Pt 1: How we practice “working together” to solve complex challenges.

The work that we do to help at-risk children be more successful in their lives, and to learn better, more effective regulation skills, is not for the faint of heart. The work involves connecting with students and families who are in pain, with histories involving failure and trauma, and little hope for future success. The work entails daily dodging of danger, while practicing patience, compassion, and flexibility. The challenges are great, and the risk of our most vulnerable youth aging into poverty, substance abuse, and health issues are real. This work is not for the thin-skinned. 

And this is what we do: Atlantic Academy attempts to help students at-risk for future challenges to get out of the quicksand by teaching them a language and skill-set that is, by-and-large, foreign. For us to have a modicum of success with this effort, we invite adults to join us, who bring their own unique histories and predispositions, their strengths, and styles. And this may be the most challenging component of this work: To enlist adults to work cooperatively, professionally, skillfully, and flexibly together, toward a common cause-- helping our most vulnerable kids access wide-reaching opportunities.

So the question is how do we establish the conditions for cooperation, professionalism, skillful means, and flexibility with each other? How do we foster a workplace culture that performs adaptively and effectively toward outcomes that are valued by our community? In other words, how do we get the best out of all members of our staff?

To answer these questions, it may be helpful to reference the extreme ends of different organizational management models that I have experienced in both school and human services settings. In one extreme, which I’ll call the way of the “iron-fist”, you have a top-down, vertically oriented management approach, where only those at the top (the supervisors) make the decisions. The day-to-day operations of staff are heavily scripted and structured by management, from what the daily, moment-by-moment schedule entails, to what a staff person should say and do, and at what point. Operationally, staff meetings are run by supervisors, the management and organizational systems that staff use are designed and overseen by supervisors. The expectation is simply that staff do their job, which translates as: follow the direction of your supervisor or hit the road.

In the other scenario, which I’ll call the “collaborative way,” the organizational chart is horizontal, or flat, as opposed to vertical, or hierarchical. Everyone gets equal say and equal weight in terms of the “how” and “what” of day-to-day activities. With the collaborative way in a hospital (as an extreme hypothetical), nursing assistants are alongside doctors in making diagnoses and determining treatment. Staff meetings are largely spent ensuring that everyone has a chance to give voice to their feelings and opinions, and to share their ideas and thoughts. The expectation is that everyone’s voice and decision-making are weighted equally. 

Fragments of the iron-fist and collaborative ways have seen their time here at our school, with both styles resulting in outcomes that are sub-optimal. In the iron-fist way, at worse, staff feel disrespected, distrusted, and discounted; while at best, although the iron-fist way can result in obedience, staff is disempowered, lacks creativity, and are prompt-dependent (i.e., independent problem-solving is hindered, capacity-building lacking). On the other hand, the collaborative way seems to be far more superior and “just” than management with an iron-fist. Yet, what I have seen time and again, is that, although staff may feel heard and believe they have equal decision-making, effective action is often stymied, action-points fuzzy, and skillful means and analysis muddied by the amount of voices, opinions, and ideas brought to the table. If you ask any one member of staff what the approach is to a given issue, you’ll likely get multiple, contradictory responses. 

This brings us back to our work: Atlantic Academy strives to help the most complicated and challenging youth around. To do this, we need to have adults working at their best, in the service of helping our students be their best. Cue ProSocial, an organizational approach that is embedded within the same model that we use to understand our students’ (and our own) challenges (functional-contextualism, contextual behavior science), and one that aims to increase optimization of groups. In other words, ProSocial helps direct our aim towards creating a highly cooperative and effective staff group, and avoid the tyranny of the iron fist, and the vagaries of the collaborative way. Within ProSocial, eight principles, called “Core Design Principles” (CDPs), are described that guide a group towards optimization, which prioritizes the wellbeing of its members (all community members), over the profit and loss statement (although these are not mutually exclusive).

Atlantic Academy looks to use organizational practices that are intended to reflect the CDP principles, which in turn function to create optimal teamwork, the necessary and critical ingredient to our mission. Examples of these organizational practices will come in a future post.

The question that inevitably arises is: How do we manage to avoid the extreme ends of the management continuum, between the iron-fist and the vague collaborative way? Are we collaborative? Or are we authoritarian?  In a nutshell, we are striving for both an authoritative and a cooperative team culture.  

1. Authoritative: able to be trusted as being accurate or true; reliable.

The kind of work we do (providing treatment and education to children with adverse childhood experience, and learning histories that have contributed to inadequate and narrow behavioral repertoires, as well as biological predispositions to mental health and developmental deficits), requires a necessary level of specialization that is grounded in a combination of experience, education, and mentorship/supervision. We strive to hire professionals (board certified behavior analysts, certified teachers, licensed clinicians) who are trusted in their ability to perform effective (“true”) services for our population. In other words, we need a level of authority that reflects the complex subject of treating trauma, behavioral disorders, and profoundly maladaptive learning histories. 

Authoritative is contrasted with authoritarian, with the latter concept being one to avoid. Authoritarian is “favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, at the expense of personal freedom.” This is the way of the iron-fist, which simply is something that doesn’t tend to work in the long run. 

Along with creating a culture that reflects authoritative sources of expertise and skill, we are also seeking to build cooperation.

2. Cooperative: involving mutual assistance in working toward a common goal.

If a team is working optimally, by definition, that team is highly cooperative in the service of shared values or outcomes. At Atlantic Academy, we have supervisors with authority. These include behavior analysts, teachers, clinicians, and directors, who, as a result of their background, direct treatment, and programming. At the same time, we have our Behavioral Education Technicians (BETs, our front-line staff) who work with the students all day, implementing the prescribed programming from the supervisors. Due to their work activities, BETs have insight into student’s daily experiences that staff in other positions don’t always have access to. Thus, the BETs and the supervisors are engaged in a cooperative effort in the services of the Atlantic Academy mission. Each brings critically important and co-dependent skills and insights to the organization.

Of course, the devil is in the details. While we continue to work towards a partnership between authority and cooperation, the middle ground between the iron-fist and collaborative way still needs clarity.  So in a future post, I will offer a working model to clarify this middle ground by detailing the roles associated with decision-making processes, and what the relationship between cooperation and authority look like.

Thanks for reading. As always, please add any thoughts you have on this subject in the comments below.

-Jed