able to tell them what to do - but it sets a foundation for a positive working relationship into the future, and shows them the very practical and real value that records can deliver and a recognition that improving records management can support and improve their work.

This kind of thing has not historically been the core work of records management. If we look at our standards though, it’s clear that this fits well with the expectations now about what best practice is. The addition of appraisal to ISO15489 was a real statement to me about what the future of records management is about, and if we consider the case above, what we have done is straight out of ISO appraisal - we found a way to mitigate business risks using records management tools and practices. It is a change to what we have been doing.

To me, the change starts with recognising that other people are managing records every day. In between what is produced now by amateurs, and what can be produced by amateurs with help from professionals is the opportunity to improve performance that managers want, and executives will fund - if only we show them.