IDD Leader

Your best direct support professional gets promoted to supervisor. Now what? At too many organizations, the answer is sink or swim.

Marie Gwilliam calls it learning to swim by being thrown into the deep end of the pool. At MV Advancements, a smaller Oregon IDD provider with about 100 employees and turnover under 18%, leadership development starts long before the promotion. Marie, Katie McMahon, and Heidi Leggett share what they noticed when frontline supervisors were being left out of the mix, and what they did about it, from an EOS tool called Delegate & Elevate to making sure everyone in...

Your core values are probably on a poster. At MV Advancements, an IDD provider in Oregon, theirs used to be too: framed on the wall, wordy, and easy to ignore. Now, as Katie McMahon puts it, they’d be shocked if anyone got through a day without saying one out loud. And their turnover is just under 18%, down from the 30s.

In this conversation, Marie Gwilliam, Katie McMahon, and Heidi Leggett from MV Advancements share how five core values went from the wall to the way their whole team talks: in the interview, on a new hire’s fi...

You can’t pay people to stay. You also can’t write them up into caring.

So how does one IDD agency keep its direct support staff year after year, with wages above its competitors and health insurance costs held steady for over a decade?

Nick, Susan, and Jessie of Core Services didn’t start with a raise. They started by flipping the org chart: the people on the front line matter more than the office. Then they backed it up with a shadowing program, new promotional roles, a night-shift support role, and a habit of loo...

Imagine telling your board you're about $150,000 in the red this year, and that you chose it. That's the call Susan Arwood made as the new executive director of a Tennessee agency in turmoil, when she put her staff through intensive person-centered training. She bets it paid for itself ten times over.

Susan, now with NADSP, joins Core Services' current leaders, Nick Filarelli and Jessie Dunn, to tell the story of how a small agency went from a place where staff weren't allowed in parts of the office to a model for the field.

You'll hear...

You thank your team constantly. You write the cards, send the texts, say the words out loud. Then someone above you calls and says morale on that team seems low.

That's the exact moment Melanie Bazile describes in this conversation. She leads innovation and expansion at Compass, a provider with more than 1,000 employees. Her own appreciation was sincere, frequent, and not landing, because it was the kind she likes to receive rather than the kind her team did.

You'll hear how Compass figured out what her team actually wanted, and why they now expect every...

Somewhere on your team right now, there's someone with real potential and no real path — and no one's ever asked them what they actually want out of their career, let alone their life.

Melanie Bazile is Director of Innovation and Expansion at Compass, a 1,000+ employee organization that's built an entire culture around a simple, almost uncomfortable question: what are you dreaming about? Not your five-year plan. Your actual dreams — the ones that have nothing to do with your job title.

In this conversation, you'll hear why Compass hires slowly but fires fast, and the very real...

You're short-staffed. Which means your team gets burned out. Which means people leave. Which means you're even more short-staffed than before.

If that loop sounds familiar, here's the uncomfortable part: the way most leaders respond to it usually keeps it running rather than breaking it. In this episode, you'll walk through five of the most common responses to that cycle — hiring harder, adding perks, just trying to survive the week, chasing efficiency, sending out another survey — and why each one, well-intentioned as it is, can quietly make things worse instead of better.

For each one, you...

You've probably had a version of this moment yourself: someone on your team says all the right things about wanting to grow as a leader, and when you ask what "getting better" would actually look like, day to day, the answer gets vague fast.

That gap — between the lofty language and the actual, nameable behaviors — is the entire subject of this episode. Every organization has a scorecard for compliance, for finance, for scheduling. But ask yourself how you'd actually know whether one of your supervisors is genuinely good at managing people, and odds are the answer gets fuzz...

Somewhere on your team right now, a staff member hired last month is quietly deciding whether they'll make it to ninety days. Not because of one bad shift — because of a growing handful of small things nobody's asked them about yet.

If you've ever sat across from someone who just gave notice and thought, "how did I not see this coming," this one's for you. Kris Foss and Nate walk through why the usual approach — waiting for the exit interview to learn what went wrong — almost always arrives too late to help anyone. You'll hear how to use yo...

If some version of this story sounds familiar, you're not alone: There's a rebranding effort — new logo, new shirts, new colors, the whole thing — that lasted about a month before nobody could find the shirts anymore and half the company forgot it ever happened.

Most change efforts in most organizations follow the exact same arc: a lot of energy at the launch, and then silence six months later. Dr. Manny Rodriguez has spent his career studying exactly why that happens — and more usefully, what separates the initiatives that actually stick from the ones that quietly die.

In...

Turnover was sitting at 60% year after year, and Dr. Manny Rodriguez says the first question nobody was asking wasn’t “how do we fix this,” it was “why do we assume we already know why people are leaving?”

You’ve probably felt this tension yourself: exit interviews that never quite tell you the truth, and a gut sense that pay alone can’t be the whole story. Manny is a behavior scientist and organizational performance consultant who’s spent decades working inside organizations to figure out exactly that. In this conversation, he walks through what actually turned a 60% turnover r...

Take a full two weeks off — no email, no check-ins, phone off — and watch what happens to your organization.

If that thought makes you a little uneasy, you're not alone, and Wes and Kristy Mast built their entire leadership system around exactly that discomfort. They lead a multi-state home inspection company, a world away from human services, but the problem they solved is one you'll recognize immediately: how do you build something that doesn't quietly depend on you holding it all together?

In this half of the conversation, they get specific about how that actually work...

Wes Mast used to call himself the "chief everything officer." Answering phones, doing inspections, handling marketing, driving to job sites, and eating lunch in the car — all at the same time. Somewhere in there, he was also picking up dead chickens at chicken houses just to keep the lights on.

That's not where the company is now. It's a multi-state business, and the difference wasn't hiring more people — it was building an actual system for growing leaders, instead of just promoting whoever happened to be best at the job.

Wes and Kristy Mast aren't leaders with...

There’s a sentence Amanda Elder says almost every executive director is thinking, but nobody actually says out loud.

Amanda leads Frontier Community Services in rural Alaska. Kim Champney leads the state’s disability provider association. In this half of their conversation, they get honest about something most leadership content skips past entirely: what it actually feels like to run an organization when you don’t have all the answers, and what you say to your own team when the numbers stop adding up.

You’ll hear how a housing crisis and an aging population are coll...

If you're leading in this field, chances are you already know: there's no real playbook. No one handed you a map for the exact situation you're in right now.

Amanda Elder and Kim Champney lead in rural Alaska, where that's not a metaphor — parts of their state aren't even on a road system. But the bigger truth is one you'll probably recognize: they've had to build the way forward themselves, one hard decision at a time.

You'll hear what happened when Amanda got kicked, hard, by someone she supports — and why she says it's the best...

One organization used to spend three staff members and two full weeks writing their quarterly reports. Now it takes one person about an hour.

That's the kind of number Daniel Caridi, co-founder of Kibu, mentions almost casually — and it's just one of several moments in this conversation that reframe what's actually possible inside a disability services organization.

Daniel talks candidly about building trust as a VC-backed outsider in an industry that has every reason to be skeptical of tech companies, a mistake he's made more than once by growing faster than his product could support, an...

A volunteer dodgeball class for five people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. That's where Daniel Caridi's company started — and somehow it turned into an EHR platform now used by over 400 disability service providers across the country.

Daniel isn't a DSP. He doesn't have a family member with IDD. He stumbled into this world by accident, and that outsider's perspective is exactly what let him see something the rest of the industry had missed: if you design software around making things easier for the person actually entering the data — not the administrator pulling the report — everything downstream gets better...

There was a woman in her 80s. Her one goal was to get her driver's license. When someone finally asked where she'd go first, she said the grocery store. Then: "I'd go see my sister." They didn't know she had a sister. They'd been supporting her for years.

That's what happens when someone asks the right question.

Most leaders in IDD services are asking plenty of questions. Satisfaction surveys. Engagement pulse checks. Annual reviews. But there's a category of question that almost never makes it onto the form — and it turns out to be...

What if the thing you've been dreading is actually the thing that could transform your organization?

For the past year, Nate kept noticing a pattern: a disproportionate number of the highest-performing organizations he interviewed were CQL accredited. When he asked them about it — off the record, almost as an aside — they didn't talk about compliance. They used words like transformational.

So in Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Nate sits down with three leaders from the Council on Quality and Leadership — President & CEO Mary Kay Rizzolo, VP of Services and Systems Excellence Katherine Dunbar, and VP of Tra...

Most IDD organizations genuinely care about their staff. You celebrate DSP Appreciation Week, recognize milestones, and try to say “thank you” in meaningful ways—and yet, people still leave. Not because recognition doesn’t matter, but because much of it isn’t tied to what actually drives retention. Well-intentioned efforts can feel good in the moment without building long-term commitment, and supervisors often miss the everyday moments that matter most.

This episode is the REPLAY of a live, interactive session between Kris Foss (UMN’s Institute on Community Integration) and Nate Beers (IDD Leader). It explores:
--Why recogn...

Most leaders already know they should be listening more. This episode is about what actually happens when someone does.

Steve Gonyea is a parent, foster parent to 178 kids, and one of the most relentlessly solution-oriented advocates in the IDD space. In Part 2 of this conversation, he shares how he went from barely getting five minutes with politicians to one assemblyman clearing his entire afternoon — because Steve was the only person who walked in with solutions instead of complaints.

He also shares how he built a fully operational complex care center in Utica, New York — six days...

What if the people most likely to solve your retention problem are already on your payroll — and nobody's asking them?

Steve Gonyea has been inside more human services systems than almost anyone: IDD, foster care, juvenile justice, mental health. He's a parent, a foster parent to 178 kids, and a former DSP who went on to become one of the most tenacious advocates in New York State. He's not an executive. He doesn't run a provider organization. And that's exactly what makes this conversation so valuable.

In this episode, Steve breaks down what actually happens to a...

Most conversations about AI in human services stop at "it's coming." This one is about what's already here.

G.N. Janes, CEO of Valley Community Services, has spent a decade building a data-driven retention system for frontline supervisors and DSPs. We go deep on what happens when artificial intelligence enters that system — how agentic AI works, what it actually looks like when a model flags a struggling supervisor, and critically, what a human does next.

G.N. also gets honest about what he'd do differently: starting with data governance, eliminating data silos, and making sure th...

Most organizations find out a frontline supervisor is struggling the same way they find out an employee is leaving — too late.

G.N. Janes, CEO of Valley Community Services, spent the last decade trying to change that. What started as a wild guess about where the real problem lived — the frontline supervisor level — became a full data infrastructure with weighted dashboards, engagement surveys, and predictive analytics built to catch problems before they become crises.

In Part 1 of this conversation, G.N. breaks down exactly how the system works: what they track, why scheduling and onboarding turned...

Most workforce programs fail because they stop at 90 days.

The problem compounds from there.

The organizations seeing retention rates up to 90% aren't doing more of the same — they're doing something structurally different. JW Gibbs runs a Department of Labor registered DSP apprenticeship program in Missouri through UMass Boston's Institute for Community Inclusion.

In Part 2, the conversation gets specific: the inner workings of how the program runs, how to get it into your state, and what happens inside an organization when staff start lining up for their slot.

One DSP with ten ye...

The hiring bonus didn't fix it. The career fair didn't fix it. The referral program didn't fix it. And deep down, most leaders in human services already know why — they just haven't had language for it yet.

JW Gibbs spent 25 years in corporate America before entering this field, driven by something personal: a son with significant disabilities who will one day rely on the same workforce JW is trying to fix. He now runs a Department of Labor registered DSP apprenticeship program in Missouri through UMass Boston's Institute for Community Inclusion — with retention rates among participating providers rang...

Leadership can feel heavy—especially when the demands keep growing, decisions keep stacking up, and everyone else’s challenges seem to roll uphill toward you.

For executives, program leaders, and operational leaders in human services, stress often comes less from the mission itself and more from the complexity of leading people, systems, and priorities all at once.

In this episode, Nate explores one often-overlooked leadership skill that can significantly change how you experience that pressure: asking better questions.

This isn’t about surface-level check-ins or task reminders. It’s about using thoughtf...

If you lead a human services organization, you’ve probably watched this play out:

A staff member’s performance starts slipping. Their supervisor sees it. But days turn into weeks, nothing gets said — and by the time anything happens, the employee is disengaged, the team has absorbed the dysfunction, and you’re looking at another preventable vacancy.

It’s not that your supervisors don’t care. It’s that most of them were never shown a simple, repeatable way to have the conversation that actually leads to change.

That gap — between knowing...

If you’ve ever thought, “Why do I feel like I’m babysitting adults?”… this episode is for you.

In human services, most leaders don’t struggle because they don’t care—they struggle because they were never shown what to actually say and do in the moment when staff push back, avoid responsibility, or just don’t follow through.

In this episode, we walk through four real-world situations that supervisors deal with all the time—from passive follow-through issues to more direct resistance—and break down exactly how stronger leaders handle them.

No theory overload. Ju...

Most organizations are promoting the wrong people. Not because they don’t care. Not because they’re careless. But because they’re using the wrong criteria.
 
In this episode, Nate breaks down a simple but powerful rule:
➡️ Never promote an “ask twice” person.

From there, he unpacks the two traits that actually predict supervisor success—and why being a great DSP doesn’t automatically translate into being a great leader.

You’ll also learn how to move beyond the “accidental supervisor” trap by building a more intentional leadership pipeline, including:

What if the thing your best DSPs want most… isn’t more pay?

In Part 2 of this conversation with Scott and Craig De Fasselle from DSP Magnet, we shift from big-picture staffing challenges to something surprisingly simple—and incredibly powerful:

➡️ The small, human moments that make people stay.

From 1-minute appreciation messages to better questions leaders can ask, this episode is packed with practical ways to strengthen connection, improve retention, and create a workplace people don’t want to leave.

Because while compensation matters… it’s often not the deciding factor...

You hired 100 DSPs… so why are you still short-staffed?

In this episode, Nate sits down with Scott De Fasselle and Craig De Fasselle from DSP Magnet to unpack one of the most frustrating realities in IDD services:

👉 You’re hiring… but you’re not actually getting ahead.

We dig into the hidden reasons behind the “revolving door” — and why the problem may not be what you think.

This conversation is packed with powerful reframes:

--It’s not just a recruiting problem
--It’s not just an HR problem
--And it’s defini...

Staff retention can feel incredibly frustrating.

You try retention bonuses. Recognition programs. Hiring harder. Posting more jobs. Improving onboarding. And yet… the vacancies keep coming.

For many leaders in human services, improving retention feels like trying to carry water in your hands—no matter how much effort you put in, it keeps slipping through your fingers.

But the organizations that achieve consistently low turnover aren’t just getting lucky.

They’re doing a few key things differently.

In this solo episode, Nate breaks down five practical shifts that great leaders...

If your team is struggling with retention, the answer probably isn’t another pizza party.

In Part 2 of this conversation, Nate sits down again with workforce strategist Holli Beth Clauser, founder of ABA C.A.R.E.S. Staffing and host of The People Contingency Podcast, to talk about the deeper systems that actually influence whether staff stay or leave.

Together they unpack practical ways leaders can spot early warning signs of turnover, break down silos between departments, and use simple data to strengthen both recruitment and retention.

Along the way, Holli shares wh...

When you're short-staffed, under pressure, and drowning in overtime… speed feels like the only thing that matters.

But what if hiring fast is actually making your turnover worse?

In this episode, Nate sits down with Holli Beth Clauser, founder of ABA C.A.R.E.S. and host of The People Contingency Podcast, to unpack what most human services leaders get wrong about recruitment.

Holli has lived the high-pressure scenario—delivering nearly 90 net hires in four months with just two recruiters. But here’s what makes that story remarkable: 83 of those hires were still...

In this episode, Paige Raetz from Proof Positive explains why turnover is a lagging indicator — and what leaders should measure before staff ever think about leaving.

You’ll learn how organizations are tracking wellbeing, spotting early warning signs of burnout, and improving culture through small daily practices instead of one-time events.

This episode moves from philosophy to operations: what to measure, how to measure it, and how leaders can intervene earlier.

Timestamps:
00:00 Why pizza parties don’t fix burnout
02:27 How to track wellbeing over time
03:02 Wellbeing as a leading indicator
07...

Turnover is often blamed on wages — but what if that’s not the first lever leaders should pull?

In Part 1 of this conversation, Paige Raetz from Proof Positive explains why staff wellbeing isn’t just a morale issue — it directly impacts safety, engagement, errors, and retention. More importantly, she shares practical, low-effort practices organizations are already using to improve workforce stability without adding cost.

You’ll hear how positive psychology and behavior science intersect in real service settings — and how leaders can start applying it immediately.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 - Why wellbeing impacts safety and errors

Advocacy often feels intimidating for provider leaders — time-consuming, political, or like something only professional lobbyists can do.

In this episode, Nate continues his conversation with Libby Vinson, CEO of the New Jersey Association of Community Providers (NJACP), to break that myth apart.

Libby shares what actually gets lawmakers to listen, why provider voices matter more than they realize, and how advocacy can be far simpler — and more relational — than most leaders expect. This conversation reframes advocacy not as politics, but as leadership: telling your story, inviting people in, and making the ask.

If...

Workforce instability in disability services isn’t a mystery — but it is often misunderstood.

In this episode, Nate sits down with Libby Vinson, CEO of the New Jersey Association of Community Providers (NJACP), to unpack why workforce stability doesn’t come from one-time fixes, short-term incentives, or chasing the next solution — and why leadership plays a bigger role than most people realize.

Drawing from her background in advocacy and her first months leading a statewide provider association, Libby shares what she’s seeing across organizations: what separates providers who are barely surviving...

What does your culture actually feel like to the people doing the work?

In this follow-up conversation with John Dickerson of Quillo, we dig into the uncomfortable truth most leaders don’t see: DSPs often move through their day wondering whether a supervisor message or a quick “call me” means they’re in trouble.

And that fear—small as it may seem—is one of the clearest signals that your culture isn’t creating psychological safety.

In this episode, John shares real stories from the field that reveal how leaders uninte...