Corruption Index 2012

Transparency International has released their Corruption Perceptions Index 2012, complete with an video that explains the purpose of the index and what corruption is.
 

For librarians, this index can help to answer the questions:

• How safe is my investment in this country? 
• How much of my philanthropy/donations get to the people who really need it? 
• If I travel to this country, how likely is it that a bribe will be necessary for business? 
• My foreign service exam/international studies course included a question about corruption: what countries are the most corrupt?

Should you share the wealth?

You realize that one of your colleagues in the library is working many over-time hours to offer programming for patrons and that he has had to take from his collections budget to offer some additional services. This colleague is quite humble and has asked other members to downplay his extra hours in front of the director. Another colleague with a different program is much louder at staff meetings--citing her carefully accrued statistics and satisfaction reports from clients--and she is always good at securing additional funding for her programs, above what other departments receive. You have done a head-count and your modest colleague has a higher attendance at his programs, whereas your documented colleague has a lower attendance, and she has cancelled a few sessions, due to few or no attendees, and spent time on other projects.

Budget time is here: do you point out to the director that your quiet colleague could use some extra cash, even though you know your calculating colleague is counting on that money for her programming?

Do you stand up for the quiet man, who may go after you like John Wayne if you decide to help him, or do you stay silent and let the scrivener keep her scribblings? I would reason my way through this problem, stressing that I would like to see an equal distribution of the budget, especially in a case where the public--and the library--is benefiting from higher attendance.

Here are the points to touch on:

• You can't punish one librarian for getting her work done on time by taking her money away.
• However, the public is benefiting from another staff member's programs, so we need to support them with more funds, a refreshed librarian and stats that we can use to get some more money.
  
• You will have to decide: talk with your colleagues, stressing the benefits to the public, or straight to the director, if you believe that a direct order is the only recourse. (The latter is the least favoured in the interview, but really the most likely in an actual workplace.)
• There may be an HR shuffle that you feel you can give a (temporary) assist with. Taking on too many extra hours means that you will feel the burn-out and will only seem like brown-nosing to an interviewer: I'm so keen, I may never go home. Turn it into a temporary benefit, part of your professional education: gathering stats for the quiet one and marketing for the collector.
  

Your quiet colleague should be prompted to keep his stats--though he doesn't seem to have enough time to meet his programming requirements--so you may have to volunteer for an assist. After all, some of his overtime will have to be caught up by someone: try to package it as a learning experience for you, the rookie.

I hope an interviewer will indicate that you will have a mentor who can assist you with these problems, and will accept your rationale that you can't rob Peter to pay Paul. If you have encountered this problem in the past and you felt the situation was successfully resolved, tell the story and point out what you would replicate in a future situation to have the appropriate happy ending.

What if a patron doesn't like a colleague?

What if a patron doesn't like a colleague and prefers to have you help him/her, every time, even when you are not on your shift?

You have two options to answer this question:

1. This is a hypothetical question, so you can make a guess as to what you would do. You can ask about policies in effect in the library in regards to dealing with "difficult" patrons.
2. You can treat this question as a BDI question. As a BDI question, you must use a true, past experience and explain what happened in that situation and highlight your role. It is best that the experience had a positive outcome, but if it does not, you can finish your answer, hypothetically, stating what you would do differently in the future based on what you learned from the experience.
   

Don't shy away from these questions since they are asking about how you would deal with sticky situations. The interviewers want to know: do you always go running for help? and do you know when to call for help? When it comes to ethics and conflict, you have to strike a balance between the two. You also have to show that you are fair-minded.

Some interview questions are multi-layered and they may have more than one step to solve. An interviewer could take this question into several different directions:

• Collegiality and conflict: what if you don't like your colleague and find them to be abrasive and abrupt, but you know that you have to address the issue? This becomes a behavior descriptive question if the interviewer asks, have you experienced this situation in the past?
• What if your colleague is a person of color or a person who wears a prominent religious symbol and the patron always waits until you--who appears to be of the same ethic group/religious affiliation as the patron--are free? You can also change this if the interviewee is a person of color and say that this patron always waits until you are free, ignoring your colleagues that do not appear to be of the same ethnic group of the patron. This becomes an ethical question: do you say something to your colleagues, to the patron or to your supervisor?

However, I don't think that interviewers should ask this question invoking race or religion if they have not created a policy for their own library staff when dealing with these issues. I have a peeve about these questions, especially in regards to personal conflicts: why do organizations persist in asking these questions when they have no clear internal policy? Some supervisors think they are going to get a silver bullet answer when they haven't bothered to form one themselves.