Perspective
Taking
In my role at my place of employment, I am responsible
for overseeing the operations and administrative duties for group homes that
provide services to youth ages 14 – 18. These youth have been identified as having severe emotional and behavioral
challenges. The group homes are secured locked settings that limit free access
and movement of youth and provide staff complete control over the living environment. The youth we service have experienced a significant amount of trauma in
their pasts and as expected, they act out their feelings through aggressive and
self-injurious behaviors. Because their needs are so severe, the guardians and
placing agencies have decided that they require a living environment that
provides maximum watchful oversight.
In my role, I supervise five middle managers who
collectively supervise about 50 other individuals. The goal of each of the
programs is to ensure that the youth we accept into the program are able to
learn independent and daily living skills so that they are able to successfully
transition back into the community. My expectation is that all staff, on every
level, conduct services in a manner that ensures and takes into account the
safety and well-being of the youth first. Some of the challenges that the
middle managers face is that not all staff view safety and well-being the same
way. Many of the staff do not have children of their own and some have never
worked with youth with such severe needs; therefore, they lack the knowledge
and understanding that is required in order to make sound decisions that are in
the best interest of the youth and in line with the program’s goals.
Staff are trained to
monitor and control their assigned environments. Staff engage daily with the
youth and are able to quickly build a rapport. They begin to bend on the rules
and underreport incidents as a way to “help” the youth and to show “compassion”.
Staff misunderstand their roles and begin acting more like friends to the
youth, failing to realize that the youth need consequences to their actions,
structure, and guidance. By lowering their expectations for the youth, the staff are showing the youth that their behaviors are acceptable and that there is not a real need to change.
I had to learn to take the staff’s perspectives of
their roles into consideration when trying to assist their managers in coaching
them. They fail to realize that the youth have not had consistency, stability,
structure or adequate parental guidance for most of their lives. They spend so
much time with the youth that their boundaries and roles become blurred. They
see their leniency as a way to help the youth move through the program, when in
actuality, they are failing the youth. Instead
of addressing the staff’s underperformance, I had to spend time with them and
observe their interactions with the youth. I began having brief one-on-one meetings
with most of them in my efforts to understand why it appeared that they could
not meet the expectations of their roles. I gained a lot of understanding by
taking this step and helped me to shape my thoughts about the performance. There
is a genuine concern for the well-being and safety of the youth and I can
ascertain that the staff really do mean well. From the managerial standpoint,
their behaviors look as if there are boundary issues and that the staff are
unable to meet the expectations of their roles.
Perspective taking means that you are able to
understand the perceptions or viewpoint of others, even when it may be
different from that which you have always believed. This was an important lesson
I had to learn. I have not always possessed the ability to take other’s
perspectives into account and was used to only seeing things in the way that I
believed to be right. If the performance of others looked differently that what
I believed it should, then that person’s performance was wrong. It was not
until I learned how to “put myself in others shoes” that I learned the
importance of taking others viewpoints into consideration. It helps me to
understand matters from a different level and teaches me to be more subjective.
In the situation described above involving my
workplace, it is essential that managers be able to understand the perspectives
of the staff. Although their perspective on their roles with the youth hinder
the achievement of the youth’s program goals, the overall goal of ensuring
safety and well-being is still achieved. In a sense, the staff are also
exhibiting perspective taking by putting themselves in the shoes of the youth
that they serve. Perspective taking is a great trait to possess because it also
serves as a way to build relationships.
Below is a one-minute Youtube video that gives a quick
example of how important it is to take the perspectives and considerations of
others into account.
Superheroes Social Skills - Perspective Taking:
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