The Pueblo City County Library District had a vision of becoming a better library district to serve its community, however, there were obstacles to overcome. With eight library locations each library had primary focus on their own operations. There also seemed to be an attitude of entitlement among staff and a general lack of understanding about what was going on in other departments and branches. We wanted to create a culture of accountability where all members "think like a district" and ask, how can I contribute to a common goal? We also wanted to measure our progress with meaningful data.

To change the organization we needed to start with the culture. We brought in world class trainers from Partners in Leadership to help us understand what accountability truly is. Everything from the way we communicated and conducted meetings to performance management had to change. We also changed our compensation structure from a step increase to a pay for performance process. We established four key results that became a measure for organizational success and engaged teamwork, collaboration and innovation to achieve extraordinary results.

The Pueblo City County Library District went from having a modest one percent growth in service-area population to successfully driving record breaking growth in areas of circulation, library visits, program attendance and computer/digital use. As motivation and momentum grew year after year, we began breaking our stretch goals and took top positions as compared to peer libraries nationally in these categories. The library district continues to work as a collaborative team and is now expanding our measurements to include outcomes as well as outputs. The culture shift has made a positive and lasting difference for our district.