Day: October 23, 2013

Getting questions heard

Real Social Skills
A reader asked:
People tend not to answer me when I ask a question, even if it’s something I need to know. It’s particularly bad with regards to planning or getting background information on what is happening at a given time. What might I be doing that tells people answering me is optional? How can I emphasize that getting an answer is important? (I’m pretty sure I’m the problem, since no one else has trouble finding things out from the same people I am talking to.)
realsocialskills answered:
I actually have this problem too. To the extent that sometimes I get confused about whether I actually even *asked* the question, because people seem to have completely ignored it.
I think it might be that they don’t realize that you’re asking a question because they rely on certain cues to know that they’re being asked stuff. There are a few things I’ve figured out in this regard. For instance:
Eye contact:
  • Most sighted neurotypical people use eye contact as part of the way they initiate a question.
  • They look at the person they want to ask, that person looks back, then they ask
  • People who rely on eye contact to tell when someone is asking a question might have trouble understanding that you want to ask something if you’re not looking at them
  • It might help to look in their direction when you ask them something, even if you’re not actually doing the eye contact thing

Tone:

  • I don’t know how to describe this, but there’s an inflection most people use when asking questions
  • If you’re not inflecting questions that way, it might be hard for some people to detect the question
  • I don’t know how to describe this, but it might help to listen to how people who are successfully getting their questions better are inflecting them

Volume:

  • It might be that you’re speaking too quietly and people aren’t noticing that you’re talking
  • This can particularly happen if you’ve been socialized not to take up space
  • It might be worth trying intentionally talking louder

You might want or need to provide cues in a different ways:

  • Not everyone can provide the inflection/volume/eye contact cues.
  • They can be useful strategies if you can do them, but they’re not the only ways
  • If you can’t do it that way, there are other ways, for instance:
  • Saying explicitly, “Can I ask a question?”. (It can be especially useful if you say the person’s name, because then it’s easier for them to know you’re talking to them.)
  • In some contexts, raising your hand is an effective way to get someone’s attention. It’s likely to be perceived as childish though, and people will often laugh at you for it. But it does often work.

Ask questions through email, texting, IM, or phone calls:

  • Sending a message one of those ways automatically implies that you’re trying to get that person’s attention
  • So it replaces the eye contact and other body language things you might be having trouble with
  • If you’re asking email, it can help to put “question” or “time-sensitive question” in the subject
  • (Or something context specific like “Wednesday plans?”, “Need some background for the hamster project”)

Two kinds of praise that set off red flags

Real Social Skills
soilrockslove asked:
Two kinds of praise that set off red flags are – lots of praise for normal things like “we have a cafeteria with varied, healthy food!!! And the menu changes!!!” or something similar. And also a lot of buzzwords and words that sound happy like “empowerment” etc. But they don’t ever tell anything they *do* to empower people. It’s just show without substance.
realsocialskills said:
Yes, those are good examples.
I think there’s also a thing where testimonials can be a red flag. Sometimes testimonials are just examples that illustrate that an organization can work for people, and that make it clearer what it does. Sometimes testimonials are brought as evidence that the organization is purely wonderful and that it is absolutely great for everyone involved no matter what.
All real places suck for some people, and organizations that are committed to not noticing this do some scary stuff. It doesn’t mean that good organizations talk about who they suck for on their promotional materials – most don’t and shouldn’t.
Good organizations don’t try to prove that they’re perfect for everyone, though. They try to show that they have something valuable to offer. That’s a huge difference.

Clarification regarding praise as a red flag

Real Social Skills

Obviously people don’t badmouth their organization to outsiders their organization is trying to recruit; doing so is unprofessional.

I’m talking about a different thing.

The thing where staff spend an extraordinary amount of time praising the organization and press people it serves to do so as well.

And in which it’s really hard to find any criticism *anywhere*, and where people are really forcefully saying how great it is, in a way that goes way beyond professionalism and recruitment spin.

Does anyone know a better way to describe the thing I’m talking about?

The word “institution”

Real Social Skills

In a disability context, “institution” means something like “an organization that keeps disabled folks separate from mainstream society and under the control of others”.

It used to be fairly common practice for families (under great pressure from doctors and state authorities) to send their disabled children to residential institutions and then have no further relationship with them. That’s fallen out of favor in the past couple of decades, but a lot of the underlying power dynamics remain in service providers in other settings.

For instance, group homes are often referred to as being “living in the community” rather than “institutions”, but they also often have identical power dynamics.

Similarly, some places will say that they are not institutions but are rather “intentional communities” or some sort of utopian village because they are farms and cottages rather than big harshly lit buildings. But again, they have the same power dynamics.

The power dynamics can be hard to spot if you don’t know how to look for them, because a lot of institutions will go out of their way to pretend they’re doing something fundamentally different.