IDD Leader

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...

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...

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 a...

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 su...

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 finan...

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 ...

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 Rodrigue...

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 ...

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 d...

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...

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&...

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 ...

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 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...

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....

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 ...

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 superviso...

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 w...

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...