How you work with the people around you
Taking feedback, listening, asking, collaborating
- RBT
- BCaBA
- BCBA
What the obligation is
The technician outline treats interpersonal skill as an ethics task, not a soft extra, and it names the components: accepting feedback, listening actively, seeking input, and collaborating. The reason is that these behaviours are what make the rest of the system work. A technician who takes feedback well gets better supervision. One who asks questions surfaces problems while they are small. One who collaborates with a teacher or a speech therapist stops a learner being taught two contradictory things. The analyst code puts the same obligation on analysts and adds coordinating with other providers in a client's life.
In plain language
Take feedback without defending. Listen to families and colleagues. Ask when you are unsure. Work with the other people in the learner's life.
What this looks like
- Hearing a correction and asking a clarifying question instead of explaining why you did it.
- Writing down what a caregiver raised and passing it on the same day.
- Agreeing a single communication system with a speech-language pathologist rather than running two.
- Saying you do not know, and finding out.
Where people get caught
- Treating feedback as criticism, which trains your supervisor to stop giving it.
- Answering a caregiver's clinical question yourself to seem competent.
- Going quiet about a problem because raising it feels like admitting fault.
- Dismissing another discipline's input as unscientific rather than coordinating with it.
If you are not sure
Default to passing information along rather than holding it. Almost nothing is made worse by your supervisor knowing about it sooner.
In the codes
- RBT Ethics Code (2.0) Section 1 — How you conduct yourself
- 1.02 Behave professionally and own your commitments
- RBT Ethics Code (2.0) Section 2 — How you deliver services
- 2.03 Stay professional during every work activity
- Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts Section 1 — Your conduct as a professional
- 1.03 Be accountable for your work
- 1.15 Respond to requests and meet deadlines
- Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts Section 2 — Your conduct in practice
- 2.08 Communicate in language people actually understand
- 2.10 Collaborate with colleagues, including outside your profession
On the exam
Terms used here
Situations where this comes up
Related topics
Written from
- bacb-rbt-tco-3 — Task F.9
- bacb-ethics-code-2022 — Interpersonal skills and collaboration
Written from the RBT outline's ethics task and the analyst code's collaboration standards, in our own words.
This entry has not yet been through independent review. Treat it as a draft, and read the official code for anything that matters.