I don’t like de-escalation.
I recently shared some of our trainings with a big company. Their employees are struggling with an increase in incidents related to homelessness. After we watched a video together, we had the following conversation: De-Escalation vs. Conflict Prevention Our approach to de-escalating conflict is 90% around preventing conflict in the first place. The other 10% […]
No one wants to yell at you.
When I ran the shelter, I was yelled at…A LOT… Sometimes first thing in the morning (before I was even awake). Sometimes in front of an audience (residents and my staff). Sometimes by people twice my size (and scary!). Next time someone is yelling at you, I want you to remember one thing. No one […]
“Excuses” vs. “Explanations”
Did you know… None of these are excuses for bad behavior, but they are all explanations for bad behavior. We can seek to understand the root cause of bad behavior without excusing bad behavior. If you understand why someone is behaving badly, it is MUCH easier to help them behave well than if you just write them off as […]
How do I handle repeat offenders?
Dear Ryan, I work at a coffee shop. There is a guy who lives in the woods nearby. Most days he will come in and buy a small coffee and sit around for a while. That is cool. What is not cool is that he keeps asking other customers for money. When we ask him […]
The problem is not what you think it is.
I am doing a training tomorrow for McDonald’s national security team. By the way, I’ve been working with McDonald’s for about a year, and I have been REALLY impressed with how committed they are to a compassionate approach to homelessness. In preparation for training their team, I was reviewing our old training on “How to […]
Is there hope for “Everyday Sadists?”
People email me a lot asking how they should handle a staff person who enjoys enforcing the rules too much. It comes across as “picking on” people or “bullying” them. I tell them that their staff member is what psychologists call an “Everyday Sadist.” There isn’t really anything they can do to help the person […]
De-escalating conflict is like typing without looking at your hands.
Can you type without looking at your hands? If not, this newsletter won’t be very helpful. Do you remember learning how to touch type? It was REALLY hard. First, someone had to teach you where to put your fingers. Then, you had to think about every single key very carefully (“’J’ is my right index […]
Harold was a “little” inebriated.
I was 21 years old. I had only worked at the shelter for a month and still had no idea what the heck I was doing. The rest of the staff had gone home for the night, leaving me to run the shelter by myself. Harold stumbled in at 10:30 pm. He smelled like someone […]
How do I balance kindness and strength?
Dear Ryan, How do I be kind without coming across as gullible, weak, or as a pushover? How do I find the right balance? Mike Mike, I think you are asking the wrong question. You don’t “balance” kindness and strength. They aren’t opposites. The key is to be both fully “kind” and fully “firm” at […]
“Old man Jenkins is drunk and swinging on people.”
It was 9:00 pm in the second largest homeless shelter in Illinois. The only employees were me and Chris, who was brand new. It was a quiet night with a relatively low number of residents in the shelter (“only” 150 or so). A resident (a middle-aged Hispanic man with a handlebar mustache) approached Chris and […]
