Who are you? The evolving role of Job Supporter – Part 2

Phases 5, 6 and 7 of The Seven Phase Sequence are the focus of this session.

• What if the initial support plans didn’t work out as intended?
• How can everyone proceed if the typical means for learning the job isn’t sufficient for the employee with a disability?
• What are the considerations if it’s determined that there needs to be a method modification or adaptation?
• And what is the job supporter’s role in all of this?

Transcript

So last time we were just getting started with the Seven-phase Sequence. So I wanted to go back to this slide. We’ve already talked about the first phase, but just one thing I wanted to make mention of here: You all probably remember one of the work conditions that I gave yesterday for Sam, something that he hated. What did he hate? “Special”, right? He hated “special”.

Now, this process along with the process of identifying tasks, this process of job analysis involves going into the business. I was there for all told about nine hours or 10 hours doing this process that I’m describing to you here, and it required me going in before he started work.

For Sam, that was just another indication of special, wasn’t it? And it is. I mean, he was right. The whole thing we talked about earlier, about the role of a job support person, and here I am going into the business without Tim to scope all of these things out. So it’s just worth acknowledging that that’s being done in favour of competency.

But he’s right. It is, in terms of his image, stepping on it a bit, you see? So I needed to negotiate this with Sam. I said, “Here’s why I do this, Sam. It’s so that I can know everything about the job, and I can give you information about how this is going to work. And I can know really well how it works. And people there can know a lot of information about you before you start work.

In other words, everybody’s going to know everybody. I’m going to know the tasks you’re doing really well, so that if you have a question about the tasks or the people teaching you the task have a question about them, I can actually give advice. And the other thing, Sam, is that you have had a bunch of one-day jobs.

You know, things that just haven’t worked very well. So what I think is, it’s worth putting the time in upfront to be sure we have things as tight as they can be, and that way, it increases the likelihood that the job will go well for you.”

I think the other thing that allowed Sam to agree to that was the relationship that we’d made during Discovery. He trusted me. I wasn’t just saying something out of the clear blue. He knew I was in it with him and on his behalf. So, he gave me permission to do this.

Alright, so we talked about exploring the ways of the company, and I’ll go through some of the things that I learned related to method and related to the culture of the business for Sam.

So, related to the culture of the business, standards were high and that was really good, because if they were really particular about how things were done there, they were probably going to be pretty tight on method. People would be doing the tasks the same way, and that’s what I observed.

There was no downtime. And that was really important too because, you know, Sam was one of these guys who has a whole lot of energy. Now, the other thing that I noticed about no downtime is this was one of the unwritten rules of the business. Sure enough, there were all these written procedures and things to follow, but I noticed that anytime if somebody was standing still, if Missy Joe walked by, she’d want to know, “Do you need something to do?”

So, the idea was if you’re working out in a barn and you’d finished all your tasks, you take a broom and you find spiderwebs to knock down. There’s nobody who wasn’t busy. And that was positive too.

I really liked this next aspect because there wasn’t this big hierarchy of ‘I’m too good to do that job’. There were two barns at Saddlelake Equestrian, one with their horses and one with horses that were boarded. And if a stall needed cleaned in either barn and a stall cleaner wasn’t around to do it, then Missy Joe would clean the stall, or a trainer from University of Cincinnati would clean the stall. So I thought that was a really nice feature as well.

Turnover was really low, and that was going to be essential for Sam just to have a solid group of coworkers who knew him and so he could know them, and everybody could know how everybody else gets around in the world. What kinds of tasks would be a good fit for Sam, and what he needs to be successful.

Now, this last item I have in red, because it was a no-go for me at this point. I learned that the people who would be supervising typically and teaching typically the tasks that had been negotiated for Sam, that those people are on the road a lot because one of the primary ways they make money is going to horse shows.

And so that barn full of their horses was going to be out and around all kinds of places. And I was at the point of saying, “I don’t think we can do it”, until the owner said, “Well, let’s see if we can work something out”. And so finally we worked out six consecutive weeks: Six consecutive weeks for a consistent supervisor before he would leave.

And that was a compromise, but it seemed, given everything else that looked good, it seemed like it was good to go because I was seeking for Sam work that used his experience in horses, moving active physical work, tasks where they’re done or not done, and people taking a personal interest in Sam’s success and they really wanted to hire Sam for these tasks.

Okay, so Phase Two relies on the learning about the natural means for the company. The means is how any new employee learns the job, and it also involves new employee orientation. So, this is a picture of Roxanne, she’s the office manager, but she is the person who went through new employee orientation with new employees.

And so, this was important for Sam to do this, gave all of the written rules of working in the horse farm. The more essential part of this to learn was how do new employees learn the tasks that have been assigned to him. And so, this was common with lots of kinds of businesses. It would be somebody who was experienced in the task.

And so these were the different tasks we’d identified. The first was, first thing in the morning, go up in the loft and throw down the bales of hay that would be needed for both barns full of horses and to give the horses the right amount of hay and to put it in the right place in the different stalls for the horses, and to give the horses water and to give them grain.

So the next piece is to look at who are the people then who teach the means. So Roxanne would’ve been one of those already mentioned, but the key person was Mike. And so this involves some negotiation too, because one of the things that I’d noticed about Saddlelake was that it was mostly women who worked there and I thought Sam would respond better to a male supervisor. And so I asked Missy Joe, ‘Do you have any young men about Sam’s age who would be especially mature?’ And she said, “Yes, I have one of those. His name is Mike.”

And so Mike is the person that I spent time with for about eight of those nine or 10 hours, showing me the tasks, how he would teach the tasks to a new employee, and I explained, as I’ve said before to Mike that I don’t know much about horses, but Sam does have a working knowledge around horses.

But nonetheless, I really wanted to understand the tasks that he was going to perform.

So Mike taught these to me, and one of the things I noticed about him that was just really exceptional is something that I teach in teaching, and that is whenever I made a mistake, and I made quite a few, he never corrected me in a way that made me feel stupid, even though I felt like, wow, how did I do that? You know? So for instance, he would say, “Be sure you get Sally three flakes of hay.” I would pick up two flakes of hay. And he said, “Be sure you get three.”

I remember once I was out in the field with him we were going up into a pasture in a little four-wheeler, and he hopped out and opened a gate, drove through the gate and closed it. And I thought, well, I’m a city boy, but I can still do that. So when we got to the next gate, I said, “I’ll get this one.” And I hopped out and I started and unhooked the gate. It was the wrong gate, which made me look like a city boy. But he didn’t go, “No, not that one!” That’s not what he did. He said, “Get the green gate.”

You see, anytime I started to make an error on anything, he never corrected me in a way that made me feel silly or stupid or incompetent. He just told me what was desired. He just made the assumption that if I got it wrong, I didn’t have enough information. And that was going to be perfect for Sam because he had had so many people in his life saying, “Sam, you’re not trying, Sam, you know, if you try harder, you’d be able to do this. You’re goofing off.”

And so one of the things that I told Missy Joe about Mike was this. I said, “You know, just, I teach teaching and I have a hard time Mike is doing the way he does it.” And she said, “Well, describe that to me.” And I did. And she said, “That would be good for everybody, wouldn’t it? If everybody learned that way?” I said, “Absolutely. It’d be a good way for everybody to learn, but it’s going to be especially important for Sam because he’s has so many people blame him for not understanding what it is he’s supposed to do.”

So one of the things that I did that I think helped with Sam’s anxiety about me spending time at Saddle Lake, at the end of each day, when I spent a half a day with Mike, I would go by Sam’s house on the way home. And some of these pictures I’m showing you, I would, like of the hay loft and the watering and things like that, I would take to Sam and I’d say, “This is what you’re going to be doing.” But I also told him about Mike. And I told him the kinds of mistakes I’d made, like wrong amount of hay and the green gate and all of that. And he thought it was hilarious, of course, that I made those mistakes. But what I think what was comforting to him was that this was going to be somebody teaching him that he would feel good about.

So Roxanne was just really good at understanding how Sam was feeling about things. And so I remember one time I went in and Roxanne said, “I could tell Sam was having a hard time because I saw his head down, and if I see him standing still with his head down, it means that either he thinks he’s messed up or he doesn’t know what to do.” That’s exactly what that means, and nobody had told her that. She just knew that. And so she knew how to get Sam what he needed at that point in time.

As I mentioned yesterday, this was the home place, the home horse farm for the University of Cincinnati equestrian team. So a lot of UC students who were getting lessons from Missy Joe worked there and they worked there to barter for their lessons from Missy Joe.

And so the people who took Mike’s place when he was at a horse show were typically UC students, and one of them was Zara and I remember once when I was going in to follow up with Sam and I was asking about watering because, you know, how’s the watering going? Because I remembered she had said, or other people had said rather that he was missing horses. And she said, it’s still been a problem. And I said, “Why do you think it’s a problem Zara?” And she said, “Because he doesn’t like standing still that long to fill the two buckets of water.” I said,” I think you’re right. What do you think we should do?” And she said, “Yesterday when Sam was in a stall with me and we were taking care of some horses, he asked me why the horses liked her. ‘Why do the horses like you? And they don’t like me?’” So she said, “I told them, because if I have a relationship with the horses, I know them and they know me. You have a relationship with the horses, they’ll come up to you the same way.” So she said, “I think maybe when he is watering the horses and he doesn’t like standing still, if he would call the horse over and pat on it and talk to it, then that would give him something additional to do when he could form a relationship with the horses.” Perfect.

So that’s one of the other things you want to think about when you’re doing job analysis. When you run into something that you think could be an an issue for the person. First thing, whether they name it or you name it, ask them if they have a possible idea or a solution for it. And there were a lot of people like that there. So, the people component that was so important for Sam, like one of the very most important things, was looking really good.

Now Phase Four is when you decide who is going to do what here. So we have all of this information about ways, means, and people, and it’s showtime. So Sam’s going to be starting next week. Who is going to provide instruction for Sam? And as I said earlier, that depends.

You remember the scales. It depends on what Sam needs and what is typically available. And I thought that was balanced really nicely with Mike and so did Missy Joe. So we decided that Mike would provide all the instruction for Sam and I would be available as needed.

Basically I would be in the office, in the nice air-conditioned office, while they were out sweating in the sun. And I would do my best to look like a horseman and have my Mac with me and just work, be working on other things. You know, that was the idea. And I would text, I had permission to text Mike. I would, I knew the schedule. I’d worked it two days myself. I knew about where they’d be, what they’d be doing. And I had permission, you know, to go around to where I knew I would find them and see how things are going, to follow up with how it is. And then if they had any questions, they could come ask me.

So that’s what Phase Four looked like for Sam. That wouldn’t be the same for everybody: It could be for somebody who’s going to need a whole lot of instruction that it would be shared at some point. But remember the Dave Mank thing: Once funky, always funky, right? You want the very first day of instruction, you would want to orchestrate it.

So Mike was the first person teaching Sam something, you know, even if I was there to take over for a little bit of time afterwards. But you want it to be as much what is typical and valued as possible. So some questions to ask are, “How long does it typically take somebody to learn these tasks?”

They may say, “Oh, you know, should be on his own within three days.” Well, you know. You’ve got three days then. And then I always ask, “Has it ever taken anybody longer?” And the typical response to that is, “Well, if it takes them longer and it’s a good fit, then that’s okay.” Now there would be boundaries for that for sure.

So you don’t want to say, “Well, if it would take two months, would that be okay?” If it’s going to take two months, then for sure it’s going to be a shared responsibility. Does that make sense? So you’re not saying that an employment specialist or job coach or job support person, whatever you call him, wouldn’t provide instruction. But in this instance, it wasn’t necessary.

And here’s the other thing, the relational thing, you know. So I had a relationship with Sam, so he was willing for me to camp out there and do that, and he trusted me to do it and to come talk to him about it. The other thing that you gain from spending that amount of time and learning the tasks yourself and having somebody teach you the tasks so you can envision that person teaching Sam, the other thing you get from that is you get some social capital with the business. When you’re sitting in the nice air conditioned office and they’re in the 95 Fahrenheit (35°C) heat, pretty hot…. So, they may think if I had just shown up and said, “Well, I’ll check in with you every now…” but I didn’t know what I was talking about. You know, I’d paid my dues. I’d gotten all hot and sweaty myself. They knew the reason I was in the office was because that was the best place for me, that was the best place for Sam.

So, if everything is fine, then really you’re pretty much finished. And if not, you go to the correction phases.

And so this is you support or substitute for the natural people. So this could be an instance, could have been entirely wrong about Mike, and it didn’t go well at all. And so one of the decisions you might make here would be, well, maybe Olivia who had a similar position, maybe she would’ve been a better person to supervise Sam. So that’s an example of a change that could be made there.

Sometimes there’s, as in the stupid hose scenario, there’s a time for some role clarification. So when I was in the air conditioned office on one of the days that Sam worked and I was there for the first six days that he worked, in the office the whole time, he was working, one of those six days, he came in the office and nobody else was in there but me. And right when you come in the front door and go over to the, break room, to the right, and he went into the break room and I heard him saying, “Stupid hose. Dumb hose. I don’t know why they’d ever make a hose like that. That’s the dumbest hose I’ve ever seen. Stupid hose.”

And so I walked into the break room and I said, “Sam, is there a problem with the hose?” “Yes.” And I said, “Would you like me to go out there and take a look at with you?” And he said, “Yes.” And so we went out there and sure enough, the hose was unwound and he was supposed to be winding it back up on the wall to look like that.

Now, one of the things I mentioned yesterday about Sam was part of the impact of his disability is you would look at Sam and think that man isn’t going to have any trouble winding up a hose. I, from what I know about Sam, he is going to have some trouble winding up a hose. Just the part of the motor planning and you know, moving your body the way it needs to move to do that.

And so, anyhow, we were doing it together. I knew how to do it because I learned from Mike, and guess who walks through the barn, but Missy Joe, and she goes, “Hey Sam, hey Milt.” We said hi and just went on our way. Well, in the afternoon that day, Missy Joe wanted to have a debrief meeting about how things were going.

So we did, and she wanted Mike to join us and we we’re just talking about things, things going really swimmingly well. And then she looked directly at Mike and she said, “You and Sam need to work on winding up the hose.” How did she know that? Because she saw me teaching Sam. And she knew that it was Mike’s job to teach Sam. And one of the things that we had talked about early on is if you’re teaching Sam a task, this was just kind of a general rule that I thought would work probably all of the time with Sam, that if you see him do it completely by himself three times before you leave him to do it by himself, then he probably knows it, but don’t give him a task and see him do it once and leave him to do it again.

Or even see him do it twice, three times. And that way you can be pretty sure he knows it and he’s ready to do the task. So she saw that didn’t happen and she knew there’d been a problem with Mike’s instruction. That’s why I say role clarification. I wasn’t supposed to be teaching Sam, Mike was.

Now, there wasn’t really anything other than that. You know, I pretty much got to sit in the air conditioned office and get my work done and check in with them. So we decided I would periodically do follow up and ask targeted questions like, “How’s the watering going?”

But I also had assisted Sam to get another job because he worked at Saddlelake Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he was interested in cars. There was an auto body shop real close to where he lived. And so, we targeted work for him there. And you know, I talked to Keith, who’s the owner of the shop. I went in and explained I’m assisting a young man to look for work. I’ve already helped him get a good job at a horse farm, but he’s interested in cars and I’m wondering, are there things that aren’t getting done here the way you need them to get done?

And he said, “Yes. There is something; it’s preparing bumpers and quarter panels for spraying.” He said, “We need them roughed up, you know, using different grades of steel wool and sandpaper and sometimes different solvents to get them prepared for paint or primer to stick. That’d be great to have somebody do that.”

So we arranged a time for me to come in and spend… and learn how they did that task. And so Keith taught me how to do the task. I said, “I think this would be really good for Sam.” He met Sam, hired Sam to do the task. Sam learned how to do the task. I left. I was coming back and doing follow up.

And part of follow up is just hanging out and watching for a while. It’s not all talking. And what I noticed was that Sam would be working on a bumper for about two minutes and he’d go find Keith. and then he’d go back and work for about 10 minutes and he’d go find Keith again and ask him a question.

So I got together privately with Keith and asked him about that and he said, “Yeah,” he said, “we thought he knew the job, but he sure is coming to me with lots of questions.” And I said, “Man, that’s probably kind of trouble for you because it just you, Sam, and Lowell, only three, three men working there,” and he said, “Yeah, it is. You know, I’ve got to get the car sprayed, the whole car painted,” you know, and so I fell back on the substitute for natural people, which was me. I mean, it wasn’t reasonable to ask Keith to spend time with Sam doing a task that we thought he already had learned. And he’d already spent as much time teaching him and more than he would another employee.

And it wasn’t reasonable to ask Lowell to do it. He was the only other person in the shop and he had his own particular task related to preparing cars. So it was like we got it wrong. And so, I went in at that point, since I knew how to do the task and I taught Sam. I picked up on the additional instruction that Sam knew. You see how that works?

Now, is that stepping on Sam’s image a bit? Does that put him in a client role a bit? It does, but you see, it’s in favour of competency. You remember, we’re always looking at increasing image and competency, and so sometimes it’s just one of the things we have to come to terms with. Sometimes we do a trade off of people’s image in favour of their competency, which in really any case we’re getting involved in terms of job analysis, in terms of the Employer Needs Benefits Analysis… Julia alluded to this earlier… anytime that we’re present on the job, we are stepping at least a little bit on the person’s image and putting them more in a client role.

So we have, that’s why we just do it when we need to, but we do it when we need to because, you remember the scales? We use what is typically available as much as possible, but if people would need more, we figure out a way to get more for the person. Does that make sense? So that’s a Phase Five decision.

Phase Six means there might be a more effective natural means for teaching the job. And so the means is the way the job typically would be instructed for a worker. And at McDine’s Auto Body, it was just like at Saddlelake. It was with an experienced person, primarily Keith, but in this instance Lowell.

So I’m labeling this the ‘surprise task’ because within Customised Employment, you define what kinds of tasks people are going to be learning. You learn the task yourself and how they teach, and then all this stuff we’ve been talking about.

So here I am and really, you know, Sam’s doing really well working with Keith, and then Lowell calls him over and says, “Here, I want you to load this spray gun with some body primer.” And he showed Sam how to do it. I thought, well, that’s pretty cool. And I watched and snapped a couple pictures and then he walked over to a quarter panel of a Ford and said, “I’m going to show you how to prime this quarter panel.” And I thought, huh, that’s interesting. Nobody talked about priming a car. You know, that’s its own skillset for sure. I don’t know anything about that, but I wasn’t going to say, “No, you can’t do that.” But I was going to watch to see what happened. But this is going to be interesting. So the first thing Lowell did was kind of like Mike, a perfect demonstration of priming a quarter panel. So he said, “Watch what I’m doing and I’ll explain it to you. See how far I am from the car. If I get any closer than that, it’ll run. We don’t want that. If I get any further away, I won’t get enough primer on the car, just this far away from the car. You see how I’m overlapping? Just like that. So we’ve got the whole surface covered. You see the speed of what I’m doing?” Sam goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I see that.”

And then he gave the gun to Sam. He said, “Okay, you do it now.” And Sam, you know, didn’t get the information from the verbal information. And so Lowell’s going, “Stop, stop, no!” He wasn’t doing the Mike thing, like, “Slow down, overlap this,” you know. “No. Stop. Stop!”

And so, anyhow, they stopped doing it for that time, and I went over later and I talked to Lowell and I said, “You know, one of the things that I’ve learned about Sam is that, especially when he’s in the middle of something, if you’re talking to him, he may not hear what you’re saying and so you might want to give him the information this way. I think this would work better for Sam on that task.”

I said, “Next time, why don’t you say, ‘Here, I’m going to put my hand under your wrist. And I’ll guide you just the way I demonstrated’”, and that way he could move Sam’s hand the way it needed to move and overlap it, the same pace you see. So that would be an example of a Phase Six decision giving a different means for delivering information to the employee. So physical information instead of verbal information for Sam and that instance would’ve worked better.

And then the very last thing that you look at doing is adapting or modifying natural ways, because that’s what businesses hold most dear, like changing the method of a job or adapting.

And so when I teach this, this Seven-phase Sequence is something we teach as part of systematic instruction and just did a workshop in Canberra a couple weeks ago, a bunch of you all were there. You know, a lot of times people will say, “I’m a special ed teacher,” like I am, “and I was taught to start by modifying things and adapting things, so they work for the person’”

And I say, “Yeah, this is really different because we want to start with what is typical and valued in the business. And we don’t want to change it unless we have to because it’s what everybody there is going to be familiar with. We’re not adding anything to it. People will be more prepared to teach that way. You see how that makes sense? But if you need a modification, you do it.”

And so there was one, the watering still wasn’t getting done. Even with Zara’s solution. Talk to the horses and pat on ’em. Horses were getting missed. And so you can see the original watering pattern that was used was going across, to the stall on the other side, then diagonally to the next stall, then across, then diagonal and across, then diagonal.

And so I watched Sam and I thought that might be why he’s missing them. So I proposed… this is a big deal to propose a new method. It’s not something we take lightly, but I thought it was worth doing. So I said, “You know, would y’all be willing to think about Sam learning to go all the way down one side and then all the way back to the other?”

Now that’s a big deal because one thing Sam needs to learn a new method, for the other that’s different than what everybody else does on that job. Anyhow, that’s an example of a modification. I think that if you do a really good job with people in Discovery and you do a really good job of understanding the business, you camp out with people on both sides to really understand everything you can about that, you have people meet ahead of tim,e so that on the first day of work there’s none of this. “Who are you?” Everybody knows who you are. You’re there as the advisor or the consultant to help things go well.

So my tips are, you’ve done your background work, just relax and enjoy. You’ve devoted the needed time upfront to know the job candidate, the people within the business, and the job candidate and his or her immediate coworkers or supervisors have met prior to the first day of work.

You know about the culture of the business, you know about typical instruction and the people teaching new employees on specific negotiated tasks. They know the role that you’ll provide as a consultant or an advisor, and in some instances, instructor. The places you’ll be located in the business if you’re needed, and the preliminary schedule.

In other words, on the first day of work, you’re really lowering the temperature, lowering the anxiety for everybody. No surprises or at least minimal ones. And I’ll stop there.

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.