Workforce

Accountability in most organizations has a direction. It goes down. Watch how it actually operates. A frontline employee is late three times and there is a form for that. The supervisor who never built a workable schedule produced the lateness, and there is no form for that. The director whose shifting priorities created the missed deadline sits in the meeting where the missed deadline is discussed, and the entire conversation is about the person who missed it. We call this a

Every organization has an official story. It lives in the annual report. In the website copy. In the remarks the executive director gives at the gala. It is the story of where the organization came from, what it stands for, and where it is going. It is a good story. Often it is a true story. It is also almost never the story the staff tells. David Boje, whose research on organizational storytelling shapes a significant part of how I think about climate work, described organiz

High first-year turnover is a climate problem. And treating it as a hiring problem is one of the most expensive mistakes a nonprofit organization can make.

Behavioral health is one of the hardest environments to lead in. The work is emotionally heavy. The funding is unstable. The people you serve are often in crisis, and the people you employ are often one hard month away from their own. Turnover is brutal. Burnout is constant. Secondary trauma is real and rarely named. If you can build a healthy climate in that environment, you can build one anywhere.

The addiction treatment and behavioral health workforce is in crisis. That sentence has been true for years and it is getting more true, not less. Turnover rates in residential treatment consistently run 40 to 60 percent annually. The federal government projects significant shortages of addiction counselors and substance abuse social workers through 2030 and beyond. Private equity has entered the addiction treatment space and brought capital and operational pressure without a

Engagement is not a condition. It is a result. It is what happens when the conditions in an organization, the daily climate, are supportive, safe, purposeful, and invested. When those conditions are absent, disengagement is not a problem to solve. It is a signal to read.

The stay interview is not a new concept. Leaders who do not conduct them are not unfamiliar with the idea. They are afraid of the answer.

But mission can also be weaponized. Not maliciously, not usually. But quietly, gradually, in the way that any powerful idea can be used to avoid something harder.

I remember sitting across from someone in an exit interview who cited enormous problems. Real ones. The kind that, if I had heard them six months earlier, might have changed something. But I was hearing them now. On their last day. With their badge already turned in and their next job already lined up. Everything they said was true. Every word of it was useful. And none of it could be applied to the situation that had just walked out the door. That is the exit interview. True

It is a story about the systems an organization has or has not built, and what those systems say about who they are when it counts.

And it starts the moment you decide whether policy is a compliance exercise or a culture-building one.