“If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”Dr. Stephen Shore
I came across that quote years ago as I was starting my career working with kids diagnosed with autism. Those words (along with other influences) profoundly changed how I viewed my role as a young clinician working in ABA settings. With the help of many mentors, I learned early on that every kid and every parent was different. This lesson had an essential impact on my career in that I learned what my North Star should be as a behavior analyst. If I wanted to be effective, I needed to honor the values and priorities of those I was serving, because at the end of the day, I was accountable to them and their goals, not mine.
In honor of Autism Acceptance Month, we wanted to humbly share our perspective in relation to clinical leaders more effectively leveraging their soft skills to better serve others through compassionate collaboration. By building systems at the organizational level, leaders can promote compassionate care to all those coming into contact with their organizations, thus producing lasting effects that could sustain beyond just a single month each year. April is a beautiful month to celebrate kids with autism. That said, there's work to be done year around to help those kids and their parents thrive.
In this post, there are 2 simple strategies that you can start considering today. One is a brief self-assessment of compassionate collaboration. The other is an annual rhythm that you can start this year to better serve those who are under your clinical care. By engaging in compassionate collaboration as an organization, you increase the likelihood of parent adherence to treatment, which we already know makes a difference in the social validity of our work as professional behavior analysts (Taylor et al., 2019).
I like to tell parents that what matters to them, matters to me. That's the truth, assuming you're practicing as a behavior analyst with social validity in mind. I think I've naturally been collaborative and compassionate as I've interacted with individuals with autism and their parents, but I'm not exactly certain in all cases how my soft skills were perceived. As leaders, we should not leave compassionate collaboration to chance. We should build systems and models that enable us to compassionately collaborate on a large-scale, regardless of whether the individual providing care is "naturally" compassionate. Below are the steps you can take right now that'll move your organization in a more compassionately collaborative direction. Note, these are simple and brief recommendations that could be easy to implement in most organizational settings. They are meant to spark more ideas, planning, and action. They are not meant to be a step by step task analysis of how to be a more compassionate organization, nor do these recommendations have direct correspondence with the literature in compassionate care. To reiterate, the intention was to provide ideas that will inspire more reading, planning, and creativity when it comes to compassion in organizational settings.
Administer the Compassionate Collaboration Tool (Rohrer, et al., 2021) organization wide. Use those data to influence strategic initiatives and training opportunities in the next year within your organization. For example, to what extent are you incorporating parent input as you are developing targets and goals in the treatment planning process? Or to what extent are you using non-technical language to help parents in your parent coaching/training sessions? These are just a couple examples of how this self-assessment could really shape organizational goals over the upcoming year. Once you have collected these relevant data, continue to dedicate resources to bridging gaps between client values and your programming and services.
Consider an annual organizational assessment exclusively dedicated to evaluating cultural practices that are consistent with providing compassionate care and collaboration. For example, organizational leaders could readminister the Compassionate Collaboration Tool annually, in addition to other tools and assessments, to gather data. I like the idea of having seasons in organizational rhythms. As in life, having different activities associated with different seasons could be a sustainable practice to address certain initiates. For example, every April, you could use the month to reevaluate compassionate care in your organization. Identify a rhythm that works, and stick to it. I suspect that compassionate care requires year around effort; however, reassessment and reevaluation could occur annually or semi-annually, etc.
By going through these exercises, organizational leaders can better equip practitioners to provide high-quality, socially-significant ABA therapy. While certain readers might perceive these recommendations as optional, I would argue that compassionate collaboration is more of a requirement that all providers should be striving to achieve. The science of behavior change should be pragmatic and useful to those that should be reaping the benefits of our work. How can we do that without collaboration? How can we do that without truly listening? How can we do that without working to relieve distress? How can we do that while also trying to assert our values, priorities, and agendas over our clients’?
Our call to action as leaders is to use this month as an opportunity. Maybe what individuals with autism and their parents need is not trifling social media posts and cute graphics that have no benefit to anyone. Maybe they need us as scientist-practitioners to BECOME more compassionate. Maybe they need more collaboration with their providers. Maybe they need more communication. As I said, use this month wisely. It's an opportunity to rediscover your North Star as an organization. It's an opportunity to grow in compassionate collaboration and care.
We all know that every kid and every parent is different. Let's do our part to do better in aligning what we do as behavior analysts with what they value in their unique contexts and situations.
References:
Rohrer, J. L., Marshall, K. B., Suzio, C., & Weiss, M. J. (2021). Soft Skills: The Case for Compassionate Approaches or How Behavior Analysis Keeps Finding Its Heart. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 14(4), 1135-1143.
Taylor, B. A., LeBlanc, L. A., & Nosik, M. R. (2019). Compassionate care in behavior analytic treatment: Can outcomes be enhanced by attending to relationships with caregivers?. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 12(3), 654-666.