The role of the Job Supporter can be confusing for everyone.
This session will explore the first four phases of The Seven Phase Sequence for Balancing Naturalness and Individual Needs. We’ll explore
- How the job supporter devotes time to understanding the culture of the business
- How new employees typically learn job tasks
- How to identify allies within the business with the idea of honouring typical and valued ways of learning as much as possible.
All of this sets the stage for everyone to understand the role of the job supporter. No more “Who are you?”
Meet Milton Tyree
Milton has professional and personal experience over decades of helping people with disabilities have strong work roles. He uses the principles of SRV (Social Role Valorisation) as a foundation for his work.
Milton lives in Kentucky in the USA and works with Marc Gold & Associates, the pioneers of Customised Employment. He has run several workshops about customised employment for Imagine More. He has worked closely with us to support families exploring employment.
Transcript
Good morning. What a fabulous conference this is, loaded with so many important and encouraging personal stories with more to come. So, I’ve changed a little bit what I planned for my sessions today. Did some reworking on things last night based on several factors. One was Jan’s comment yesterday that so much of my work uses Social Role Valorisation theory, or SRV theory, as foundational, and so I’ve added some connections with Social Role Valorisation theory related to the topics that I’m going to be presenting today.
Also, yesterday, I wasn’t satisfied with my timing yesterday afternoon with the job development session, and so I want to pick up with some things today that I didn’t cover yesterday, because I think it will give a more clear picture around some of the other aspects of customised job development that I did not cover yesterday.
And because of content changes and the way I’ve rearranged things, I’ve put everything together, so you’ll see I had a “Who are you?” and then a “Who are you 2?” So this is now “Who are you? One and two and more” is what this will be called.
Just a bit about Social Role Valorisation theory. This is a picture of Dr. Wolfensberger and another of his book, Introduction to SRV or Social Role Valorisation. His work has had a profound influence in my work and in my life, and I know that the work of Imagine More and CRU (Community Resource Unit) and Family Advocacy and possibly others here in the room have been greatly influenced by Social Role Valorisation.
And if this is new to you, we’ll just be dipping our toes in the water a little bit. You know, you have organisations in all three of these, Imagine More, CRU, and Family Advocacy, who could direct you to specific training on SRV.
Alright, so back to where we left off yesterday. Just a couple of review slides.
Customised Employment does involve Discovery, customised plans, visual, non-traditional resumes, representation of the job seeker, focus on specific benefits to employers, and then a negotiated job of mutual benefit. It does not include comparative evaluations. We’re not interested in testing. We’re not interested so much in job openings or competitive interviews or traditional resumes, or existing job descriptions.
So, as I was suggesting yesterday, that around being creatures of habit that we are, looking at job development in this way for me, compared to all of the years that I did the other way, is definitely a new way of thinking about this. You’ve got to kind of get out there and give it a try. And it does beg the question around some of these other things.
So if we don’t contact people who traditionally are contacted in HR, then who would we contact? And the reason we say this isn’t that HR people, there’s anything wrong with them or they’re not perfectly nice people. It’s just that their job, generally speaking, is around guarding job descriptions, and we’re not so much interested in job descriptions; we’re interested in tasks that are essential to the functioning of the business.
So personnel managers may be resistant to changes in their established protocols. We seek to call on managers at the highest level of responsibility as possible. And that’s just because they are people who are more likely to be able to make decisions.
Utilise all of your connections, as you all have already talked about so expertly, you know, just a ways to get in the door. Who do you know who knows somebody in that business helps get in the door to make the pitch, to make the ask.
Now this is, I found to be really helpful. We call big stores like Walmart and Home Depot and Lowe’s, we call these ‘big box stores’ in the U.S., and we encourage people not to focus on big box stores, not that you can’t find good jobs there, but it’s around the negotiation of jobs. Small businesses, where the owner of the business is there, it’s a local business, they’re going to be more likely to be able to make decisions on the spot without calling somebody in Sydney or Melbourne or some other place to be able to make a decision.
And, in medium to large companies, area managers could be good people to contact. So that’s just something to keep in mind around who are the people you want to talk to.
Now you want to start with, you know, as much as possible, the lead that you’ve been given through a friend or wherever else. But I mean, you want to get to a place where you can negotiate with people. That’s the point of this.
Alright, now. So, this is a little different, too, in terms of the whole interview. What does the interview look like? So, you’ll notice my terminology in the heading here. We’re talking about ‘meeting the job seeker’, not a formal interview of the job seeker. We’re looking at a ‘representational’ form of job development. This has been discussed.
We’re looking at Discovery as being a substitute for the HR office for what they typically would do in terms of their vetting of people. We feel like we have vetted the person we’re representing through the process of Discovery. And instead of a job description, we’ve devoted time in the company doing an Employer Needs Benefits Analysis – that’s what we looked at yesterday in terms of matching the conditions, interest and contributions of the person seeking the job with the unmet needs, tasks better performed by others, and tasks of particular benefit to the business. That’s what we get through, the Employer Needs Benefits Analysis.
And so, from there, we develop a customised job description and we use a visual resume instead of a traditional one. So this meeting of the job seeker, this is how we think about this: This would be conducted after the Employer Needs Benefits Analysis, where we’re looking at tasks that they would have that would fit the conditions, interests, and contributions of the person we’re representing.
And if we see that… if we don’t see that, there won’t be a negotiation, if we don’t find tasks that the business needs and that the person we’re representing would be good at doing, then there wouldn’t be a negotiation.
But if there is, we have a discussion with people at the business. “These are things I’ve found. Would this be helpful to you?” And if they say “Yes”, then the next person, before meeting the job seeker, would be to take your information to the job seeker. “I think we could develop a job for you here with these kinds of tasks. Are you interested in moving forward?” And if everybody is, then that would be a time for the person to meet the job seeker. And this requires organisation, facilitation, orchestration, just like a job interview would. Like, “these are the kinds of things you’re going to talk about. You know, these are the kinds of things you’ll see”. I know a lot of people will work a lot better not sitting across a table having a conversation with anybody, but actually taking a tour, a part of the business, looking at the tasks that are going to be done or so forth.
So the idea here is that really, if we’ve reached a tentative agreement on the tasks to be done, it’s really just meeting the job seeker. it’s more of a formality at this point. They’ve already sort of met the person through a visual resume, and you start working on things like start date.
So here are just some examples of, you know, that just underlines what I was just saying, that Discovery is a substitute for a traditional personnel office. We have what they need. We know how to talk with them about that, the employer, about that.
Using a visual resume; I gave one example yesterday, and I know you all are doing a lot of work on these too. Now, so, you know, around the point of visual resumes, you know, it’s not to say you couldn’t use a traditional resume. If you have a work history like Will’s, why not have a CV or a traditional resume? Visual resumes, a lot of times, are for people who don’t have a lot of work experience, who wouldn’t have a lot of credentials to put in a resume. So this is a judgment kind of a call.
Alright, and then instead of the job description, using the Employer Needs Benefits Analysis. So again, just conditions, interest, contributions, unmet needs, tasks of specific benefit to the employer and tasks better performed by others. And we looked at some examples yesterday, like Michael and Corey and Gabby.
So what I want to introduce now is what I see as three big shifts in open employment in the 40-plus years that I’ve been doing it.
And this is the first one. We talked about this yesterday, related to Discovery: Starting with the person, not the job. And there’s been a lot more focus on that. So, for instance, these photos are of Daniel working at Dr. Lehocky’s office. This is not an arbitrary job. This is a job that Daniel got after school through Discovery, and it’s a customised job that matches the needs of the doctor’s office and the contributions and interests that Daniel has.
The next big shift that we’ve also talked about is there’s been more focus on negotiating jobs, not just taking regular job descriptions. And for some people, like for Mallory, this is going to make the difference in working or not working because I’m not sure I know of a job that Mallory’s going to compete for with other people. For other people, like Michael, it’s going to make the difference in having a good-fitting, challenging job versus one that is where he’s going to be underemployed.
Now here’s the third big shift. So the first one is Discovery, I guess you would say the second one is customised planning – negotiated jobs of benefit to the person and the company. And the third big shift is the one that I’ve designed this last session on. And that is on open employment evolving: What is the role of the employment support person, and how do we think about that? That has changed over time, and so we’re going to be taking a little bit of a tour, a look at that. I’ll get to cover some of it in this session and some of it in the session this afternoon. It’s kind of going to be a ‘to be continued’ kind of a presentation.
But before I do that, I want to delve a bit into SRV theory and how it has been helpful to me in thinking about all of these. I’m going to focus particularly around the job support piece here, however, but it also relates to job design, and it relates a lot to the stuff that Jenny was talking about yesterday in terms of what are we up against and what are we going to do about it?
Critical thinking isn’t being critical of something. It’s looking at it deeply, like, what’s going on here? And so the questions that we’re asking through SRV theory is, “what would the benefits be of taking this sort of action related to employment for somebody we care about who has a disability? What would be the costs of proceeding in that way, especially related to the person’s image and competency?” And then we think, what would be better and why would it be better? These are really helpful questions that SRV helps us frame.
So the two major thrusts of Social Role Valorisation, you’ll see in this illustration, are image enhancement and competency enhancement, and that if people’s image and competency are enhanced, it increases the likelihood they’ll have valued social roles. And ordinarily, these are complementary, and we’ve heard so many stories where we can see that’s true.
So people get jobs, really good-fitting, challenging jobs, and that increases their competency. And the more their competency increases, the more it increases their image, their social standing in the world. You see how that happens? And then the greater their social standing, they get… people get job advancements, which increases their competencies.
Our idea is that image enhancement and competency enhancement relate to people getting valued social roles. And one of the really important… we would say in SRV thinking, “big roles”, roles with a big bandwidth, is ‘employee’, because it takes up so much time in our lives, because it relates to who we know, our opportunities to learn, our opportunities to develop new skills, meet other people, have other connections, to have a standard of living, all of this. So, so much revolves around the role of employee, the one we’re focused on here.
And Social Role Valorisation theory says that the reason to have valued social roles is it provides access to the good things of life. So why don’t people get socially valued roles? Because of a dynamic called ‘Social devaluation.’
‘Devaluation’ doesn’t say that some people are more important than other people. It’s not about that at all. It’s not. It’s about perception. It’s rooted in judgment, people’s judgment and perception of other people. And social devaluation happens when there’s a characteristic of a person, a difference with a person, and that difference isn’t in itself negative, but it is perceived in a negative way. That is the definition of social devaluation: A person has a difference, and that difference is perceived in a negative way.
So that’s important to understand. We absolutely are not saying that some people are more important than other people. We’re talking about perception, which is what Jenny was talking about yesterday: People being pushed away, on the outside. Some people “don’t need work”. Some people need work, other people don’t need work. We would say that is part of the process of social devaluation, and there are two levels, this isn’t real nice to think about, the ‘individual level’. We all devalue other people. It’s just part of how we are hardwired. It’s not one of the prettiest parts of our human identity
But the kind of devaluation we’re concerned about, that Jenny was talking about yesterday, is ‘collective devaluation’. And that’s when lots of people within a society see a difference with people, and that difference is perceived in a negative way. And you see, disability is one of those things in our culture, in our world; the disability part of people is perceived in a negative way, and so that is going to set up these structural limitations for people.
And that it is universal: Even very kind, enlightened, highly principled people will devalue other people, even people who are experienced devaluation themselves, even people who are family and family members and friends of people who experienced devaluation will devalue certain people.
Now, here’s a photo I took in Canberra when I arrived here a little more than two weeks ago. And I was eating dinner late in the bar one night, and this was on TV, and I took a picture of it because it was about a woman talking about a royal commission that had lasted four years, looking into disability.
So one of the things we know about social devaluation is it’s not going to take four years to find it. I hope that a lot of the four years was spent figuring out how to address it. But things she was talking about are related to people with disabilities are what we’ve been talking about: segregation, poverty, poor education, low employment rates. So, in SRV thinking, we would say that these are the result, not of people not being able to work and support themselves and not live in poverty and have good jobs, all of that is possible. We know it is. We see evidence of that here. It is social devaluation, you see, that is the cause of this.
So SRV gives us some ways of thinking about this. Dr. Wolfensberger talks about the common life experiences. I’m just going to spend a second on this, but one of them we talked about yesterday, disability being life-defining, you know, when you find disability programs that group people together or have things, something special for people with disabilities, a lot of times it’s because disability’s been life-defining.
And in the world of work, it’s been sheltered workshops. That’s how Jean ended up in a sheltered workshop. Remember? She graduated from a parochial school. She had cerebral palsy. It was decided she would work in a sheltered workshop. That’s an expression of her disability being life-defining.
Something else we see a lot of the same kind of dynamic in the US are special coffee shops. This is one that was developed in the US by a church group. I know that people who developed it are just really super people, but it has the same kind of thing: It sets up the idea that people with disabilities need a special place to work with other people with disabilities, which inadvertently sends the message to the coffee shop down the street, “I guess if you have Down syndrome, you can’t work at my coffee shop because you have your own down the street.” You see? Now, that’s not the intended message, but I think that is the received one.
And I understand the impulse to develop entities like this because unemployment is so high for people. Things that are congregated and segregated do not provide the same level of access to the good things of life.
I guess, the other thing that I want to say about this is that there is a lot to know about it and worry a little bit about talking about it for 20 minutes when there’s just so much to know, but just a bit of an introduction and I’ll be coming back to this from time to time with the time I have remaining today.
So, a colleague and I have developed a three-day workshop on Social Role Valorisation related to employment; that’s just to say there’s a lot to think about related to this and just a bit of a dip of toes in the water.
So one of the other negative life experiences is that certain roles will be imposed on people. Now, you might remember in that photo or the slide of valued social roles, I showed a magnet because valued social roles pull other people in. And I also said they were chosen by people because we do choose our valued social roles, all of them except family members. We don’t get to choose our family members. Now, that’s a valued social role we don’t choose.
But the other ones we pretty much select, whether we’re going to be a painter or a historian, you know, or a neighbour or a friend, those kinds of things, member of a faith community, those are chosen valued social roles as opposed to negative ones, which are imposed on people.
So, some really powerful ones that get in people’s way are this idea of adults being seen as children, right, because children don’t work, and you know, this characterisation of people being somebody to be pitied or being seen as a burden or being seen as a menace.
This full-time human service client is my lead in to my next topic, however, so this isn’t saying that people shouldn’t be clients of human services and I’ve met some people here who provide human services, who are working really hard to develop good customised employment services. And so, regardless of whether it’s family-led or led by an organisation, this idea of people being seen as a client of a service can be really powerful. And being a client of a human service, it is probably going to be seen at best as neutral, a neutral role, like, not positive or negative, or at worst as a negative role.
It is not something people aspire to, you know, if we’re thinking, I want to be a pilot, or I want to be a good neighbour, you know, I want to be a terrific aunt. We don’t hear people say, “I want to be a client of human services.” It’s just that in itself, it’s not something to aspire to, so we need to be careful about how we proceed within our job support roles. That’s what this next section that I prepared is about, and again, we’ll start it now and we’ll finish it this afternoon.
Now, a colleague who works in SRV, Debbie Reidy from Holyoke, Massachusetts, wrote a paper about this idea of the problems with being seen as a client of human services. And she called it the ‘Trojan Horse Effect’. She was making an analogy with the mythical Trojan war and the Greeks pretending to sail off, but leaving this gift for the people of Troy to be rolled into the gates, and we know what happened after that. And so what she says is that the client role has an insidious way of becoming life-defining, remember that life-defining again, once a person receives human services, and as a ‘master identity’, that’s really important because people are going to be clients and that in itself isn’t the problem, it’s that the client role becomes big. The master identity of the client role severely limits the possibility that someone would be seen as somebody that has something to contribute in work. So let’s explore this a bit.
I’m going to show you some historical pictures from my background, the early eighties, doing supported employment. So, this is Barrister’s restaurant, used to be a nice little diner down on Fifth and Market in downtown Louisville. And so Jim was a man we were assisting to find work. Now, this was very much before Discovery, and so the way we used to find out what kind of work people wanted to do, you might remember I was talking about, we tested people or we asked them. We asked the question that we say ‘never ask in Discovery’: “What job do you want to do?”
And the reason we don’t ask the question in Discovery is we figure just in this, like in this example, people really won’t have the information to make an informed decision. So, instead we’ll say things like, “What are the kinds of things you’re good at that you enjoy doing, and how could I join you to learn more about that?”
But we don’t say: “What do you want to do?” But I did ask that question of Jim.
So, just a quick backstory about Jim. Jim had gone to a special school in Louisville, and he had a job as a student there working in the cafeteria. And his job was working at the dish machine, where he would take trays and load them in the dishwasher and slide them through, and then take them out and dry them off. So he worked with the dishwasher.
And when I asked him what he wanted to do, what did he say he wanted to do? “Wash dishes”. You see how predictable that was? And so we said, “Great, we’ll help you find a job washing dishes”. So here Jerona is talking to Barry, the owner of Barrister’s restaurant, and she did a version of job analysis. She didn’t ask some of the really important questions that we ask nowadays that we’ll be talking about later, but she did find out how the dishwasher worked. And Jim had an interview, a pretty standard kind of interview, like we used to do. Jerona was there too, and Jerona shows Jim how to do the job.
This is where the title of the session comes from: “Who are you?” Because I was doing this kind of thing in the same day. So we would help somebody get a job, and we would look at the job and know a little bit about it, and we’d show up on the first day with a new employee, first day on the job, “Here’s Jim”. And then Jerona, this person who’s not an employee of the restaurant, is teaching him how to wash dishes.
And so it was a very common question we got. “Who are you? Can you explain to me again, and who is he? And you’re both doing it, you’re both new employees, and you’re…”, you know? So it was confusing to people, you see. So we’re a lot, we know a lot more about that now, but that’s where the title came from.
So here’s the kind of ‘who are you?’ moment that I’m sure Jerona got teaching Jim how to wash dishes, which she did very well, you know, Jim watched Jerona, Jerona watched Jim, Jim learned how to wash dishes.
Let’s go back to the client thing. Jim had two roles here. One, a really highly valued role, the role of employee. The other one, a marginal role at best, the role of client.
So let me tell you another little piece of this story. Jim did really well washing dishes, Jerona would just check in from time to time, and one week we got a call from Barristers, and they said, “We really want Jim to learn some new responsibilities here. We want him to learn how to cut up vegetables and do other kinds of things. You know, we’re thinking about full-time for Jim. He’s a great guy, good employee.”
And so why did they call us? Because they wanted Jerona to come back and teach him, even though they saw how competent he was. You see, they didn’t say, “Come on over here, Jim, let me show you how to cut up the potatoes and peel ’em and make some chips here.” They called us. And then what did we do? We sent Jerona. So I ask you, was he primarily their employee or our client? ‘Client’ was really big. And it was because of the way we presented it.
Now, in Jim’s instance, there may be times when Jerona, this is what we’re going to explore, there may be times when Jerona would need to provide instruction, but that wouldn’t have been one of them. That would’ve been one where they could have easily taught Jim how to do that. So we would say that Jim was an employee and he was a client, but the client role was dominating how Jim was seen in that business.
Now, in 1981, Jan Nisbet and David Hagner wrote a paper about this very issue called ‘Natural Supports in the Workplace: A Reexamination of Supported Employment’, reexamining the supported employment role, and I saw Jan Nisbet do a presentation on her paper, shortly after she wrote it, and I tried to kind of draw a graphic of what she talked about.
She said, “Here’s the problem with this heavy-handed job coaching kind of approach. It’s like the job coach… this is the person I have in the cape at the bottom of the graphic here… the job coach becomes like a flying wedge and just goes into the business, and everybody else peels off to the sides. The coworkers who typically would be teaching and providing instruction and support, they just stepped to the side.
And so what their paper was about is not saying ‘how do we get rid of job support people?’ It wasn’t that at all. But it’s saying, ‘how do we get rid of this flying wedge dynamic where somebody comes in as an, as a support person and everybody goes, oh, well you know what you’re doing and I don’t, you take over now?’
So SRV theory is really helpful around this issue. One of the principles in Social Role Valorisation theory is called the Culturally Valued Analogue. We abbreviated it to CVA because who wants to say ‘Culturally Valued Analogue’? But the idea behind it is, why don’t we start with what is typical and valued rather than starting with something that’s special; why don’t we start with what is typical and valued? What happens for people who have a valued social status? And then if we need to change something, we’ll adapt it. We’ll modify it, but let’s not change it right out of the gate, you see?
So CVA employment questions would be things like these: How do people typically find jobs? Well, networking is one of those ways, isn’t it? That’s why we talk so much about doing that here. That’s very typical in our culture.
How do people typically learn their jobs? That’s the one we’re focusing on here, so that’s what we want to find out in businesses. How does anybody else learn these tasks? That’s the question that Jerona never asked. Remember, I showed a picture of her doing job analysis, and I said she didn’t ask some of the really important questions. That’s one of them. How does anybody else at Barristers learn how to be a dishwasher? Can you show me how to do that?
How were people typically compensated for their work? So if non-disabled people have some kind of unpaid internship in a particular kind of work, then you would think that’s typical and that’s fine. But if anybody else doing those tasks or that work would be paid, then a person with a disability should also be paid. You know, it’s just, that’s the Culturally Valued Analogue.
What’s considered a desirable job? There’s something else that SRV really helps with, that all jobs are not created equal. You know, the jobs have different levels of competency involved. They have different image and social status, and we always want to look for the very best. We want to look at the best of possibilities in terms of what would be most image-enhancing for people and develop opportunities for them to develop competencies.
These are all things that are just have been very helpful in my work to consider around what would a good job be, you know, so what’s considered a desirable job? Understanding SRV, and let’s start with the very best option that we can imagine. That’s an issue of Discovery you see in job development.
Now, when I got to come to Australia the first time, I’ve gotten to be here twice in a year, which is just magnificent. And my first trip was to Sydney last September, and one of the presenters at the Family Advocacy Conference, where I also was, was David Mank, who’s done a lot of the pioneering in our work of what we call ‘supported employment’, what you call ‘open employment’, and he did some natural supports research a number of years back that was just really important. Some of this would’ve been predictable.
So, one of the things they found out in their study was that the more typical instruction and support is for people, the better their social integration would be. You would kind of guess that. But something he learned that I wouldn’t have guessed is that their wages are higher, the more typical the instruction is. And the inverse of that, the greater the hours of direct support through a job support person, the less typical things are, the lower the wages and the typical compensation package.
But, this last point is the one that always has been most important to me. And what this says is that you’ve got to start the very first day with people who typically provide instruction and support, providing some level of instruction and support the very first day. Because, he says, if you wait, if even a day, if you wait until the second day, it’s going to be harder to do because you’re setting up the same expectation that we did at Barristers with Jim.
So you’re going to see when I get more into the seven-phase sequence, that Jerona may have a role in providing instruction, we’re not saying that employment support people don’t have a role, but we are saying that they don’t provide instruction and support to supplant somebody who typically would do it.
What this study said was from the very first day, so I’m thinking of some people, you know, like Mallory and like Justin and some people I know have really significant, Tom, really significant impact of disability. And frankly, instruction’s going to have to be shared. It is. But from the very first day of them starting work, what I know now that I didn’t used to know is, find a way to introduce that person to somebody who’s going to teach them something new ahead of time. And when they roll in or walk in or however they get into the business the very first day, be sure that the very first person who teaches them something is somebody who typically teaches that task, because that puts them, in my SRV way of thinking, really strongly in the role of employee.
And then it puts you, as a support person, or me, as a support person, in a supplemental role. But if people come in right away and we start providing all of the instruction, it puts them in a secondary role, and they look to us for everything. Do you see how that happens? And so it’s a matter of nuance in a way, but it’s just getting things started on the right foot, that’s how I think about it.
I also got to hear David Mank present on this paper at an APSE conference pretty soon after it was published. And he used this shorthand way of describing that last bullet item. And this really stuck with me because it’s catchy and I can remember it. So here it is: Always start with what’s… I’ll give you the catchphrase in a second, but the principle is, always start with what’s typical as much as possible on the very first day. Don’t wait to change because it’s going to be harder.
This was his little phrase, he said, that stuck in my brain. “Once funky, always funky”. So, if you start off with something that’s a little bit different to the culture, you know, they’re not used to that there, it’s going to be really hard to get rid of it. So you’ve got to be careful about starting with something that’s different in the culture. Just judicious about it.
And so again, this is my SRV thinking, that people we support in work are going to have two roles: client role, employee role. And our job is to keep as small a footprint as possible so that the big role is employee and the little role is client, as much as we can. We’ve learned a lot about that in 40 years, and I just think it’s important to pay attention to it.
Jan Nisbet and Dave Hagner kind of lit the fuse on that, but that was 1988. Can you believe that 1988 was 35 years ago? I can’t, that’s 35 years ago. So the idea, you know, the reason I’m emphasising that is this idea of people other than us providing supports and the importance of that, the essence of that, has been around for 35 years.
And so what I’m going to show you now, I’m going to start now and introduce it, and then when we come back, we’ll dig into it more. But it’s our way of thinking about it at Mark Gold and Associates. And it’s complementary to the Culturally Valued Analogue, or the CVA, what happens for people with a typical and valued status in terms of learning work. Let’s do as much of that as possible. That may not be enough, which is what this slide illustrates, what we’re always looking at, if you look at the right-hand side of the slide, is what has what we call ‘generic validity’, and that’s just saying what is it that happens with everybody else in the business in terms of learning. And we want to balance that with the employee side that we’re supporting. What does this person need to learn? You see?
And we’re sure that those are in balance, so we’re not going to favour, “oh, well, that’s the way they teach. Well, that’s never going to work, but let’s try it anyhow”. We don’t do that because that would unbalance the scales. If we need to supplement, then we supplement. If we need to advise, we advise. If we need to just step back and keep in the background, that’s what we do. We want the scales balanced. Does that make sense? So it’s not, this isn’t an all or never kind of thing; in other words, it’s nuanced, and it’s making judgments all of the time about what would be the best thing to do.
So this is the seven-phase sequence. My, does that look complicated! And so we’re going to walk through it a step at a time, and we’re going to start now, and then we’ll finish this afternoon.
Now, I introduced you to Sam yesterday, who is the most recent person that I’ve had a chance to really take a primary role in support with, and he and his family have given me permission to share his story. So you remember, in terms of Discovery, it all starts with Discovery; cars and horses, we talked about his conditions, interests, and contributions, we talked about his customised plan for employment meeting, where Saddle Lake Equestrian came from.
We’re going to look at the seven-phase sequence through Mark Gold and Associates and then through Sam’s example.
So, the ways of the company is the first phase of the seven-phase sequence, and it is big, lots to learn. It refers to the method of task performance. So we’ll be looking at the, I will be looking, doing this job analysis, where we use the seven-phase sequence, I’ll be spending time at Saddle Lake, looking at the tasks that we’ve identified for Sam to do and seeing are these tasks that multiple people do, and is everybody doing it the same way? Because one of the things that I know from my training and systematic instruction is that a constant method of task is really important for learning, not just for people with disabilities, for everybody. It is a way that human beings learn performance tasks is to have a consistent method.
I work on computers a lot in my work. I don’t use them for play, but I use them a lot in work. And so I know that I know my way around pretty well, and my wife will call me over, and she’ll say, “Can you show me how to do this in Word?” And even though I know better, because it’s Vicky, and I know better from instruction, I’ll say, “Well, you could do this, or you could do this, or you could do this, or you can do it this way too”. And she says, “Just tell me how to do it.” That’s what consistent method is, right? You have a consistent method.
In that way, so I need to remember what method I show her, and then the next time, if she goes, “I don’t remember, you know, this was two weeks ago, can you show me again? I want to do that method again.” That’s the principle here. So that’s one of the things we’re exploring in ways of the company is method.
But then you’ve got all of this stuff in the second bullet that has to do with culture of the company. You know, it’s like, who were the coworkers there? Boy, that really, you will already have had some experience with that, like doing the needs analysis, but really figure out who the people are, how people interact with each other.
You figure out things like how do you see coworkers working together or against each other? Do people like working there? You know it, you’re going to be camping out there for a number of hours, so it gives you time to talk to more people about how they like their job. You don’t want to help somebody get a job in a place where nobody else wants to work, right?
And I ask people, “How long have you worked here?” Because one of the things I always look for is a consistent workforce, especially for people that meeting new people is difficult and knowing what the person’s going to be really good at doing is difficult to discern. You want consistent people around. “How long have you worked here?” “Seven years.” “Great.” “Yeah, just about everybody’s worked here that long.” That’s good news.
And then, you know, we have like, language of the company. What we mean is, what kinds of terminology do they use in the business? So this was a horse farm and I needed to tell Mike, who was showing me around and showing me Sam’s job, I needed to say, “Now Sam knows a lot about horses, but like I said yesterday, I know the difference between horses and cows. So you’re going to have to tell me the names of things that Sam will already know.” And, but that’s part of learning the terminology of the business.
And celebrations. So you walk into a business, this wasn’t true at Saddle Lake, but you walk into a business, into the employee break room, and there’s this box of incredible doughnuts. Now I know from John Armstrong that y’all think of doughnuts as a dessert, but we get to eat them for breakfast. And so there’ll be a box of doughnuts. Isn’t that great? And so you get your coffee, white top coffee, well, we don’t do that really, but you could still figure it out. And you get coffee and doughnuts.
And so you see this during your job analysis, and you ask an employee, “Who brings the doughnuts?” That’s going to be a really important part of job analysis, the unwritten rules of job analysis. And they’ll say, “Oh, we all take turns.” And then you’ll say, “Well, when Mike starts, be sure and let him know. Be sure he gets on that list.” And they may say something like, “Oh, he wouldn’t need to do that.” And you go, “Yes, he does.”
And then you talk to Mike about it ’cause you want to be sure they tell him about it. And you also want to say, like in Spalding, in Lexington, Kentucky, there’s a company called Spalding that makes these deep-fried doughnuts. They are about 8,000 calories each. And man, are they good! So if this job was in Lexington, you’d say, “Mike, we’ll get up early if you need me to take you to Spaldings, you gotta get in the queue, right? I mean, you gotta get there early ’cause they run out of doughnuts. And we’ll get into the queue. So you can take Spalding doughnuts, the very best doughnuts.”
So you see, that’s all part of fitting in. So you look at written rules: What are their established rules? What are unwritten rules, like the doughnut rules? And I’m at stomping time, so we’re going to pick up with phase two when I come back this afternoon. To be continued.