Consultation Skills for Mental Health Professionals E-Book

Richard W. Sears

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1157

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Consultation interventions are an increasingly popular alternative to clinical practice, allowing the practitioner to interact with and affect many different individuals and organizations. This type of work challenges mental health professionals, drawing on all the skills and resources they may possess, yet also offers some of the greatest rewards and opportunities for service. Filled with numerous case examples and checklists, Consultation Skills for Mental Health Professionals contains a wealth of information on this important area of practice. It provides a comprehensive source for working with a diverse clientele in a variety of settings, discussing both traditional mental health consultation models and the fast-growing field of organizational consulting. The guide is divided into four parts: * Individual-Level Consulting Issues takes up individual career assessment and counseling, along with how organizational contexts affect individual jobs; leadership, management, and supervision; executive assessment, selection, interviewing, and development; and executive coaching. * Consulting to Small Systems discusses working with teams and groups; planning and conducting training and teambuilding; diversity in the workplace and in consultation. * Consulting to Large Systems covers how to work with large organizations, including organizational structure, terms, culture, and concepts, as well as processes such as change and resistance; how to assess organizations, and the characteristics of healthy and dysfunctional workplaces; and issues involved in organizational intervention. * Special Consulting Topics include issues such as the practical aspects of running a consulting practice; the skills required for successful clinical consultation; consultation services for special populations; and crisis consultation, including critical incident stress management, psychological first aid, disaster recovery, media communication, and school crisis response.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1: Introduction

Definitions of Consultation

The Tripartite Nature of Consultation

Consultation as an Interdisciplinary Field

Why Consultation is Important for Mental Health Practitioners

How Does Consultation Differ from Other Competencies?

Characteristics of the Players in an Organizational Setting

Consultation Settings

Types of Consultation

The Role of the Consultant

Skills of the Consultant

Consulting Core Competency Domains

Internal Versus External Consultants

Elements of the Consultant-Consultee Interaction

The Classical Problem-Solving Sequence

Part One: Individual-Level Consulting Issues

Chapter 2: Clinical Career Assessment and Counseling

Holland’s Hexagonal Model of Interests

Holland Themes

Dual Type Explanations

Campbell Interest and Skill Survey

Abilities Assessment

Personality Assessment

Career Stages

Integrating Data

Case Example: The Discontented Auto Salesperson

Chapter 3: Organizational Context

Multilevel Organization of Work

The Positive Aspects of Work

Work Motivation

Unemployment

Case Example

The Problem of Job Stress

Case Example

Case Example: Burnout

Organizational Interventions

Individual Interventions

Family-Responsive Interventions

Employment Stigma for Individuals With Mental Illness

Causes of Underemployment

Case Example

Formal Theories of Job Motivation

Job Satisfaction

Work Schedules

Job Problems

Organization Structure and Job Evaluations

Legal Issues in Employment

Chapter 4: Leadership, Management, and Supervision

Historical Background

Leadership

Leadership Theories

Supportive Communication

Dealing With Difficult Employees

Case Example: The Paperwork-Challenged Therapist

Networking

Organizational Politics

Negotiation Skills

The Art of Negotiation

Conflict in Organizations

Negativity in Organizations

Territorial Behavior in Organizations

Chapter 5: Executive Assessment, Selection, Interviewing, and Development

Preparing for the Selection Task

Introduction to the Applicant

Resume Review

Interview Data Collection

Selection Interviewing

Case Example

Psychological Testing

Items to Include in the Report Outline

Case Example

Other Types of Executive Assessment

An Example Proposal

Job Analysis

Legal Considerations for Psychological Testing in the Workplace

Common Selection Predictors

Case Example: Putting it all Together

Case Example: Executive Development Request

Case Example: Executive Development Planning

Derailment

Case Example: Managing Transitions

Chapter 6: Executive Coaching and Performance Enhancement

What is Coaching?

Case Example: Succession Issues

Coaching and Human Resource Systems

Why is Coaching so Popular?

Coaching Customs

The Coaching Process

Case Example: Helping a Coach

Theoretical Approaches to Coaching

Case Example: Initiating Stages of Change

Case Example: Existential Intervention

An Abbreviated List of Coaching Methods and Techniques

Case Example

Diversity Issues in Coaching

Stumbling Blocks for Coaches

Case Example: The Case of the Nonlistening HR Professional

Performance Enhancement

Corporate “Couples” Counseling

Case Example: Green Chemical

Part Two: Consulting to Small Systems

Chapter 7: Working with Teams and Groups

Analogies to Clinical Skills

Systems Theory and Concepts

Characteristics of a System

The Psychodynamic Approach to Team Development

Basic Science Related to Groups

Group Processes in Organizations

Role Theory

Important Group Phenomena

Participation

Empowerment

Communication in Groups: Communication Networks

Work Teams

Importance of Meetings

Types of Decision Making

Decision Making in Organizations

Task and Process

Improving Group Facilitation Skills

Small Group Intervention

Chapter 8: Training and Team Building

Training in Organizations

Training: The Facilitation Problem

Case Example

Training Resources

Writing the Training Proposal

Team Building

Case Example

Steps in Team Building

Case Example: Team-Building Design for a New Team

Chapter 9: Diversity Issues in Consultation

Why Does Diversity in the Workplace Matter?

Types Of Diversity

A Model Diversity Policy

Techniques for Managers

Challenges of Diversity

The Great Problem of Difference

Institutional Stages in the Diversity Process

Principles for Treating Human Differences

Goals of Diversity Training

Doing Diversity Programs

Assessing Diversity Issues Within an Organization

Part Three: Consulting to Large Systems

Chapter 10: The Nature of Organizations

Organizational Structure

Organizational Culture

Characteristics of Organizational Culture

Finding the Organizational Culture That Best Fits the Individual

Organizational Change and Resistance

Resistance

Strategies for Inducing Organization Change

Reframing Organizational Change

Chapter 11: Assessment of Organizations

A Healthy Workplace

Origins Of The Healthy Workplace Concept

Why Maintaining a Healthy Workplace is Important

Targets for Organizational Diagnosis and Intervention

Goals of Organizational Assessment

Systems Model Interview Questions

Chapter 12: Organizational Intervention

Steps in Action Learning or Process Consultation

Case Example: Employee Stress

Organizational Change and Development

Consulting Styles

Transition Management

Strategic Planning

Part Four: Special Topics

Chapter 13: Practice Management

Getting Started

Practice Management Issues

Managing Difficult Consultees

Ethical Issues in Consultation

Case Example: Ethics Case Analysis and Proposed Resolution

Chapter 14: Clinical Consultation

Consultation Skill Development as a Therapist

Case Example: Assessing the Whole Client

Case Example: Using Interpersonal Skills

Core Elements of Successful Consultation

Brief History of Consultation

Developing the Consultant-Consultee Relationship

Models of Consultation—Caplan

Case Example: Mental Health Consultative Approach

Behavioral Consultation—Bergan

Case Example: a Behavioral Approach

Ecological Models—Gutkin and Curtis

Case Example: An Ecological Approach

Chapter 15: Consultation Services for Special Populations

School Consultation

Case Examples

Suggested Reading

Pediatric Psychology

Case Examples

Suggested Reading

Health Psychology/Behavioral Medicine

Case Examples

Chapter 16: Crisis Consultation

Critical Incident Stress Management

Management Continuity

Individual Responses to a Crisis

Communication With the Media

Crisis Intervention for School Settings

Glossary

References

Additional Reference Sources

Appendix

Author Index

Subject Index

About the Authors

Copyright © 2006 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 13: 978-0-471-70510-9

ISBN 10: 0-471-70510-1

To Ashlyn and Jeremy, from whom we have learned so much.

Preface

This book is based on the class notes for the core course on consultation for doctoral clinical psychologists created by John R. Rudisill, dean of the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology. Our intent is to educate mental health professionals on the practical aspects of consultation. This material covers traditional mental health consultation models, but also focuses on consulting with organizations, which is a rapidly growing area of the field. Regardless of which area you find most attractive (or even if you believe you may never actively engage in formal consultation work), the diverse array of knowledge covered in this book will prove useful to all mental health clinicians. The book is organized into four parts: (1) Individual-Level Consulting Issues, (2) Consulting to Small Systems, (3) Consulting to Large Systems, and (4) Special Topics.

The chapters in this book cover a broad variety of consulting topics and make ample use of disguised case examples taken from actual practice as well as fictional scenarios to illustrate and enliven the concepts discussed.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of consultation, discussing definitions, different types of consultation, and the fields that have contributed to the research and knowledge base. It reviews the settings in which consultants work and highlights the basic skills and competencies needed by consultants. Basic problem-solving skills are also outlined.

Part One covers issues related to consulting at the individual level. Chapter 2 covers career counseling. Assessment and other issues are discussed for individuals who are seeking employment, changing fields, being promoted, or simply are not happy with their current jobs. Chapter 3 covers concepts concerning a variety of organizational contexts, including job stress, burnout, and how jobs are structured. Theories of human and work motivation are explored, as well as basic legal issues regarding employment. Chapter 4 deals with leadership, management, and supervision. Beginning with historical models of leadership, the evolution of ideas about how to manage others in the workplace is traced, culminating in a multidimensional approach to conceptualizing leadership. Important leadership skills are taught, including supportive communication, dealing with difficult employees, networking, negotiation skills, organizational politics, and how to deal with conflict. Chapter 5 investigates the tools and skills needed for executive assessment, employment selection, effective interviewing, and professional development. Chapter 6 covers executive coaching and performance enhancement, a rapidly growing field in which the consultant or “coach” works to improve the executive’s job performance. This chapter presents a variety of strategies, including how to apply psychotherapeutic theories to a coaching situation.

Part Two focuses on issues involved in working with small systems, such as groups and teams. Chapter 7 explores the nature of teams and groups (using systems theory, role theory, and group theory), how to effectively conduct a meeting, and how to facilitate a group (which involves feedback, basic skills, methods and tools, and designing effective facilitation). Chapter 8 discusses how to plan and conduct training and team-building sessions. Though important diversity issues are highlighted throughout the book, Chapter 9 focuses specifically on the many diversity issues that are important in workplace and consultation settings, including how to educate managers and how to make the workplace more inclusive.

Part Three investigates consultation as it applies to large systems. Chapter 10 discusses the nature of organizations, and covers organizational structure, terms, concepts, culture, change, and resistance. Chapter 11 explores assessment issues, including the characteristics of healthy and dysfunctional workplaces, targets and goals of assessment activities, and how to perform effective assessment interviews. Chapter 12 looks at intervention issues and outlines the steps in process consultation, discusses organizational change and development, considerations in the use of differing consulting styles, and strategic planning.

Part Four introduces special consulting topics. Chapter 13 covers the practical issues of running a consulting practice, including charting, billing, and the development of a marketing strategy. Ethical issues are also discussed. Chapter 14 provides information on clinical consultation and explores Caplan’s mental health consultation model, behavioral and ecological models of consultation, as well as general knowledge and skills required for successful clinical consulting. Chapter 15 covers consultation services for special populations, including school and pediatric consultation. Annotated bibliographies are included for those who would like to know more about these settings. Chapter 16 covers crisis consultation and outlines strategies for intervening when organizations experience traumatic events, including critical incident stress management (CISM), psychological first aid, phases of disaster recovery, how to communicate with the media, and crisis response in school settings.

The field of mental health is changing. With nationwide budget cuts, community mental health centers and other agencies are cutting back on the number of high-level mental health providers they employ. Aside from the positive aspects of doing consultation work, consulting may become a necessity for many clinicians to provide the means to make a decent living.

Recently, there has been a rapid expansion of research into the field of consulting. Although it is important to have an understanding of the research base, this book focuses more on the practical aspects of consulting. References provided at the end of the book show readers where to find more details about the empirical research.

As a final caution, remember not to “consult” in areas for which you are not competent to practice. Just as you would not work with a deaf client (even through an interpreter) without specific training in deaf culture and issues unique to that population, you should not begin to do work in large organizational strategic planning without specialized knowledge, training, and supervision. In mental health work, the client’s mental health is at stake. In organizational consulting, the organizational health and the financial health of the institution and all of its employees are at stake.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the many students who have stimulated our thinking and pressed for increasingly helpful ways to impart this material, especially Erika Driver and LaToya Gregory.

Also, we appreciate the support of the generous and welcoming psychologists of the American Psychological Association, Division 13.

Many thanks to our diligent research team, who are doctoral students at the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University: Shelley Leiphart and Brandon Kozar, for their background research and painstaking indexing work, and Tricia Giessler, Lindsey Slaughter, and Jayme Arose for finding difficult to find citations. Thanks also to Susan Foskuhl, for all of her administrative support.

Thanks also to Elfriede and Charles Sears for all of their support over the years, and to Ashlyn and Jeremy, for all those times we told them we did not have time to play. The mentorship of Joseph Petrick in business consulting and ethics is also greatly appreciated. The inspiration of ninjutsu teacher Stephen K. Hayes has also had a profound impact.

We would also like to thank Tracey Belmont, senior editor at Wiley, Ester Mallach, editorial assistant, and all of the Wiley staff for their encouragement and support of this project. Special thanks also to Charlotte Saikia for her diligent editing work, and to Pam Blackmon and Nancy Land of Publications Development Company of Texas.

This material was gathered from many sources over a number of years, and although every effort was made to appropriately cite material, errors are possible. The authors apologize in advance for any such oversights, and request that we be made known of such instances so that proper credit can be given in future editions of this book.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

What exactly is consultation? Even very experienced practitioners in this field have a difficult time answering this question with precision. However, one way to define consultation is through consideration of the activities involved. Although the variety of activities makes it difficult to say what a “typical day” might be like, Box 1.1 shows a sampling of a day in the life of a consultant in private practice.

Box 1.1: A Typical Day for a Full-Time Consultant

7:30 a.m.Have breakfast at the Racquet Club with the managing partner of a law firm to discuss her business and personal concerns.9:30 a.m.Work with an executive who is the victim of downsizing on career assessment.11:00 a.m.Consult with a company concerned about a potentially violent employee.12:00 p.m.Put on a team-building and planning workshop with a small financial firm around the organization’s future.4:00 p.m.Meet with an owner and company president who are having difficulty getting along.5:00 p.m.Analyze a test battery from a selection candidate for an executive position.6:00 p.m.Coach a supervisor who was demoted by his company because of his poor people skills.

On the way home, think about the survey requested by a large social service agency and a consultation request by a medical practice.

As mental health clinicians, most of us are not particularly interested in consultation during the early years of our career. We usually want to do therapy, most often individual therapy, and are enlivened by the opportunity to intimately connect with individuals in a safe, structured environment. Consultation is sometimes neglected in mental health professions because students conclude that clinical practice is the only legitimate professional expression of clinical skills. As we progress (and sometimes “burn out”), we often begin to feel some comfort with individual therapy, and want to add increased complexity by seeing couples or families. From family or group therapy, the next step in our developmental mastery of complexity may be supervision or organizational consultation.

All the lessons we learn and the experience we gain from individual and group therapy are useful when doing consulting work. Therefore, this book begins with individual interventions, moves into considerations for group interventions, and progresses into principles for organizational consultation. Consultation is one of the most complex and challenging interventions a mental health provider can perform, but with that challenge comes great potential for service. We can often create major impact through our consultation efforts by using the important principle of leverage. As individual service providers, we are limited in the number of individuals we can help. By providing group therapy, we can further increase the number of individuals we help. Through consultation, however, we can ultimately help many more individuals, especially when viewed from a systems perspective. Assisting a work supervisor not only improves the quality of work and life for the supervisor, it can foster a healthier work environment for all the employees at that worksite. Consulting with other mental health providers about specific clinical skills (e.g., systems perspectives and diversity issues) can positively affect every client seen by each provider. Consulting with CEOs of large corporations can help improve the mental health of every employee in that organization.

Once we become more aware of the suffering in the world, we feel compelled to do more about the systems in which the suffering is perpetuated. You may feel that you have little to offer, but what seems like common sense to you may be enlightening to the consultee. As clinicians, we often experience this with psychotherapy clients. When asked later what was most helpful in therapy, clients often point out incidents that we did not recognize as meaningful at the time and discover that the client has no recollection of what we felt was the most meaningful therapeutic event. Whatever the perceptions of either person, the end result is life-altering change.

Consultation has several unique features that may appeal to mental health professionals, depending on their vocational and avocational interests. Often our clinical client base consists of individuals with severe psychopathology with whom it can be extremely challenging to work. Consultation clients are often highly skilled and accomplished “normal” individuals who are extremely grateful for the consultant’s services. Consultants typically earn a relatively high fee, which is received promptly, avoiding the hassle of insurance companies and managed care forms and oversight. On the downside, consultation can be anxiety-provoking, tapping into our deep-seated fears and worries about our competence. There is also a large degree of ambiguity in consulting situations—you may find yourself staring at the client with neither of you knowing what the other one really wants or needs. The knowledge that we have learned and relied on in clinical situations, such as the importance of avoiding dual relationships, often becomes less applicable. Consultants must rely on a broad knowledge base, including fields such as business, education, and health. It also typically requires either an ability to market yourself well or a strong personal “face validity,” or presence.