And welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host, and I’m the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with roposis if you threw me for a curve with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate, with what’s up. Hey Tony, here’s what’s up. HR overview for non-HR professionals. Trust is key, and so is strong middle management for CEOs and EDs responsible for human resources in their nonprofit. Janelle Miller Moravec helps with what to focus on and how to manage job descriptions and hiring, retention, promising employees, problem employees, talent development, performance management, and more. She is executive director at Youth and Family Counseling. On Tony’s take too. Hails from the gym more sourdough for Rob. Here is HR overview for non-HR professionals. It’s a genuine pleasure to welcome Janelle Miller Moravec to nonprofit Radio. She’s a nonprofit leader and mental health advocate. She has led youth and family counseling as executive director since 2009, driving its growth and impact across Lake County, Illinois. She’s managed teams as a non-HR professional for nearly 20 years. You’ll find the agency at counselingforall.org and you’ll find Janelle on LinkedIn. Welcome to nonprofit radio, Janelle. Thanks, Tony. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. We’re talking about uh HR non-HR professional, you are adamant. You are not an HR. I am not an HR professional, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t do a lot of it. Exactly. Tell us what you do at the agency, the agency is about, uh, since 1962, I believe, mental health counseling, please tell us. So, youth and family counseling is a community-based mental health counseling center. We see whatever walks in the door. Um, we see across the lifespan, people from all walks of life, and we’ve evolved over the years to think about access to mental health care in all kinds of different ways from Affordability to cultural. Um, linguistic availability, geographic availability. So we’ve grown with each iteration. It’s been, it’s been a wild ride. I just celebrated my 25th workniversary, so I’ve been actually here at YFC for 25 years. Yes, you were, right? I was before I came up to the fundraising. Yeah. Congratulations on your work. Never heard of congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it’s a big milestone. Yeah, it’s a good time. You’re well established in Lake County. Uh, do you get to see any clients? Well, since I am a fundraising and not a clinician, um, one would hope, right? I don’t. I. OK. But no, I don’t have any of the clinical certifications, um. I, I have been working in the environment, so I know enough to be dangerous. Yeah, no, no, no, no, it wouldn’t be, no, no, but yeah, let’s go to a question that might be a little more appropriate. Um, non non for HR pros. uh, you’re doing, you say you do, you do HR every day, you think? Yeah, for sure. I do HR every day. Yeah, OK, OK, yeah. So what do you think, where’s your focus as the, as the executive director, CEO? What, what do you, what do you, what are you focusing on around HR? Oh, so many things, right? So many things. So yeah, so I think it falls into two buckets, right? So HR is my, it keeps me safe. It keeps YFC safe. So in this bucket you’ve got compliance, risk management. I mean, if honestly, I don’t worry as the executive director. I don’t worry about the big stuff. Um, I don’t worry about the, um. breaches in confidentiality is pretty secure. I worry about HR laws and someone not being paid appropriately or classified appropriately. One of those could take us down. So it’s a huge um It’s my best friend on compliance and if I have a really good, if I manage that risk, that’s my, that’s HR right there, right? And then the other big bucket is performance management talent development. We’re a fee for service organization, so philanthropy covers 40% of our budget and fees for service 60%. Um, I need this to happen. That means I have to have productive employees. And so, taking care of them, um, developing them, um, providing an environment where they can show up and do their work and, and be successful, giving them the tools, those are all the things that I do every day. And a lot of that is HR, right? Absolutely, I think it all is that you just enumerated, yeah, uh, on the compliance side, how do you get help with the, uh, the laws of HR, making sure that like you said, employees are categorized appropriately, right, as an employee or they’re a 1099 independent contractor, but that’s just one, that’s just one example. How do you get help with the compliance side? So, uh, I’m not an expert, right? I’m not an HR professional. And so, uh, at the beginning when we were a smaller organization, our budget was under a million dollars. Um, I relied on my board. I was careful to always have an HR professional on my board and, and the one that I had when I stepped into this role and she stayed with me for a hot minute until I got my feet under me. Um, she was the one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. She taught me so much and she was so generous in sharing the resources of her team. Um, so it, it morphed from, you know, the, the board person helping me to Then we, we had enough extra resources, so we actually joined a lawyer. There’s a lawyer here in Illinois and she has a consultant program for nonprofits, behavioral health nonprofits specifically, and she was my Go to resource, she would let me know about law changes and then say, and here’s what you need to do with that. Your handbook should now say this. She would say, and you should now do that. And so, um, thinking back to, you know, when they first talked about having the Fair Labor Standards Act changes and all of the, you know, raising the wages and the, the levels so that you’re exempt or non-exempt. She walked me through all of that. Uh, I was thrilled when in 2021 we were big enough to need more HR but we’re still not big enough to need like a whole team of HR vice president of human resources right we’re not big enough. There are only 32 of us, um, but we, we do have a fractional HR so we did outsource and that’s been a really great solution for YFC and this sort of in between space. Um, I have. Through our outsourced partner I have strategy support and then every day make sure the benefits are entered properly support, um, so it’s looked different depending on how big or where YFC was today our budget’s just under 3 million, so we’ve grown quite a bit. That’s a cool evolution though from board member to consultant to fractional HR. Yeah, yeah, so you’re still managing it. Yeah, exactly. And I guess I’ve come to this point, um, in my leadership where I look around and I say, I, there are certain things that that I can delegate in HR and that everybody should know. And then there are certain things that I, no matter even if I have a vice president of HR I still should hold, right? That strategy, some of that vision, I should for sure hold it. What’s delegable. Um, Benefits, right, onboarding, hiring, um, you know, some of the talent development, performance management, I think of it, you know, our, our. Our org chart looks like a typical org chart, right? It’s got the triangle with me at the top. I take care and manage 4 to 5 people and everybody under them, they’ve got 4 or 5 under under each of them. And if we all take care of our next person down. We’ve got a pretty solid, a pretty solid group. OK, and we’re gonna talk about the importance of middle management. I know you rely on them. They’re critical secret sauce. Let’s talk a little more first though about talent development, performance management, you see those two bucket, your compliance and your, your talent development. What, what do you, what, what, how are you spending your time around the, the talent part, growing people? Oh. We spend a lot of time on growing people. So in, in my world, behavioral healthcare, we’re actually in a workforce shortage. We’ve been in a workforce shortage for many years, pre-COVID. And so it’s not just, uh, to attract that worker, the skilled, experienced, talented worker that we need to work with our clients. It’s not enough to just pay a salary. Uh, they can work anywhere. We have to offer value. And what we’ve learned. That is valuable to these mental health professionals is growth. And so we have leaned into growth um pretty consistently. So today, even though we’re just 32 people, there’s a career ladder for clinicians at YFC and it’s, it has 3 levels, um, when they work. When they shut their doors and go into with a client, right? They’re all doing the same job, but they’re doing it at different proficiency levels. So at this point, we have 10 core competencies and we’ve to find out the behaviors, um, for each of those core competencies at each level, and we are actively training and tracking progress and assessing our clinicians so that. We are making sure that we’re promoting and moving everybody up that ladder as much as we can. Um, so that’s just one piece of how we’re, we’re leaning into that professional development piece. But there’s also, OK. No, it just sounds it sounds pretty complex. What it is, but it’s kind of, it’s kind of fun. It’s like, it’s like making a crossword puzzle, right? Uh, I struggle with crossword puzzles, but yes, no, no, I, no, no, no. Uh, yeah, no, it’s essential. Uh, I mean, it’s, it’s an investment. I’m not by any means, uh, minimizing or denigrating like it’s just, it, it sounds like a, it sounds like a. A large investment, but it’s an investment in your professionals, in your team. So it’s an investment worth making. I mean, this, this core competencies and 10 behaviors under each competency, each for different 3 different levels, you know, that’s, that’s a lot of. Talent development infrastructure to to put together but. But it’s worth it. Yeah, it’s totally worth it because my, my teams are growing, right? And, and now they’re staying. What I need them to do is I need them to stay. There you go. I get to retention. Yeah, retention rate. I mean, you’ve got a shortage, you can’t afford to lose anymore. You really don’t want to lose anymore. We’re gonna get, we’re gonna get to employees. We’ll get there later, but hoping, hoping to avoid firing, but sometimes not. But so yeah, so you got a shortage you’re trying to retain people. This is a, this is the staff team retention. plan, right? Right. And everybody knows, right? It turnover is expensive. And it’s not only is expensive, it’s not good for client care. Like, it’s, it’s awful when you have to tell a client, Oh yeah, you’re gonna work on your 3rd therapist here at YFC. Like that’s, like, that doesn’t do anybody any favors. So we really want our therapists to come and to grow with us, and, and we do everything we can on a whole bunch of different levels to make that happen. How often do you do? Formal performance reviews with with the with your manager just you know I don’t you so yeah, but we have a quarterly cadence and so most of my clinicians are getting weekly supervision um with uh with the supervisor for for clinical reasons, right? They’re reviewing their cases, they’re they’re getting another set of eyes on those cases, making sure it’s appropriate. We have to do that as a standard. Care. But what we’ve done is we’ve rolled into that, you know, some performance management and some talent development. We’ve asked our supervisors to be mentors, coaches, teachers, cheerleaders, um, they know their, they, they are the person for their team, right? So, Suzie, you know, who’s on Katie’s team. Katie is her person, and we know that if she has anything, be it I’m not feeling well, I need to take 2 weeks off. Is that OK? I have a tough case, um, any of that stuff. She’s gonna ask her person because she sees that person every week. And so we really had to upskill our, our supervisors. There, there again, leaning on your middle back, right? All right, so now, now we’ve teased this a couple of times. Why don’t you, um, explain how essential middle management is for a 30 person organization, 32. 32. Uh, they’re my they’re my secret sauce. They’re my whole reason that we get anything done here is, so, um, they’re super important to me. Those middle managers, um, and, and it’s, they’re in this uncomfortable position. Of being between leadership. These folks in the trenches. These are the folks that report to you, right? We’re talking about. They’ve actually not to me, to my clinical director for the most part. Report to the clinical director, not to you. Correct. OK. OK. Seniors. OK. OK. So they’re your secret sauce. I’m sorry, I just wanted to get that’s a really great clarifying question. Um, so yeah, so it’s um they report in. And I lost my train of thought. You asked me. I asked you why why middle management is so essential, how, how much you lean on them, what their responsibilities are. So I, I covered, you know, a little bit about how my staff, they work with their, their supervisor, that’s the go to person. So I need that person to be. Trained in HR, know how to understand our business model so that they can understand and, and guide that productivity. They’re doing discipline, right? I need them to be great at giving feedback, positive and negative feedback. Um, and those are all HR things. They’re signing their time cards, you know, and I, this year we’ve actually empowered them. To make some hiring decisions. So they get to make that first round of interviews and present a final, you know, couple of candidates to their supervisor, whoever that may be, and we’re empowering people to, to make those choices and to try that out. And sometimes it works, sometimes they make, you know, choices that maybe weren’t so great. And that’s a really good learning experience. On the, oh, absolutely, of course, hopefully we do learn from mistakes. Well, you know, there was a red flag in the interview, but I, I ignored it type thing or like that. Um, does every new employee get an interview with the executive director? No, no, not necessarily. It doesn’t make you nervous doesn’t make you nervous. No, no. OK, now she’s, if you can see the video, she’s like, mm mm, no, no way, no way. All right. Not nervous. Listen, I, um. I, I, I feel like I feel good about our process, you know, I, I’ve trained them in, in how to, how to hire, how to ask questions, right? And, and we, when we go to hire a position, together, we put together a guide. Well, they put together a guide, whoever the hiring manager is, but they, they have to sit down and they have to think about before I let them post the job, um. What is this person gonna do? Right, that’s the job description. But then what makes it a great job? Like, why would someone want this job? And then what are the challenges that come along with this job? And then, what are the absolute essential things, characteristics that I need to have in in a in a candidate, in a new hire. And then we base our interview questions off of how they answer those questions. And so we’re actually interviewing and asking for examples of tell me a little bit about You know, how you, how you break into a new team and how you establish a relationship with someone you’ve never met before. You know, that’s a, an example. So, I think they have a good process and I, I trust them. Trust. You, yeah, you trust the the trust trust those folks who are the secret sauce. Um, when we were emailing uh about topics and I asked you, you know, how how does HR support hiring retention and firing. You said something that you just, you just mentioned very briefly, but we’re gonna do it. Job descriptions, job descriptions essential, yeah, another, another essential element to HR for non-HR professionals. Why, why is a job now you don’t mean the description that goes out to the public, do you? Or do when you’re hiring, or do you mean an internal job description that you were just referring to internal job descriptions a minute ago, but yeah, about job descriptions. Why are these so important? Well, I think your job description is so important because that is the position, right? You hire for the position. You don’t hire a person, you hire someone to do a job. And so, what is that job? What are you asking them to do? And I had always had sort of two different documents, an internal version and an external version. And then my HR team was like, We think they should be one. Like, why would you, why would you not be completely transparent about what you’re expecting this person to do? And I said, oh my gosh, but that’s so much. And they said, right. Don’t you think you’d want people to know? And so now we, we put the whole thing up there. Um, and it’s a lot, but, uh, to their point, we’re getting more qualified candidates. So it’s, it’s a better, so our job job descriptions are key because you’re defining the purpose of the role, you’re just you’re saying who it reports to. So you’re just reading a job description, you’ll know, OK, this is kind of how I fit into the organization. Here’s who I report into and I can kind of get a sense of where that person is in a hierarchy and Here are my essential job functions, right? All these are the things that I’m gonna do every day. And then the other ones, OK, those are things I’m gonna be involved in, but they’re not gonna be my Right, my, my direct responsibilities all the time, or I might do them like once a year. You got those. So you have a pretty good idea of what’s expected of you, and then you get to see the how you need to act and hopefully the company has laid out a little bit of the how they want people to work. Um, and so that’s, that’s really important for when you’re hiring and bringing that person on, but it’s also important for when you have them on because That’s, you could say, but this is what we hired you to do. And if you’re not doing that, then you’re not doing the job we hired you to do. Now we’re getting into the performance management. Right. Exactly. And so we have gotten to be really pretty specific when we talk about the caseload you’re expected to carry, we say what that is. And then if that person isn’t delivering that caseload, it’s like, but this, this is the job. And so, Let’s talk about how, what’s getting, what’s getting in the way? And it’s, there’s always, it’s always curiosity first. Like, what’s going on? Why, why are, like, why? Why aren’t you meeting the productivity goals? And it could be anything from poor time management to, um, they need to work on their rapport so that they are warmer and connecting quicker with people. It can be, I’m getting all kinds of clients that make me really uncomfortable because it’s triggering something inside of me. But we have to have a trusting relationship with the supervisor so that you can work through those and then say, OK, well, what can we do? Let’s time management, let’s block out your schedule. Where can, how can we help you, you know, plan your time so that you can get everything done. You know, if it’s, you know, I need to work on those rapport building skills, OK, let’s, why don’t you do this training and then we’ll role play in our next supervision, and we’re going to work on that, that skill, and they’ll work on it every week. So you have a very high touch model of of HR. Yes, we do, we do. I don’t know that because of the nature of the work is all high touch, obviously personal, these are, these are therapists or counselors or psychologists, right? Yeah, very high. Uh, EQ, right to the work, so maybe that suits you, but, or maybe, you know, it’s, I mean it sounds appropriate for any organization, it’s. It doesn’t, you should, I guess I feel like you need feedback, you need, you need to get data, right? You need to understand how are you doing and how does that compare to what’s expected of you and your manager should be having. Maybe you don’t need it every week, but at least monthly or quarterly conversations as you said. It’s time for Tony’s take too. Thank you, Kate. Another new tales from the gym episode. Remember Rob, the former Marine, Semper fi. Uh, he, he suffers lower back pain. He’s got the skinny legs and. 34 weeks ago he got a loaf of sourdough bread. He sort of connived it out of a woman who was unnamed at the time by telling her how good her baking probably is, you know, like just BSing his way into it, and she went out to her car and got him a loaf of her homemade sourdough bread. Well, he got another loaf. So, and, and her name is Kim. Her name is now come to us. It’s Kim and I don’t know, she, she seems to be committed like every time she bakes, it sounded like. She’s gonna do a love for him, like he’s getting his. Daily bread. Give us, give us this day our daily bread, or give us this day our daily sourdough. What is that? Where’s that from? Give us this day our daily bread. Oh, and forgive us our trespass. Oh right, that’s right. OK. So that’s the church, um, Catholic Church, um. He, he’s, he seems to be hooked up, connected with. Kim’s Sourdough supplying. Let’s see what happens. And these are just the ones I witnessed, of course. There may have been loaves exchanged, or not exchanged, given, no exchange, he, he’s not giving anything. Uh, granted that, that I don’t witness, but uh I’ll, I’ll be keeping my, uh, ears and eyes open for more bread exchanges. We’ll see what happens between, uh, now Kim, that’s a new character, Kim, we know her name. And Rob. Simplify. That’s Tony’s take two, Kate. I heard that baking sourdough takes a lot of talent because there’s something with like the sourdough starter, whatever that is, you have to like feed it things like. Yeah, well, yeah, there’s there’s fermentation and it has to, but it’s a long process. It’s a much longer process than like pizza crust. If you ever have made your own pizza crust. Uh, that, you know, that you can do in like a half a day or so, it just rises over time. Or several, several hours, but sourdough, yeah, you, there’s a starter and you have to, it’s many, many day process to get the start, to get the dough to do what you want to do. It’s all, it’s all related to chemistry and oxygen and release of carbon dioxide, and you get the, the, the bacteria or OK, that’s the, uh, that’s the extent of it. I know it involves chemistry. It’s very technical. Good for Kim then if she’s able to like do that. I know, and look, Rob, and Rob gets these free breads. I mean, it’s, you know, Rob, I don’t know what it’s, you know, she’s she’s being friendly. I don’t know, his daily bread. We’ve got Bou but loads more time. Here’s the rest of HR Overview for non-HR professionals with Janelle Miller Moravec. There’s something in your background that led you to develop this type of a uh a high touch HR infrastructure? I, well, other than. My lived experiences here. No, I mean, I was a French major. Um, I, I do like to talk. French people are very high. I mean in a different way, right? I don’t maybe it’s, it’s from Wesleyan culture. I don’t know, but it’s, you know, it’s. We’re certainly a very relational organization, but also, I, I think it is because we’re a nonprofit. And the other piece of it is that no one works and comes to the nonprofit sector to make money. Like, we all know we’re not making bank here. And so, why Are they here? They are here to make a difference. They’re here to grow, and they have to feel connected. And so all of this high touch work, whether it’s, you know, performance management, a caring manager, engaged in big picture conversations, it’s all about connecting the employees to the mission, because that’s what attracted them to come and work here in the first place. So, Maybe that, maybe that’s the reason, but I, this is what has worked for, for me. Um, I had a good coach several years ago and said, when you falter, go back to what worked well for you. And I, I have done that. And while it has over the years, it might look a little bit different. The core values are the same, right? Which is, understand what is motivating your people and what’s getting in the way for them and take care of that so that they could do their jobs, right? And be very transparent and, and upfront. And so we have conversations about once a year about what’s, what’s good about working at YFC. And then the next question I ask is, what would make it great? And that’s where you tease out all of the stuff that’s getting in the way. And I’ve had everything from, you know what, it’s good. I love the people, but what would really make it great is if we had a full size fridge where we could all put our lunches in. That’s a pretty low lift, right? Exactly. Exactly. And I had a board and say, I’ll buy it. There you go. But it could also and I’ll laugh because sometimes they’ll say like, Well, we really would like an ensuite bathroom. I’m like, I can’t do that for you, but I can put in a door so that you don’t have to go out and go to the bathroom in front of your clients. Will that work? You know, so we have we have some conversation and, and we all get to a place and, and what’s really important is that after I ask. I show them what I’m doing that that with that information that they gave. Sounds like YFC is a very friendly place to work. You have accountability, you got goal. You have you have productivity measures, as you said, but. Um, how do you find your way from French at, uh, Wesleyan to, uh, to mental health work? Oh, that’s a love story. I’m. That’s fabulous. Isn’t that fabulous? Um. Uh, so when I was graduating from Wesleyan, I was going to go off and do a master’s program in France, and I was going to meet a Frenchman and live overseas. Yeah, uh, that didn’t happen for me because I was actually in love with a guy who wanted to be a high school teacher and football coach. And those don’t translate. And he wasn’t French. He didn’t even speak French. Yeah, yeah, I know, right. Yeah. But he’s the love of my life. So, um, yeah. So I stayed here and did what I knew best, which was development and fundraising, and then got another job in development fundraising. And then we decided we wanted to start a family and I was looking for a part-time job, and this was the only place that was offering a part-time job and fundraising. So I took it. They’re not easy to find. I took it. And I think we’ve grown up together. Um, I’ve had my 3 kids here. At one point they were, when they were babies, they came with me to work. Um, it’s been, it’s a kind of a special place because it It requires a high level of trust. You have to trust your supervisor, you have to trust your colleagues, we have each other’s backs at all times. um Well, your clients have to trust their therapists. Yeah. Yeah, and there’s no judgment here. There’s, it’s, it’s pretty special and so when um, When the executive director before me stepped down, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I’ve been his development director. I knew, you know, I knew exactly what we needed to do to take it to the next level, and the board, that same HR person said, go for it, we’ll help you. So, the rest is history. It’s been, it, it starts out as well, the love story, of course, continues, but starts out as no surprise, your your grand plan. You never even made it to France to live. You never lived in. I am. I’m I’m holding out in retirement. Oh, OK. Maybe we’ll see, we’ll see. Would it be more countryside or rural or city? Oh, you know what, I actually think Normandy would be a really great fit for us because there are a lot of English speakers there because he’s still you have to bring up, bring him along. Well, 6 months and you become fluent, I think you don’t have a choice. I don’t know. Although after your brain melts together, it’s harder to learn languages. No, it’s harder, but it’s not. It’s not impossible. Well, give him, give him 9 months. Well he’s got you to help. He’s he’s got fluency right in, right in the house. All right. Um, let’s talk a little about, uh, helping to avoid people from getting fired. We, we, we touched about it a little bit, the job description, the accountability, but someone’s, uh, someone’s a little astray. Do we, is there something called a performance uh management plan or performance improvement plan, I think we had some place I used to work. I, I, I, I would be a terrible employee now. I, I would, I would sabotage my unemployment because that’s how miserable I would be. But we used to have some PIP, I think, performance improvement plans. I hope I wasn’t on one. I might have been. Maybe that’s how I know about it. Maybe that’s why I’m, I’d be a terrible employee now. I don’t know, but we had PIP. Do you have something like that, or how do we, how do we coach people along so we don’t have to fire them. Yeah. I, I mean, here it comes back to feedback, right? And so giving that immediate feedback and then coaching for what can you do, also feeding that growth. Hey, I’ve noticed you’re struggling with this. Let’s work on that. Um, and of course, things happen. I, things happen and you have to discipline somebody to make a bad choice, you know, they, they, they lose their cool, um, And so, yeah, you, we have a toolbox, right? You’ve got a verbal warning, a written warning, you know, you can issue a very serious final warning on their file. Um, and we have performance improvement plans, but they’re truly meant to be improvement plans, right? So, when you get to that point, there’s some pretty specific things that you need to work on. And so that’s just an opportunity to lay them out. And it’s just like any other growth plan, you’re monitoring against it. And if they meet the goals, then, OK, great. They’ve improved. You’ve done what we’ve asked you to do. We’ve seen the growth, and thank you, right? And if they don’t or they choose not to, they don’t. There’s can’t and won’t, right? If they can’t or won’t, then OK, this isn’t probably the best fit for you, and that’s a different conversation. Um, I’ve seen it go both ways, but it’s that conversation that’s really important. It’s hard. It’s a really hard conversation to have, right? But um But it’s important because, listen, uh, our jobs also evolve all the time. As we’re, as our organizations are responding to the environment, they need us to respond with maybe how we work, maybe what we do. And so reviewing job descriptions regularly can help mitigate some of that, but sometimes you have to change and you don’t want to change. And it shouldn’t come as a surprise either. I mean, if, if we’re, if we’re meeting regularly to evaluate our performance against, excuse me, against the performance improvement plan, and these meetings are routinely disappointing and negative for both the supervisor and the, the team member, you know, it shouldn’t ultimately come as a surprise. It should be, that’s just human, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yes, for any reason. OK, OK. Yeah. Um, how about on the other end, hiring? When, when, uh, when you folks are hiring, you got the, you got your job description, by the way, uh, uh, I, I, I fear there are lots of job descriptions that are, well, used to be templated, I think, from. You know, from the web, just find somebody else’s job description that was posted and use it for your own company, your own organization. Now I think they may be AI generated, maybe I don’t know, maybe that’s not so bad for a first cut, but, but it’s not gonna pass muster at YFC. I mean, at the humane, you know, this is a humane trusting place to work. We’re not gonna rely on the, the, the AI generated. Uh, I’m not a, I’m not a huge fan of uh artificial intelligence. I’m, I’m, I’m grudgingly being dragged along, um, but. But certainly, you know, that’s not the final, the final job description, the way, the way you’ve you’ve described it, not at all. I mean, I think AI can do some of the work, but it can never replace the thinking and the the creativity and the critical thinking that we bring, right? So. You’re thinking about job descriptions, it should be personalized for your organization and for that role. And thinking about, you know, what would success look like? And then what, what does it starts with a brainstorming session, right? You don’t just sit down and write a job description. You have to have a brainstorming session. Where does this person fit in? What do they do? Who do they work with? Um, you know, What do I need out of them? Like if I need, what do I need to do are the essential functions. Yeah, you’re getting paid. Yeah, what are we to do? Right. So like for me, I think the clinicians, it’s pretty basic, right? I mean, it’s, I need you to work with clients. I need you to do your documentation. I need you to manage emergencies, right? That’s, that’s pretty much it. 00 yeah, yeah, you’re like, oh, not every week, but. Yeah, I mean, people are getting the level of acuity is rising as people wait longer and longer and longer for health, their healthcare. So it’s, it’s, that’s a whole another Oprah show. Yeah, because the pressure on you is going to increase and funding and assistance are are decreasing or being taken away. Uh, either by companies or by, by government subsidies. Healthcare, I mean, just healthcare, I’m thinking healthcare generally, we’re talking specifically mental health, of course, but which has never been a fully funded. Uh, fully funded institution, uh, support that, uh, to begin with. Yeah, yeah, like, like an insurance or sure will give like 6 visits or something or, you know, 12 visits. Where you know, 12 visits, you need you need 12 visits a month maybe. Right. Well, they’re not supposed to do that anymore. We have parity laws now, but we don’t have any way to enforce them. And that’s why that big lawsuit against United Healthcare is such a big deal, is they’re being forced to do parity. But you’ve got reimbursement rates which are typically below cost. And so, you know, it’s I guess I did. It’s a whole other show. All right. Um, so I made you digress like for the first time, but uh I had asked you about hiring. What do you look for? What do you look for when you’re bringing somebody into YFC? What do you look, job description aside, yeah, you look for in the person. Uh, mission alignment and Flexibility, coachability are the top two. Because most of the other things, like if they’re a clinician, they’re gonna have to have the qualifications, of course. But if they say, I’d like to be in 5 years, I’d like to have my own private practice, they are not gonna be happy here. Um, and this isn’t the place for them. It’s a community health center. Um, and if they are pretty rigid and, and they don’t like getting feedback and they don’t like working differently. They’re probably not going to do well here either. So we’re really looking for that, um, that flexible, coachable person, because listen, it’s not just our supervisors who are giving feedback to our clinicians. It’s the clients themselves who are also going to require that clinician to be super flexible. Uh, we Across the age span, we see all walks of life. And a a therapist is gonna, maybe one session, have a seven year old. And then in the next session, they might have a, you know, an adult, a middle-aged adult, and they pivot back and forth. So they have to be flexible and able to, to adapt to whoever’s sitting in front of them and meet them where they are. How do you how do you measure this flexibility, coach, gauge it, maybe not, but I didn’t it. Uh, you ask really good questions and you have a conversation. Oh, we asked them how their previous performance reviews were. We asked them, uh, you know, if you’re working on something and all of a sudden you had to switch gears, how do you handle it? What’d you do? Tell me about the situation. Give me the context, help me understand what action you took, and then let me know what the result was. That’s always sort of the cadence of those questions, um, because it’s really important to figure out is this, is this person gonna, how they’re going to respond to that need to change. Mhm mhm. Right, cause these, these are very um Personal, intrinsic, you know, sort of amorphous ideas to try to try to capture someone’s coach. Right. So I think the key, which I have learned is, and listen, there’s a whole science behind hiring and interviewing that is fascinating, and I don’t, I’m not, well, I’m not an expert, right? I’m not a professional. But what you can do is once you know. Sort of what attributes or characteristics you want, you definitely want behavioral based questions, right? That are gonna test behaviors. So you could throw into AI. I’m looking for some behavioral based questions around flexibility, you know, around, you know, managing boundaries, around ethics, and those can give you a good place to start. And then, of course, every interviewer is a little bit different. You’ve got to find your style. Um, so practice, practice with somebody else. Practice just saying the words, um, because they, they have to, at the end of the day, a great interview sounds like a conversation, right? It’s just tell me more about this, and then, oh, that sounds really interesting. I wanna to go exactly the techniques you’re using here with me. I, I wanna go back to, I wanna talk about something you mentioned earlier. Those are all, you’re doing this all to tease out what’s valuable for your listeners. An interview for a job is doing the exact same thing. They’re teasing out what they want. And this is non-AI assisted. Look at that. Look at you. It’s possible. It’s still possible to function. Um, here I am, the curmudgeon. Um, but I’m trainable. I mean, I’m trainable, but I have a lot of I have a lot of skepticism around it. It intelligence. And my daughter would say, would, would like you because she’s a chemistry student and thinks that we’re going to kill the ozone with all of the use of AI. So she tells me to use it less. There was the environmental impact. You’re saving the environment. I just had a guest recently who creates artificial intelligence models for nonprofits, you know, like specifically so that they’re training just on your content and and it’s protected. It’s not, it’s not made available to the universe to, to, to train the models and, uh, part of what he does is, uh. carbon offsets for, for clients. I don’t know, I, I didn’t ask him specifically how they do it, but he did mention carbon offsetting for the, yeah, there’s, there is, there is an impact. I know, environmental impact, um. You know, Succession planning, like, how do, how do people see a future? OK, I, I’m not the guy who wants to have my own practice in 5 years, but I don’t want, I do want to know that I have a future at YFC beyond what I’m doing now, like 5 years from now, I may not want to be doing the exact same thing I’m doing now, right. Uh, maybe I just torpedoed myself in the, in the interview. I don’t know if I, if I, if I say 5 years from now, I would like to be doing something with more responsibility. How do you, how do you get people to see their future? Yeah, with YFC. Uh, that’s a really good question. So, yeah, it’s, um, it’s they’ve all been good, but that one’s really good. Um, you know, we’re relatively, we’re a mid-sized organization to mid midsize. I mean, I even 100, 100, 200. Employee mid-size. OK, so we’re small. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and we’re mostly clinicians of that 32, most of those are clinicians and so it’s, I’ll talk about them and then I’ll talk about everybody else, mostly administrative roles, right? So. On the clinician side, it’s fairly easy because we have that career ladder. And that career ladder that we’ve built follows what we know about clinical development and clinical growth. So, we know that stage one, they’re working towards full licensure, and we know what we need to do to get them there, and we talk about it, and we show them. And then when they pass the test, we celebrate, and they get a promotion. And then, They, um, our clinicians, then we spend time, they’re, they’re competent, right? They’re, they’re, they’re competent, they’re independent, and so it takes them a little bit, but eventually, I’d say 3 to 5 years later, they get a little bored, and they’ve been trying a bunch of different things, and most clinicians, most, not all, most. Say I’m curious about teaching or I’m curious about being a supervisor. Like I want to start to do something else and become more of an expert. So then we train them on how to be a supervisor and then you have an internal course? Oh yeah, yeah, which is the same thing. It’s it’s a lot of high touch um instructure invested in. And then, you know, yeah, and then they, they keep going and if they can’t find it at YFC, they usually, you know, I have one, she’s been working a long time in the field. Now she’s going back to get her PhD. So they can do that. So it’s fairly easy to see that growth and to, you know, you do different things along the way because you’re qualified for different things. You know, if you don’t have that kind of ladder or robot structure, like the admin side, where there might be just one or two people in each department, you know, yeah, what does that look like? I think it looks like honest, transparent conversations. Where do you want to be in 5 years? And if you want to have a job that has more responsibility. Well, How can we, how can we fuel that for you so that you’re ready for what comes next? I, I think the most beautiful transitions are when you know someone’s gonna leave and you’re able to do the hiring before, and then it’s just seamless, right? Um, and so I think it’s, it’s those really frank conversations that you only can have when you have trust to say, OK, so you’re in a Mid-level development role now and you’d like to do more. So, let’s identify the skills that you might need. Is it financial acumen? Is it business savvy, you know, is it a soft skill? And then how can we, how can we give that to you? In my opinion, There’s all kinds of things in my bucket, senior leadership buckets that we’d love to share, and we can delegate down, right? So Janelle, leave us with some inspiration for this has been, I think, all very inspirational, valuable, but you know, like sum it all up for us, for HR for non-HR pros where it may be overwhelming to some people. Oh, it shouldn’t be overwhelming. HR should be your best friend, and HR is, it is, it’s the people piece of the operation and it really just comes down to. It’s just taking care of your people. That’s all it is. And if you take care of your people, they’ll take care of your organization by doing the work that they do. And so, if I, if I could, if I, if I do my job well, Then my team is able to thrive and my clients have really good outcomes. And that’s my mission, right? It’s not complicated. And it doesn’t have to be hard. It can be sophisticated. It can be simple. It can be simple. It just takes thought, it takes intention. It takes intention, yeah. Janelle Miller Moravec, executive director at Youth and Family Counseling. Counseling for all.org. Janelle is on LinkedIn. Thank you very much, Janelle. Thanks, Tony. Next week, the new tax law. What it means for end of year and 2026 fundraising with Russell James. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.