How Groucho Helped Make Us a Team

Some years ago I was asked to lead a new organizational entity in our Library called Customer Services. It was a combination of technology training, systems, the periodicals room help desk and the staff from access services (circulation, course reserve, ILL, stack management).

We spent a lot of time getting acquainted, learning where there were already commonalities in our service approach and philosophy, developing our own Mission and Vision statements and Values, etc. But as much as this helped, we still felt that we needed a signature event, program, project of some kind that would firmly unite us as a Team.

Enter Groucho Marx and his old TV show, You Bet Your Life. (See Wikipedia for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Bet_Your_Life)

With the approval of the University Librarian, we decided to have a week devoted to a part of his show in which if a contestant said the "secret word" a duck would descend with a prize. On the show, it was cash; in our game it would be a chocolate cigar.

Everyone pitched in. The arts and crafts folks in the group created the duck and the means for raising and lowering it; the web master gave prominent attention to promoting "Say the Secret Word" week on the website; the technology training team and members of the circ staff worked to create flyers that could be distributed hither and thither, and everyone on the team agreed to a) Wear Groucho glasses for the week that the game was in progress and b) Spend some time at the Circ Desk where the game took place to engage the faculty, students, staff, co-workers and others. To complete the effect, we arranged to have a couple of TV sets near the Circ Desk where we showed episodes from You Bet Your Life.

Sounds great, right?

But there were problems in involving our patrons, specifically, very few of the people who came into the library and to the circ desk had any idea of the TV show (although many/most knew who Groucho was). So, when we tried to get them to say the Secret Word they were flummoxed as to what we were doing. As a result, we basically fed them clues so that they would get the word and we could offload all the chocolate cigars we had.

On the other, this really did turn out to be Customer Services' signature moment. It became an experience that everyone on the team participated in and had a good time with from start to finish. Moreover, our sense of fun was contagious, and as the week progressed colleagues from other parts of the organization joined us at the Circ Desk to participate; some of them even went so far as to don Groucho Glasses and try to help patrons guess whatever the Secret Word happened to be at that moment.

Is it important to have a signature event? For us, the answer was Yes; our not-so-Secret Word became Fun and we made sure it stayed front and center as an essential part of our service philosophy and values.