IDD Leader

If you lead an IDD provider, you’ve probably spent a lot of time putting out fires over staffing: open shifts, overtime, temp coverage, and a revolving door that never stops. What if DSP turnover keeps happening because we spend our time responding to the problem instead of changing the experience that created it?

In this solo episode, host Nate Beers walk through why doubling down on hiring and retention bonuses stalls out when the back door is wide open, and what the strongest agencies do instead. You’ll follow a day in the life of a DSP he calls "Irena", and see how much of what frustrates her (the clunky software, the silence from her supervisor, the coworker problem nobody addresses directly) is completely solvable with more intentional design. You’ll also hear real examples from other agencies: one in Western PA that swapped out its fleet after staff asked for all-wheel drive, and one in Fargo, North Dakota that moved most of its orientation away from e-learning and toward in-person training and mentors.

If you want ideas you can start tomorrow, without a twelve-month system overhaul, this episode gives you a place to begin. It also points you to a free 12-question scorecard that takes about three minutes, asks for no email, and is easy to share with your team.

📊 Free: Future-Ready Organizational Scorecard (12 questions, about 3 minutes, no email needed): https://kibu.com/scorecard

🎟️ Free webinar series with Kibu: details at iddleader.com (look for the banner across the top)

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Still putting out fires?
01:36 Why doubling down on hiring and bonuses stalls
04:22 What are you optimizing for?
05:56 The thing most organizations overlook
06:21 What low-turnover agencies flip upside down
08:35 A day in the life of a DSP (meet Irina)
12:37 What actually made her day hard
14:06 Where to start: remove the friction
14:46 The promoted-but-never-trained supervisor
15:51 The feedback loop that swapped out a whole fleet
17:26 Why clicking through training doesn’t build confidence
21:09 Rate your onboarding, 1 to 5
23:21 The free Future-Ready Scorecard
26:22 Why staff are choosing you every day

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 the company, DSPs included, learns the same ideas in whatever format works for them.

If you lead an IDD organization and want supervisors who are ready before they’re promoted, you’ll also hear why Katie says growing leaders isn’t the same as moving people up the ladder. You’ll hear what Marie has learned since stepping into the top role, the paid month off every employee earns after seven years, and the part of culture change that’s easy to skip over: not everyone comes along.

Learn more about MV Advancements: https://mvadvancements.org/

Free resource: 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Thrown into the deep end
01:25 How they take care of their staff
03:07 A paid month off for every employee
04:30 Why a month, and not a week or two
06:05 Can DSPs get it too?
08:15 What told them to invest in leaders (and Delegate & Elevate)
09:40 Why they won’t promote without support
10:31 Growing leaders isn’t “up the ladder”
12:44 The people they were leaving out of the mix
15:00 Getting everyone to actually read the books
18:19 What Marie learned stepping into the top role
19:45 If you had one sentence on a billboard
21:49 The part nobody says out loud: not everyone comes along

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 first day, in hard conversations, and in performance reviews. If you lead an IDD organization and want values that show up in daily work and help people stay, you’ll hear exactly what that looks like. That includes the “in the box / out of the box” idea that changes how their staff handle conflict, the end of “shift wars” in residential, and the leadership meeting where their scorecard showed five years of work paying off.

🔗 Learn more about MV Advancements: https://mvadvancements.org/

📥 Free resource: 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 "I still get chills"
01:39 How did they do it? Five years in the making
03:26 When the whole agency resisted change
04:55 Turnover: just under 18%
06:31 What EOS is and why it mattered
08:02 Core values from day one (even in the interview)
10:15 The five core values
11:35 Core values in a hard conversation
17:27 How they hold each other accountable
18:13 “In the box” vs. “out of the box”
21:28 Ending “shift wars”
23:25 The scorecard moment: “This is five years of work”
25:52 Where their turnover used to be
28:54 Does every employee have a number?

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 looking at data they didn’t always want to see.

If you lead an IDD organization and you’re tired of watching good people walk out the door, this conversation shows what it looks like when retention is a leadership decision instead of a hiring problem. You’ll hear where they invested, what they learned the hard way, and the one move they’d tell any executive to make first.

Learn more about Core Services: https://www.coreservicestn.com/

Free resource: 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 "You can't pay"
01:39 The annual report and the key decisions behind it
02:25 Why DSPs matter more than the office
03:37 You can’t pay people to stay
04:36 Wages, and insurance costs absorbed for over a decade
05:35 The internship and shadowing program
06:33 The remote support specialist role
08:33 The data they didn’t want to see: “All the time”
10:06 Where they want to be in five years
14:41 Change before you have to
15:50 Push decisions to the front line
18:01 Humor and the office puppy
21:10 “I never said we were functional”
25:11 The one move to make

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 what she found when she walked in, why she invited her loudest critics to the table, and the other bets they made along the way: pay raises that could have blown the budget and a technology pilot that lost about $40,000 a year. You'll also hear the change Susan says she would make faster if she could do it over.

If you're weighing an investment in your people that looks expensive today, this one is for you.

Learn more about Core Services: https://www.coreservicestn.com/
Free resource: 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The board's reaction to a very big deficit year
03:24 – The handoff Susan counts among her biggest successes
04:44 – What Susan found when she took over
06:45 – The workshop most people attended, and the pushback to closing it
08:47 – Why they chose better over bigger
12:08 – Why Core turns some families away
16:46 – The training bet that put them $150k in the red
18:07 – The pay raises that could have blown the budget
18:44 – The independent-living pilot that lost $40,000 a year
21:58 – Inviting the loudest critics to the table
24:13 – The rule that kept staff out of parts of the office
26:35 – Susan planned to watch quietly. She didn't.
32:06 – What Susan would do differently
33:21 – This week's action move

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 supervisor to know each direct report's primary language of appreciation. You'll also hear the difference between having a person-centered plan and thinking in a person-centered way (including a budget decision where the executive team's pay was cut before any service was touched), and the growth mistake Melanie sees most often in smaller providers: waiting to hire until you're already in pain.

If your recognition efforts are sincere and morale still isn't moving, this one is for you.

LEARN MORE
Melanie Bazile on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-bazile-bb3073163/
Compass: https://www.compasscares.com/
Compass on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/compass-llc/posts/?feedView=all
Melanie's podcast, A Side of Hope: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-side-of-hope/id1763108245

FREE RESOURCE
7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – "I'm telling them thank you all the time. It's not possible."
01:23 – Why Compass tracks turnover but leans into retention
04:00 – The interim manager job where the thank-yous weren't landing
05:02 – What her team actually wanted instead
07:08 – Could your supervisors name each person's language?
08:30 – The four languages of workplace appreciation
12:31 – Person-centered paperwork vs. person-centered thinking
14:20 – The first cuts came from the executive team
17:50 – The growth mistake that starts in pain
19:09 – When "the way we've always done it" quietly stops working
23:37 – The spreadsheet that took twenty minutes instead of weeks
24:59 – Two organizations that shared one recruiter
26:29 – Why leaders avoid discomfort
28:45 – What's giving her hope right now

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 cost of tolerating the wrong fit for too long. You'll hear a genuinely unplanned succession story — one where investing in someone else's growth mattered in a way Melanie never could have predicted until she needed it most. And you'll get a look inside "Dream Culture," from its origins in a book about a struggling janitorial company to a CFO who went skydiving to keep a promise, to an employee writers' group that's now produced six published books.

If you've ever wondered what it would look like to build a team that's actually thriving instead of just surviving, this one's for you.

Learn more about Melanie — www.linkedin.com/in/melanie-bazile-bb3073163
Learn more about Compass — https://www.compasscares.com/

Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – A "dream culture"?
01:49 – Why Compass hires slowly but fires fast
04:15 – Still curious after 34 years in the field
06:49 – A provider, a software company, and a consulting arm
08:36 – The real challenge of growing an organization
09:33 – The "behemoth" comment, and 30 years mapped in sticky notes
13:53 – What got you here won't get you there
14:52 – Inside Leadership U, their year-long leadership investment
19:23 – The succession story that changed everything
22:01 – "That's gutsy" — the conversation nobody wants to have
23:31 – Taking the lids off people
25:18 – Where "Dream Culture" actually came from
29:42 – The CFO who went skydiving to keep his word
30:49 – The writers' group that's produced six published books

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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'll get the reframe: what to look at instead, and what it actually takes to interrupt the cycle rather than just outworking it.

If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right and the turnover numbers still won't move, this one's for you.

Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The turnover trap that keeps repeating itself
00:36 – Five mistakes, and the opposite direction to move in
00:59 – Mistake #1: "We just need to hire more people"
04:16 – Mistake #2: "Let's add more benefits and bonuses"
06:36 – Mistake #3: "Let's just make it through this weekend"
10:07 – Mistake #4: "Let's get really efficient"
13:06 – Mistake #5: "Fill out our survey"
15:11 – The bear metaphor (and what it says about listening under pressure)
16:51 – This week's action move

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 fuzzy just as fast.

In this episode, you'll get a look at why that gap exists, what Chick-fil-A's "my pleasure" can teach you about turning a vague value into something coachable, and four concrete, observable behaviors worth considering for your own team — not as the definitive list, but as proof of what's possible once you stop treating leadership development as something fuzzy your supervisors are just supposed to figure out on their own.

If you've ever tried to coach someone on "being a better leader" and watched the conversation go nowhere, this one's for you.

Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The confession that changed how Nate sees leadership development
01:50 – Welcome to IDD Leader
02:29 – Why there's a scorecard for everything except this
04:32 – The core problem: you can't develop what you haven't defined
06:51 – Why this gap hides in plain sight
09:46 – The Happy Days Agency example
12:25 – "Are you familiar with Chick-fil-A?"
18:34 – What "my pleasure" actually teaches about leadership
19:43 – Skill one: lead with good questions
23:17 – Skill two: listen intentionally
25:06 – Skill three: celebrate specifically
26:43 – Skill four: coach immediately
29:51 – Why common sense doesn't equal common practice
30:41 – This week's action move

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 your own turnover data to know exactly when to check in before you lose someone, the real difference between a response that sounds caring and one that actually builds trust, and what happens in the space between hearing a concern and doing something about it — the gap where trust is either built or quietly lost.

You'll walk away with a clearer sense of what to ask, when to ask it, and how to respond in a way your staff will actually remember.

Learn more from Kris Foss — foss0395@umn.edu
Learn more from Nate — nate@iddleader.com
Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – Why this episode looks a little different
02:50 – Meet Kris Foss
05:50 – The big idea: stay interview or pre-exit interview
07:21 – The one-in-ten marriage question nobody would actually ask
09:42 – The tech issue that almost became a resignation
11:03 – What are your conversations really about?
14:50 – What a stay interview is (and isn't)
20:10 – Checkup, not autopsy
23:47 – Building your own framework from your own data
25:39 – The stat that changes your timing entirely
29:38 – The response that builds trust vs. the one that doesn't
36:58 – What this data reveals beyond individual fixes
39:59 – Why listening alone isn't enough
41:29 – The listen-to-change gap
49:53 – Turning friction into a genuine opportunity

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 this half of the conversation, you'll hear a one-line definition of culture blunt enough that you'll probably start using it yourself, a story about a workplace ritual that started almost by accident and ended up cutting turnover by half, and a simple reframe on retention that reveals why "they didn't leave" is a much lower bar than most leaders realize.

If you've ever watched a good idea fizzle out in your own organization and wondered why, this one's for you.

Learn More
--Dr. Manny Rodriguez — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mannyarodriguez
-- Free resource — 7 Quiet Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The culture definition that says it all in one line
01:06 – Meet Dr. Manny Rodriguez, back for part two
02:28 – Why does change fail to stick?
05:55 – The book that changed how he thinks about "sticking"
07:39 – Big antecedents in your face
10:09 – The welcome ritual that started almost by accident
11:12 – The turnover drop nobody planned for
12:03 – The blunt definition of culture, straight from the source
13:26 – What a problem-centered culture actually sounds like
15:24 – Why "they didn't leave" is too low a bar
16:54 – The leadership habit called reciprocity
18:41 – The billboard sentence for every human services exec
21:45 – Two upcoming books, and the compass that inspired one of them

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 rate into 20% — without a single change to pay or bonus structure.

He also shares something heavier: a story from outside human services about what happens when an organization’s stated priorities and its actual attention quietly drift apart, and why that gap matters just as much in a group home as it does on a factory floor.

If you’ve ever suspected there’s a real answer buried under your own turnover numbers, this one’s for you.

🔗 Dr. Manny Rodriguez — https://www.linkedin.com/in/mannyarodriguez

📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – The alarm nobody wants to hear
01:04 – The retention myth this episode debunks
02:37 – What pattern are most leaders missing?
05:24 – The accidental start to a 26-year career
10:00 – Meet the godfather of organizational behavior management
14:32 – A story that makes it all tangible
15:01 – The retention problem everyone thought they understood
16:16 – Why exit interviews rarely tell you the truth
19:19 – The stay interviews that revealed what was really happening
21:21 – The turnaround: from 60% to 20%
24:54 – What a chemical company taught him about priorities
30:30 – The alarm that changed everything
32:40 – What this means for rapidly growing organizations
35:36 – This week's action move

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 works. You'll hear the test they run to find hidden bottlenecks before those bottlenecks find them, why they treat "replaceable" as a compliment instead of a threat, and a three-part framework for difficult conversations that keeps them from turning into either avoidance or a blowup. There's also a moment where a leader on their team was convinced her staff had stopped caring — until the data told a completely different story.

If you've ever wondered whether your organization could actually thrive during a season without you, this one's for you.

🔗 Learn more about Wes and Kristy — https://www.levelup2lead.com/
📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The line that reframes what leadership ROI really means
00:55 – Would your organization survive if you got hit by a bus?
02:54 – How do you turn a good leader into a leader-maker?
03:59 – The highest ROI move any leader can make
07:02 – The two-week test that reveals your real bottlenecks
10:08 – The silly bottleneck almost nobody thinks to fix
11:02 – Why "replaceable" is actually a compliment
12:30 – What tolerating incompetence really costs your culture
16:01 – The art of a difficult conversation
18:31 – The scheduling story that changed how she read her own team
22:08 – When Nate's own assumption turned out to be wrong
23:24 – The trick for making sure people actually understood you
26:14 – Why performance issues are almost never really about performance
29:10 – The legacy lesson Wes & Kristy hope their team remembers

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 within human services--but they are experts at developing people and businesses that don't just run from one crisis to the next.

In this conversation, they walk through the mindset shift that gets a leader out of the bottleneck, a surprisingly cheap benefit that outperforms their 401k match in staff loyalty, and the specific test they run before anyone gets promoted into leadership — because they learned the hard way that wanting the job and being ready for it aren't the same thing.

If you've ever felt like every decision in your organization somehow finds its way back to your desk, this one's for you.

🔗 Learn more about Wes and Kristy — https://www.levelup2lead.com/
📥 Free resource — 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout
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TIMESTAMPS

00:00 – From chicken houses to "chief everything officer"
01:17 – Meet two leaders who never planned to teach leadership
03:08 – The mindset shift that gets you out of the bottleneck
03:47 – Why most leaders assume everyone can problem-solve like they do
05:33 – Slow down to speed up
09:14 – The moment they realized handwritten notes weren't going to cut it
13:30 – The bold bet they made when COVID nearly killed the business
16:12 – Why they're not actually passionate about home inspections
19:59 – The $50 bet nobody could win
22:09 – The benefit that beats their 401k match
25:18 – Becoming the "Chief Repeating Officer"
26:30 – Why raising your hand isn't enough to get promoted
27:06 – Inside the leadership academy anyone can take
30:41 – The Peter Principle, and the promotion that backfires

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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 colliding into a math problem no provider association can out-strategize its way through. You’ll hear why one of these leaders finally stopped pretending she wasn’t overwhelmed, and the one sentence that changed how she carries it. And partway through, host Nate Beers steps out from behind the mic to share something he wasn’t planning to say either.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re supposed to have it all together and don’t, this one’s for you.

🔗 Frontier Community Services — https://www.fcsonline.org/
🔗 Alaska Association on Developmental Disabilities (AADD) — https://aaddalaska.org/
📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

TIMESTAMPS
00:16 – What Amanda says every executive director is thinking
01:35 – The workforce problem no provider can out-strategize
02:27 – Why the numbers in Alaska "just don't add up"
04:08 – Rethinking what independence actually looks like
06:36 – Inside the scheduling model built for burned-out DSPs
09:19 – When 24/7 care isn't actually what someone needs
10:42 – The pilot project that let leaders "dream ten big dreams"
14:38 – Giving yourself permission to not have all the answers
16:34 – The moment one leader realized she'd become the problem
18:59 – The quote that changed how Amanda carries being overwhelmed
19:35 – Nate shares something he wasn't planning to say
24:49 – The sentence no executive director is allowed to say
26:19 – An old cartoon's lesson about failure and success
28:35 – What both leaders refuse to give up on

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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 thing that ever happened to her leadership.

You'll hear how a promotion gone wrong became the blueprint for a completely different kind of job, and the $250 benefit that came out of it.

And you'll hear how direct support professionals in Alaska got something almost no one in this field has: an actual seat at the table when policy gets made.

No map. No excuses. If you're figuring it out as you go, this one's for you.

🔗 Frontier Community Services — https://www.fcsonline.org/
🔗 Alaska Association on Developmental Disabilities (AADD) — https://aaddalaska.org/
📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

Timestamps
00:00 – Why the standard workforce playbook doesn't work here
01:13 – Meet two leaders working without a map
02:26 – What made them choose a different path
03:15 – "There's not even a road system"
03:55 – The conference that changed how Kim saw her career
08:55 – Why Amanda never wanted this job in the first place
11:11 – Giving yourself permission to innovate when the house is on fire
14:23 – The moment that changed everything about how Amanda leads
19:42 – Meet Kyle — hired for the hot dogs, not the job
22:07 – The promotion that didn't work, and the job that did
23:40 – "I think that's a cop out"
25:17 – The $250 benefit that came from one hard conversation
28:21 – How Alaska gave DSPs a real seat at the policy table

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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, and a leadership habit he's had to unlearn as his company scaled past thirty employees. He also lays out, in plain language, where AI is actually headed inside compliance work — and shares two statistics about the health outcomes of people with IDD that he believes deserve far more attention than they're getting.

If you've ever felt like you personally have to touch every decision for things to go right, or if your team is buried in reporting that doesn't need to exist, this one's worth the time.

🔗 Kibu — https://kibu.com/

📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

Timestamps
00:00 – The line Daniel wants every executive in America to hear
02:27 – How do you earn trust as an outsider in this industry?
03:16 – Why staying profitable mattered more than raising another round
04:59 – The mistake Daniel admits Kibu made more than once
06:35 – The lesson in choosing to "grow better, not bigger"
09:08 – The three types of organizations that adopt Kibu
12:06 – The report that used to take two weeks, now takes one hour
13:51 – What it means to give your team real permission to speak up
21:43 – What Daniel's had to unlearn as a leader
22:28 – The moment he realized he'd become the bottleneck
24:20 – What's coming next for Kibu
26:19 – A plain-language walkthrough of agentic AI
30:55 – Two statistics about IDD health outcomes most people haven't heard
---------
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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.

In this conversation, Daniel walks through how a Zoom dance class during COVID turned into a full compliance and content platform, why he thinks compliance culture has quietly pulled the sector's focus away from the people it serves, and the surprisingly simple feedback mechanics — including a running joke about confetti — that helped staff satisfaction with their own documentation jump from 18% to 81%.

If you've ever wondered whether there's a better way to get your team to actually want to do their paperwork, this one's for you.

🔗 Daniel Caridi & Kibu — https://kibu.com/
📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

Timestamps

00:00 – The stat that made Daniel rethink everything about EHR design
01:00 – Meet Daniel Caridi, the founder who never planned to work in this sector
02:39 – How a volunteer dodgeball class turned into a tech company
04:07 – The first provider partnership that changed everything
05:48 – The real estate major with zero software background
07:11 – The insight most of the industry never saw
08:56 – Why Daniel says the whole platform is built on listening
09:46 – "Nobody gets into this job to make Uncle Sam happy"
12:15 – Turning 30 minutes of paperwork into a few minutes of talking
16:53 – Why generic AI tools miss the mark in this sector
18:23 – Inside the dashboard that shows exactly who's behind
20:06 – The police car analogy that explains why visibility works
21:18 – The gift card habit most providers never hear about
22:48 – The stat: satisfaction jumps from 18% to 81%

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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 the one that changes everything: what do you actually want?

Not what the checklist covers. Not what the role requires. What do the people you support envision when they dream of a good life? What do your frontline staff want out of their career, their growth, maybe even their life? That gap — between what organizations assume and what staff would say if someone genuinely asked — is one of the most underestimated drivers of turnover in the field. And this episode is about how to close it.

Mary Kay Rizzolo, Katherine Dunbar, and Courtney Kelly Chapman from the Council on Quality and Leadership share what the research shows about the link between how you treat your staff and what happens to the people they support, what genuinely high-retention organizations do on the ground that others don't, and how a tool called Personal Outcome Measures has been uncovering things organizations never knew — about people they'd been supporting for years.

If you're a leader who's been asking questions but not quite hearing the answers, this one is worth your full attention.

🔗 Learn more about CQL: https://www.c-q-l.org
📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: https://iddleader.com/burnout

⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 – "No dream snuffing" — and the woman in her 80s who wanted a driver's license
00:55 – Do you know what your DSPs actually want?
02:27 – The connection between quality and workforce stability
02:57 – When you treat staff with dignity, here's what the data shows
04:34 – Why CQL's focus groups with DSPs are the favorite part of accreditation
05:54 – What DSPs say they want most — and the research outcomes behind it
08:59 – Who absorbs the most when an organization struggles with quality
11:22 – What high-retention organizations actually do differently
11:59 – Why closing the feedback loop matters more than running the survey
15:28 – "No dream snuffing" — the philosophy behind personal outcome measures
17:48 – The performance punishment trap nobody talks about
20:08 – What surprises organizations when CQL holds up the mirror
21:07 – The woman with two daughters nobody knew about
21:38 – The woman in her 80s who wanted a driver's license (full story)
24:32 – Person-centered planning applied to staff — the most innovative thing in the episode
29:03 – "People don't want a good plan. They want a good life."

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout

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 Training and Special Projects Courtney Kelly Chapman — to find out why.

This isn't an audit. It's not a checklist exercise, and it's definitely not the DMV. What gets uncovered here is a model built on appreciative inquiry, real partnership, and a relentless focus on the why behind every policy and procedure — and the story of one organization whose frontline staff went from dreading accreditation to wearing buttons that said "ask me about outcomes."

If you've ever associated accreditation with dread, this conversation might just change your mind.

🔗 Learn more about CQL: c-q-l.org

📥 Free resource — 7 Warning Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Staff: iddleader.com/burnout

⏱️ Timestamps
00:00 – "When's the last time a compliance process energized you?"
02:26 – Why CQL kept showing up in Nate's interviews
03:19 – The real culture shift accreditation creates
05:10 – Why "the why" matters more than the checklist
07:28 – Meet Mary Kay Rizzolo — and the buttons that said "ask me about outcomes"
09:26 – Meet Katherine Dunbar — from DSP to accreditation lead
11:10 – Meet Courtney Chapman — drafted into CQL on a Tuesday
13:26 – Why this "feels nothing like an audit"
15:19 – What true partnership looks like on the ground
18:26 – Can you actually fail accreditation?
21:20 – The different levels of CQL accreditation, explained
23:49 – What "basic assurances" and "personal outcome measures" actually mean
25:24 – How most organizations find their way to CQL

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Do your frontline supervisors sometimes unintentionally contribute to staff turnover? It happens so easily because... Most supervisors were never trained to lead. Get The 7 Quiet Danger Signs Your Supervisors Are Burning Out Their Teams and learn how high-retention agencies spot — and fix — these issues fast. https://iddleader.com/burnout