Four Circles: The Framework I Still Think In

Four questions, asked in the same order every time, that turned a temporary job into thirty-six years of work.

Before I ever supervised anyone, built a department, or sat in an executive chair, I was a direct care practitioner working with children in a shelter care and group homes. Many of the kids had experienced significant trauma. My job was to help them become more cooperative and more available, not just to me, but to the adults in their lives who were trying to help them make better decisions, with them and for them.

To do that work well, I was trained in a set of ideas that I still think in today, three decades later, whether I'm working through a problem with a client, an employee, or myself. None of it originated with me. I learned it directly from people who taught it to me over years of supervision and feedback: Dick Kauffman, who trained me in the Teaching Family Model; George Schwartz, my Executive Director when I was a teaching parent; Byron Wright, who supervised the shelter at the time of my hire and later became my direct supervisor in transitional living; and Denise Derdeyn, a Program Director at the time whose footsteps I eventually followed in taking over supervision of the residential group homes. What follows is theirs as much as mine.

Together, what they taught me functions as four concentric circles, and the order matters. When something isn't working, I move through them in the same sequence every time.

First Circle: Skills

The innermost circle is skills. Before I assume anything else is wrong, I ask a simple question: has this person been taught what we're asking of them?

Dick taught me a model of care, the Teaching Family Model, and the core idea is straightforward but easy to skip past: much of what looks like defiance, incompetence, or anger is really a skills gap. A child who explodes when asked to set the table may never have been taught, step by step, how to break that task into manageable pieces. An employee who keeps missing a deadline may not have been taught how to plan backward from it. Skills are teachable, and teaching them, directly and patiently, is often the fastest way to change a behavior that looks like it needs correction but simply needs instruction.

I still start here first, with almost everyone. It's the least dramatic explanation and the most overlooked one.

Second Circle: Belonging

Alfred Adler is where this one comes from, and out of everything I was taught, it's shaped how I think about people more than almost anything else.

Adler's idea is that to be a productive member of any group, a person needs a real sense that they belong, that there's a purpose bigger than themselves, and that they matter to the group. You build that sense of belonging through contribution: being appreciated for what you add, being included in the group's decisions, and trusting that the group is fundamentally fair to you.

That last piece matters more than people expect, and it comes with a distinction I try never to lose, one that's more my own thinking than something I'd credit directly to Adler: fairness does not mean sameness. Treating everyone identically isn't the same as treating everyone fairly, and pretending otherwise usually backfires. I also try to hold onto something harder: the world genuinely isn't fair sometimes, and pretending it is doesn't help anyone belong to anything. What builds belonging is being part of the decision-making, being trusted with real contribution, and being treated with consistency people can count on, even when outcomes aren't equal.

When someone isn't cooperating, and it isn't a skills problem, I start looking here. Often what looks like resistance is someone who doesn't feel like they belong to the group they're supposed to be part of.

Third Circle: Developmental Stage and Trauma

Growth doesn't always move in a straight line, especially after trauma. This is where Erik Erikson's stages of development come in, layered with everything I've learned about how trauma disrupts them. Erikson's framework says people move through a predictable sequence of developmental stages across a lifetime. Trauma complicates that sequence in a specific way: a person can keep growing chronologically and even developmentally in most respects, while staying emotionally stuck at the age or stage where a significant trauma occurred.

This shows up constantly in direct care work, and in leadership too. The first time a child yells at you, expecting a reaction, they're often testing whether you'll react the way the adults in their own history reacted. If you're not careful, you get triggered by your own history, not theirs, and respond from your own unprocessed experience instead of what the moment in front of you needs. Part of the training is learning to feel your own feelings fully and honestly, while keeping that experience separate from your interaction with the person in front of you. That's a harder skill than it sounds like, and it's one I still practice.

Fourth Circle: Family Systems

Family gravity is real, and Murray Bowen's family systems theory is where I first learned to name it. Bowen's insight is that a person's family processes the patterns, roles, and dynamics they grew up inside of will almost always carry more influence over their decisions than anyone else's opinion, no matter how well-reasoned that outside opinion is.

This is often the last place I look, not because it matters least, but because it's the deepest and most durable layer. You can teach someone a skill, help them find belonging, and understand where trauma has stalled their development, and still find that the pull of family patterns overrides all of it in each moment. Understanding that doesn't mean you stop trying to help. It means you stop being surprised when family gravity wins, and you start working with it instead of against it.

Why I still use this

I don't only use this framework with children anymore. I use it with employees, with colleagues, and honestly with myself. When something isn't working, I still move through the circles in order: is this a skills gap, a belonging gap, is something developmental or trauma-driven stuck, or is a family system pulling or even pushing harder than anything I can offer. Most problems live in one of those four places, and knowing which one saves an enormous amount of wasted effort solving the wrong problem.

Plenty of people who came up at KHDS in my era sat through the same training. For most, it stayed a set of ideas from a manual. For me, it became something closer to a way of organizing a life, which I think had less to do with the training itself and more with a sense of leadership and responsibility I already carried into the room.

Here's the part most people don't know. I never intended to end up in this field at all. I graduated from college trained to be a high school history teacher. I couldn't find a teaching job that summer, and I took a position at KHDS to get through until something in my actual field came along. I never imagined I'd still be at the same agency thirty-six years later. But somewhere in those early years, as I learned to see people through skills, belonging, development, and family, I stopped waiting for the history teaching job to come through. I'd found the work I was supposed to be doing all along. I just hadn't known it yet. And I will be forever grateful.

Jeannine Field is Executive Director of KHDS