How I lead

Willink and Babin (2015) argue that leaders own everything in their world, including the failures of their teams. That idea sits comfortably beside behavior analysis, which holds that behavior is shaped by its environment, and organizational behavior management, which examines the system around a performer before it examines the performer.

So when a team misses, I start with the questions a leader controls. Were expectations clear? Was the training adequate? Did anyone receive useful feedback? What did the system actually reward? Ownership is not self-blame. It is the discipline of fixing what is within reach and then helping the people around me do the same. My first education in that kind of accountability came from military policing, and it has held up in every role since.

Self-determination theory holds that people share three basic psychological needs: autonomy, the sense that one’s actions are one’s own; competence, the experience of being effective; and relatedness, the experience of being connected to and cared about by others (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Research in work organizations links the satisfaction of those needs to stronger motivation, better well-being, and better performance (Deci et al., 2017).

I use the theory in two directions. For staff, it shapes how I design roles, supervision, and training: real choices where choices are possible, skill building with frequent feedback, and teams whose members know and rely on one another. For the people we serve, it is a reminder that a good support plan builds choice, skill, and relationships, not compliance alone.

Where they meet

The three commitments point in the same direction. Dignity sets the standard. Ownership makes the leader responsible for meeting it. Self-determination theory describes what people need from the system in order to thrive within it.

Behavioral science supplies the method. Define what you want people to do, arrange the conditions that make it likely, measure honestly, and adjust. That sequence works for a single support plan, for a department’s supervision system, and for a board’s governance practices, and it is the through line of everything else on this site.

What I believe

How I teach

My teaching philosophy is less about teaching someone a skill than about teaching them how to learn. My touchstone is Daniel Quinn’s novel Ishmael (Quinn, 1992). Its teacher rarely hands his pupil an answer. He asks questions and lets the pupil reason his way forward, until the pupil can see for himself what he had been looking past all along.

A skill solves the problem in front of you. Knowing how to learn solves the next one, the problem no one trained you for, and in human services that is the problem that matters. The staff member alone on an overnight shift, the paraeducator in a hallway, and the new clinician in a team meeting will each meet a situation no training covered. So I teach the reasoning behind a procedure, not only its steps: what a behavior is doing for the person, what in the environment keeps it going, and how to check a guess against data.

Behavior analysis has its own language for this: learning sets, generalization that is planned rather than hoped for, and the derived relational responding at the center of relational frame theory, the same science behind my leadership work. Whether I am supervising one future behavior analyst, training a room of direct support staff, or presenting at a conference, the goal is the same. People should leave able to analyze a situation they have never seen, not just repeat one they have. If I have done my job well, the people I teach need me less over time.