I know, I know — every BCBA is super busy. There are just too many cases to see and not enough time to see them. In my view, conversations with staff should be a major part of your Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) plan. Although hard to prove, I believe it dramatically improves program quality. It definitely improves staff satisfaction.
Staff often place a very high value on interacting with supervisors about training, discussing next steps for the client, brainstorming problems, opportunities to address concerns, overcoming obstacles, asking questions, learning new things, professional growth, and just getting to know the supervisor personally. Supervisors often enjoy and appreciate how much they can learn from these conversations. In addition, supervisors get the opportunity to set expectations, provide reinforcement, monitor performance, and give corrective feedback.
We train supervisors not to use “sandwich feedback.” Sandwich feedback is where you start with a positive statement, (e.g., I appreciate you showing so much enthusiasm teaching Mark!). Then slip in the corrective feedback (e.g., when I observed you running the behavior plan, I noticed you forgot step #5 blah blah). Then end with a positive statement (e.g., You are such a hard worker, I know he is going to make great progress working with you!). Sandwich feedback is problematic because it is mostly to make the supervisor feel better about giving the feedback. For the person receiving the feedback, they ignore the positive statements and focus on the corrections.
The general rule to avoid this problem is never mix positive reinforcement with corrections in the same interaction. Separate them in time while making the positive much more frequent. That is good advice, most of the time. But I think you can take this advice too far. If you sit down to have an in-depth conversation to solve a problem, undoubtedly both positive and negative things will come up. If you are working together to solve a problem, that’s often highly reinforcing to staff. If you worry about mixing your positives and negatives, you can’t have a meaningful conversation.
I believe these conversations are so important that I make sure they go on the schedule. I don’t believe you can maintain high performance without them. Sometimes, we think we can replace conversations with staff with emails, text messages, training days, or brief positive statement when we catch the staff doing something right. It’s just not the same. I recently went to a workshop by John Austin on conversations as a primary management intervention with similar (but not identical) ideas.