Labor Day 2024: From The Neurosciences, A Modest And Sensible Job Strategy

Among case managers and job counselors at job training and social welfare departments you often hear frustration with some program participants who don’t show up on time, miss appointments, disappear, or fail to follow through. Even after more than a half-century, the job training field struggles to understand how to help significant segments of participants get jobs, stay employed, possibly advance.

So many false and ineffective behavioral interventions have come and gone over the past fifty years in job training. So many empty poverty ideologies and behavioral rationales that have been advocated over these years have undermined individual agency and job placement rather than advancing these values.

Thus, as we approach Labor Day 2024 it is worth saying a word about an initiative that is building individual agency and job placement/retention skills among welfare recipients, ex-offenders, out-of-school youth, and more recently adults on the autism spectrum—workers struggling to find a role in the job world. The initiative focuses on “executive functioning”— the mental skills used to execute tasks, including emotional control, stress tolerance, time management, organization, mental flexibility, and persistence. It draws on insights from the neurosciences on goal setting and implementation.

At the center of the initiative is the New-Hampshire based neuropsychologist Dick Guare and his son Colin. Over the past decade, the Guares have overseen executive functioning coaching for a range of low income unemployed workers, with promising results. For their latest project, “MyGoals” , the Guares are partnering with the workforce specialists at MDRC, coaching more than 900 low income adults in Baltimore and Houston.

A Neuropsychologist’s Journey To The Welfare System

In the early 1980s, Dick Guare completed a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Virginia and a postdoctoral fellowship in neuropsychology at Harvard Medical School. In 1983 he assumed a position as neuropsychologist at a head injury rehabilitation center in New Hampshire. During the next few years he observed difficulties of his brain trauma patients in independent living: “They could describe generally what they thought they what they wanted to achieve, but could not focus or follow through,” he recalls. Building on the research on frontal lobes and executive functioning by neuropsychologist David Struss and neurologist Frank Benson, Guare in 1987 presented a paper linking executive skills deficits to injuries suffered to the prefrontal cortex area of the brain.

Guare and his co-authors expanded their research to include executive functioning skills deficits in populations with no reported or observed brain injuries. They concluded that these skills deficits were not limited to brain trauma. Like other cognitive skills, executive functioning skills were distributed among the population in a type of bell-shaped distribution. Individuals varied in their neurology and neurologically-based capacities for executive functioning.

Guare also became convinced, though, that with structured training, executive function skills could be strengthened. With Colin and a colleague, Peg Dawson, Guare authored a series of books in the first two decades of the 2000s, focused on coaching teenagers and young adults with skills deficits. These books (Smart but Scattered Teens, Coaching Students with Executive Skills Deficits, Smart but Scattered: Stalled, and others) proved popular among parents. Their message: executive skills challenges, regardless of origin, were amendable to direct intervention. The books offered coaching to support individuals in developing these skills.

The books, in turn, came to the attention of researchers at Mathematica and in turn to welfare department officials in Ramsey County (St. Paul), Minnesota, who were developing a welfare to work program in 2014. They reached out to Guare and asked whether Guare’s training might address executive functioning challenges they saw among their welfare recipients. With Guare they developed and in 2016 implemented a training in executive functioning skills for three cohorts of welfare case managers and their clients.

“MyGoals” For Public Housing And Voucher Recipients

Guare soon was contacted by James Riccio, Principal Research Fellow at MDRC’s headquarters in New York. Riccio had been principal investigator for a number of large-scale workforce demonstration projects aimed at public housing residents and housing voucher (Section 8) recipients and other low income workers. Independently he had become intrigued by the connections other researchers were making between neuropsychology and poverty, and with efforts to apply those insights to workforce programs.

With philanthropic funding from Arnold Ventures and others, MDRC and Guare partnered to adapt Guare’s executive functioning coaching approach that built on the Ramsey County experiences, as well as on the Mobility Mentoring model developed by the Boston-based nonprofit Employment Pathways (EMPath). Their project, which came to be called “MyGoals,” enlisted the Housing Authority of Baltimore and Houston Housing Authority as project sites. The federal Department of Health and Human Services joined with funding for Mathematica and Abt Associates to work with MDRC to track and evaluate results.

The project focused on adults receiving federal housing assistance who were not working or minimally employed (working fewer than 20 hours per month). Each participant was partnered with a job coach who met with them at least monthly for up to three years. The job coach followed a structured set of protocols designed by the Guares and MDRC, emphasizing 12 executive skills related to “planning, organizing, controlling one’s emotions, staying focused and following through on tasks”—skills they described as “particularly important in a knowledge-based labor market that is already complicated to navigate.”

The project began operations in 2017 and ran through September 2022. During this time, 901 participants enrolled, ages 18 to 56 years. The job coaches started with “motivational interviewing”: helping participants identify their own employment and economic aspirations.

Then followed a highly structured process through which the coaches helped participants set concrete goals, both short term (for the next few weeks) and longer term (over months and years). The coach and participant identified the actions needed to pursue these goals, milestones and timetables, and roles for both the coach and participant—ensuring that participants, not the coaches, took the lead. They met regularly to review and document progress. The process was routinized, meant to ensure consistency. It was also flexible, allowing the counselor to exercise the art in counseling of balancing empathy with accountability.

In a 2020 “MyGoals” project essay, Riccio and MDRC colleague Nina Castells, reflected on the project and its relation to other anti-poverty efforts. “My Goals” drew on research linking executive skills challenges to poverty environments, but its emphasis was on individual agency.

They noted research by the Harvard Center of the Developing Child linking growing up in poverty to inhibition in developing executive function skills. According to Center researchers, the “toxic stress” and “exposure to trauma” that may accompany poverty can inhibit development in children of such executive function skills as impulse control, memory and mental flexibility. Further, as scholars Sendil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir set out in their book Scarcity, among adults, the strains of poverty can undermine planning and maintaining employment goals. Riccio and Castells would write, “the intense focus on ‘getting by’ economically can drain cognitive resources away from the kinds of planning, managing and sustaining actions required for ‘getting ahead’.”

Riccio and Castells, though, highlight the role of “My Goals” in getting beyond causation. This role is nothing less than “helping participants take control, learn to make and execute appropriate plans, develop more productive habits and reap the benefits.”

Takeaways From “MyGoals”

The formal “MyGoals” evaluation is still in preliminary stage. Mathematica’s first program report was issued in June 2023, covering only a one-year period of participant engagement. It shows early and encouraging positive effects on employment goal setting and goal attainment skills. The final report, which will cover up to a five year period after program enrollment is not due until late 2025.

Other preliminary data collected by MDRC indicate that over half of “MyGoals” participants were still engaged in coaching three years after enrollment —a high percentage among anti-poverty programs that are voluntary. For Riccio and Castells, the high level of engagement reflects the trust that develops between the participant and job coach. “Through the non-directive and participant-led process, the coaches are trained to draw out goals from the participant; the participant takes ownership, and the coach becomes an assistant in pursuing these goals,” explains Riccio.

Of the participants who dropped out, Riccio speculates that a number came to the program thinking “I need a job right away.” “My Goals” was designed to be a more deliberate and methodical employment approach. But he and Castells agree that going forward successor coaching projects may need a stronger job placement element—job placement specialists who can assist in identifying job openings, and helping participants apply and go through the process.

Dick and Colin Guare have taken several lessons from “My Goals,” as they continue to refine their training model and expand it to other populations. The project underscored the role of short-term and interim successes, which the training model is incorporating. Colin Guare explains, “Given their economic conditions, our participants often have immediate economic needs and short term horizons. As a result, employment and economic goals are set for the next few days as well as the next weeks and months. Also we’ve learned how executive skill attainment can take years, as true behavioral change is usually a slow process.”

With the experience of “My Goals,” the Guares are adding more feedback loops to ensure consistency among coaches and more interactive exercises. The training is being adapted for different age groups and for different adult groups, including persons on the autism spectrum who, Guare writes, “show more significant challenges with certain executive skills including flexibility, planning and organization.”

The Future

At this point, funding for future rounds of “MyGoals” rests on the findings of the Mathematica study. However, Riccio notes that recognition of the importance of executive skills is growing among the public workforce system. Local Workforce Boards, workforce intermediaries and community training programs are contacting MDRC . They are looking to lessons from “MyGoals,” as well as EMPath’s Mobility Mentoring model, and the New Moms program in Chicago. They are looking to add executive skills training to their portfolios.

Executive skills does not represent a breakthrough behavioral intervention of the kind that workforce practitioners have been hoping for since the 1970s. It is a complement to what has long been the main catalyst for behavioral change: a job itself. “My Goals” suggests executive skills can hasten job placement and to a greater extent improve the chances of staying power.

Approaching Labor Day 2024, the post-pandemic low unemployment rates are steadily rising, wage gains are slowing, average hourly earnings are declining, and additional layoffs loom on the horizon. In the months ahead, America’s public workforce system will be called upon to address a weakening job market, especially for the workers whom executive skills is targeting. “My Goals” is a timely, low cost, and practical addition to the system. Further, in 2025 it should spur the workforce system’s greater collaboration with employment insights from the neurosciences.