Reading Time: 7 minutes
My wife and I are house hunting. We are hoping it will be our last move, as we have moved a few times already, always because my desire for challenging work took us to new places. It has meant identifying and engaging a number of specialists—a realtor, a lawyer, a painter, an electrician—to help us. Our realtor seemed surprised at our method of selecting her and I tried to imagine how I could explain it to her.
What are you good at? Really, really good at, so good you excel? My guess is that it’s something you do a lot. Maybe you run for exercise and have built up stamina to go for miles or hours. Maybe you’ve specialized in an aspect of your job, to a level that few others have achieved.
Some things you excel at without even thinking about: chewing food thoroughly (although you may notice when you don’t) or brushing your teeth. Those are things that anyone could be good at but that many of us can do, with greater or less success than each other.
I like to think I have expertise in the things I do at work every day, like leading staff or being strategic about information access. But you’d hope I was good at these things after spending decades working on them. Reference librarians get better with each question and answer. Catalogers get better with each new acquisition and each deselected item and seeing how people are using those resources. We accumulate knowledge, we gain experience through practice.
Self-Awareness on Expertise
As I noted at the top, we have moved a fair number of times for my work. During our marriage, we have bought 4 houses and are about to sell the 4th and buy the 5th. That seems a lot if you haven’t bought any houses. But it’s not many if you’re a realtor who is involved in tens of housing sales each year. Or a lawyer who handles even more property transfers during their law practice.
Everyone falls on this spectrum of experience. The trick is to know where you are on that range and having a bit of awareness about what you know, or even can know, and what you have to take on faith. This was the dilemma we ran into when we were trying to select specialists. How do you choose?
We met with our realtor after I had done a bit of research on the literally hundreds of realtors who work in the region we live in Canada. I narrowed the scope to people who had helped on sales in our neighborhood, assuming they’d have some sense of the local market. In some cases, I could get a sense of how many years they’ve been realtors. We have tended to lean towards realtors with more experience than less but we don’t have a particular threshold. There are also things like total value of properties sold that are sometimes used in marketing, but which have no impact on our selection. What does it mean if someone has sold $10 million in property value: 10 houses? Does cumulative dollar value represent anything other than time served?
“So, how did you find me?”
“You had a nice picture of you with your dog in your profile.”
She really couldn’t believe it. It was more complicated than that but that really was the deciding factor. I had taken some time to narrow down the pool. But at some point you just have to leap. We like dogs, she has a dog, there is a point of understanding. There are so many realtors, and lawyers, and plumbers, and electricians, and other service providers that choice can become an obstacle.
We have a vet that we have used for 17 years and love but who has a 3.2 star rating on Yelp. Someone who trusts Yelp will not look twice at our vet. And, frankly, I don’t know what the experience was for those people who left low ratings. I can only speak to my experience which is 5 star. We selected a plumbing company with a strong rating and they ended up leaving a hole in our foundation at ground level that allowed rainwater to pour in. A friend referred a realtor to us but the realtor had never sold a house. Ratings and referrals are not foolproof.
The realtor said that it was normal to interview three realtors, which we knew from previous experience. This rule of three is so funny. I have come across it in hiring too: we need to have three candidates. One time we were hiring at the Law Society and a recruiter had only brought us three: one woefully skilled, one right in the ball park, one with far too much experience. We are often asked to get three price quotes for a large purchase. Goldilocks. It’s ritualistic, arbitrary, not meaningful. Why three and not four or five?
The magic number is 5 in usability testing, which shows that there are some sound reasons to use a specific number but mostly doing things in threes seems to be arbitrary.
We did not compare three realtors though. We never have. There is a simple reason for that: we don’t have the experience to judge whether one realtor is going to be more or less successful than another. If we establish a rapport and trust with a realtor, that is as far as our own expertise extends. We may be able to repeat that low threshold with multiple people but then we would be back to where we started. Fundamentally, there is no way to comparison shop in a meaningful way for experts whose knowledge domain is not one you are also expert in. I’m sure people with legal issues feel this. How do you know if you have a good lawyer?
The reality is that this bar isn’t as low as it may sound. We contacted a realtor in Chicago and were never able to meet. Calls were cancelled or just ghosted entirely. After the second attempt, we moved on to another realtor.
You might be wondering about risk. But realtors and lawyers are regulated. Plumbers and electricians are or can be bonded. The process of buying or selling a house is highly regulated, requiring all sorts of standardized forms, consumer education, and expectations. Our minimal experience, as well as my understanding of the legal profession, means we probably are a bit further along the spectrum of expertise than many people. We understand the issues around a realtor representing both parties to a sale just like we understand the issues of a lawyer representing two spouses while drafting wills.
In non-regulated specialties, like plumbing and electrical trades, this may be a greater risk except that most jobs are relatively small in comparison to a house. You can look for licensed trades people, even better if they have taken out a bond to insure their work.
Be Open to Help
I tend to take this approach in my work life as well. I am an expert at what I do. Over the years, I have gained confidence in those abilities and I can tell, when I’m in a meeting with people who do not share my expertise, that they lack key knowledge or expertise. They could certainly gain it over time if they wanted and they are experts in their own domains. Our value is that each of us brings our own expertise to the equation.
It is tricky though. I know some colleagues feel as though they are not valued for their expertise. We need law degrees to be taken seriously, in some people’s minds, even if we have decades of expertise.
There can be a tendency when you work in libraries to find decision-makers who think that familiarity is the same as expertise. I have commented on this before: I take photographs, a lot of them, but I am not a photographer. I have learned a ton but I’m still not as facile with the fundamentals of light and focus and speed, never mind all of the other things that come into play with photography.
Many law librarians work in stand alone teams. If we want to do marketing, we have to created the collateral elements ourselves after developing campaign slogans or logos or whatever else. We don’t have a marketing specialist. We have to spin up initiatives based on the skills of the current library team. We have to sunset initiatives based on the skills that have left the current library team when someone moves on to another job.
One thing that I am enjoying is being part of a larger organization. Our university has an archivist that we can tap into for archival guidance. We have a large extensive IT team in case we run into technical problems. There are dedicated HR and finance teams, each of which are highly specialized. While I can bring a certain amount of experience to the table in each of those areas, I can’t match their expertise even if I had a good way to assess it.
The flip side is that I know that, if I’m deliberate about it, I can recognize my own expertise. Earlier in my career, I might have been a little less certain. But I know for a fact that there are rarely library experts in a law organization unless they have worked as librarians for a period of years. It’s just the nature of expertise.
When I am dealing with governance boards or law school faculty, I’m not apologetic about my knowledge any more than they would be if we were discussing their law practice subject matter. While I don’t say it this way, I’m cognizant that most law librarians have 2-3 more years of education or perhaps many more years of hands-on experience, specifically focused on libraries, than any lawyer, faculty or otherwise.
There is a balance to observe, then. An organization can be very do-it-yourself, if only because there isn’t money to pay for the expertise from others. We get Canva licenses so that we can create public relations material. We take Lynda.com classes so that we can provide basic help desk support within our organizations when the IT presence isn’t regular.
That’s really the threshold though. If it’s something we will need to do on a regular basis, we need the expertise. If it’s an irregular occurrence, it makes more sense to bring in an expert to get the work done. If it’s an ongoing requirement, we should be hiring or getting staff skilled in the area. We might take library-centric courses on security challenges of unruly patrons. But we may hire a security presence when that becomes a permanent challenge.
It’s like yard work. I might hire someone to cut down a tree, because they know how and have the tools and can manage the risk. But I will mow my own lawn because it doesn’t make sense for me to hire someone to do something that I have sufficient expertise to manage, even if I couldn’t get hired to work on a golf course green.
As a law library director, I would always choose to send someone from our staff to learn a new skill rather than hire a consultant to provide it. This is particularly true if (a) the need will be ongoing and (b) it fits within the career path for the staff person. Worst case, we train up someone so well that they leave for a more dedicated role using their new expertise. But paying for someone to gain the expertise, while slower than what a consultant can potentially bring, makes our team smarter. It moves our whole library further along the expertise spectrum.
At the same time, I would rather a law library I’m working at foregoes an initiative if we cannot access the expertise necessary. If the expertise is very specific, and we lack it, and can’t afford to hire it, I am happy to leave the initiative for some other organization. Or do without it.
This has meant that, particularly as I am re-calibrating my own perspective moving from a self-contained law library to a library embedded in a large organization, I have started to be a bit more contemplative about what the law library should be doing.
This is the “tool library, maker space, seed library” dilemma public libraries face. There are untold things we could do. We have a smart team with a lot of experience in areas far beyond the four corners of a law librarian’s job description. The question becomes whether we should do those things? What are we not able to do if we choose to expand in those ways? And are there already experts who we would be better collaborating with rather than trying to implicitly supplant?
It’s a great problem to have. Other experts appreciate when you recognize their expertise. I think this is especially true when they learn that you know something about their knowledge domain but don’t assume you know more than they do. I think displaying that humility can create trust that becomes reciprocal when people have questions about library services or operations.