Nonprofit Hub Radio
Whether starting a nonprofit or taking an existing cause to the next level, The Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast is about breaking down how nonprofits can grow. Each episode features an interview with a sector star with insight, stories, or ideas that can take your nonprofit from good to excellence. Join host Meghan Speer every week to make your good go further!
Nonprofit Hub Radio
The Burnout Trap: Protecting Your Nonprofit Team
In this episode, Janelle Miller Moravec shares how she has not only survived but thrived in nonprofit leadership for over 15 years—defying the sector's alarming burnout trends. Her approach? Reimagining sustainability from the inside out. From rethinking productivity standards and tailoring support for novice clinicians to implementing a team-based supervisory model and using data to track burnout indicators, Janelle offers a powerful blueprint for building resilient, mission-driven organizations. Tune in to learn how modeling boundaries and staying the course can help your nonprofit—and your people—truly thrive.
Janelle Miller Moravec is the Executive Director of Youth & Family Counseling (YFC), a nonprofit mental health organization serving Lake County in the Chicagoland area. She leads a dedicated team of clinicians, staff, board members, and donors united by a shared mission to increase access to quality mental health care. Known for her innovative and compassionate leadership style, Janelle focuses on building supportive, data-informed systems that help both people and programs thrive.
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Drowning in spreadsheets and manual processes. Bonterra Apricot is the smarter, faster way for nonprofits to manage programs, track outcomes and actually show your impact. Find out how at BonterraTechcom slash Nonprofit Hub. Welcome back to the Nonprofit Hub podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, joined today by Janelle Miller-Moravec, who is the Executive Director at Youth and Family Counseling in Illinois. I am really excited about this conversation. I know I say that a lot as we open, but I think something that's been really kind of heavy for me lately is talking to so many nonprofit leaders that are on the edge of burnout and who are seeing that in their teams. It's such a big issue for nonprofits right now that I'm really excited to dig in with Janelle and give us all some really practical kind of takeaways about how we can prevent that in ourselves and in our staffs, which I think is a critical conversation for nonprofit leaders right now. So, janelle, thank you so much for being here. Welcome in, thanks, I'm excited.
Speaker 2:This is one of my favorite topics Taking care of my people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and that is, I feel like you know. Obviously I sit in the executive director role myself and I have done that in multiple pieces of my career. There is such a weight that comes with that. So I'm really excited to kind of, if nothing else, let some other executive directors know that they're not alone in that struggle.
Speaker 2:Exactly, thank you, it is a lonely seat. Yes, right For sure. It takes a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tell us a little bit about yourself and your nonprofit journey that brought us here today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm an accidental nonprofit worker.
Speaker 1:I hear that way more often than you would think.
Speaker 2:Right, I know I totally fell into it by accident, but I love it. So I started actually as a student worker in college. I was assigned to the development office and just absolutely loved the people I worked with and then, when I got to make choices about what I wanted to do, found myself using those connections and building on those relationships and landing nonprofit job after nonprofit job, primarily in fundraising, until 2009,. When the executive director at YFC decided he was going to step down and I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I would say he didn't do it the way I would have done it. I think there could have been a lot more succession planning. So I said would you please give me this job, because I would do X, y and Z? And the board said please step in and do it.
Speaker 2:And so that was what 15 years ago and I still love my job. It's there are no two days that are the same and no two years that are the same. But yet, with that said, I still feel like I come back and I do the same core things over and over again. One of my executive coaches said think about what worked well for you and go back to that. And that has become a real strategy of mine of stopping and thinking what has worked in the past and what do I need to go back to?
Speaker 1:So here, I am Excellent. And so here you are Now. As we said at the top of the show, nonprofit burnout across the industry is real and there are so many factors that contribute to that. Obviously it hasn't been a great year for nonprofits in general, so just the extra stress that has added is a lot. But your folks, specifically your staff, are right on the front lines in counseling with youth and families. They are taking on some really heavy pieces from the folks that they're serving, and that's true I mean that is true for so many nonprofit workers. You're right on the front lines, kind of dealing in a lot of crisis moments or with folks who are really struggling with various pieces and elements of life. So talk to me a little bit about I want to dig in on both sides you as a leader, to make sure that your folks are taking care of themselves and not burning out. And then how have you managed that for yourself as an executive director for the last 15 years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, we all get into nonprofit work because we want to make a difference in the world, right, right, so for me, our mission at YFC is to open doors to mental health care. We do that by providing mental health care services, and it's our strategies that really help make those services accessible, affordable for people of all ages and from all walks of life. It's hard work. So, because of the incredibly diverse client population, we have my team, the boots on the ground, on the front lines, those counselors, therapists, who are in the room. They have to be able to pivot between working with, say, an adult in one hour and then they have to pivot to maybe working with a child, to maybe pivoting to work with, you know, a couple back to a teenager. They see five, six clients a day and in between there they've got to do their notes. They have to do all of these things. They're hearing really heavy stories. It doesn't matter what socioeconomic group you're coming from. There is trauma and awful stories everywhere and they absorb them, and so I think there are there's some key things that any clinician needs to do to stay present and to be able to come back the next day, and that is allow for breaks in your day, maintain your boundaries. So that's we talk about at YFC. We talk about that clinical framework of holding that the 53, 55-minute session so that you can usher them out, take a breath and usher in your next client. It also means responding to clients appropriately, so checking your email at the beginning of the day, at the end of the day, and responding, and not responding when it's appropriate. Because in this day and age, as consumers, we want an immediate response, right, but when therapists are in a session all day, they're not going to respond. And so one of the, I say I think, really important components of that clinical framework is this concept of training and helping our clients hold what it is that they need to talk about until the next week's session. And so we have all these tools for them to stay connected. We have, you know, text, we have email, we have voicemail. So we've had to sort of rebalance. What does that boundary look like for our clinicians? Because I need for them to be able to shut the door and go home and not manage those clinical emergencies or clinical reach outs all night, so that they can rest, recover, reset and come back the next day.
Speaker 2:We've done a lot of work in thinking about what both our clinicians need and our supervisors need, because our supervisors that middle management piece, they are the secret sauce, they are key to everything. So at YFC we have a fairly large clinical team it's about 20 providers but we've broken them down into actually five sub-teams and so each of those sub-teams has a dedicated supervisor and that supervisor is their person, that is their person who delivers their clinical supervision, is their manager, their coach, their cheerleader, their growth expert, growth coach, right. So everyone is on a talent development track. That supervisor is the person who is guiding them so that they're growing all the time, because we know that is what makes people come back for more. Is that growth? And what can I do next? Is what makes people come back for more? Is that growth and what can I do next? So I think middle management and having an effective, strong middle management structure for me is key. But another big piece is manageable work, sustainable work.
Speaker 2:So a long time ago, probably back in 2015, my clinical director at the time came to me and said probably back in 2015, my clinical director at the time came to me and said we cannot make our productivity goals. I was using industry standards of 65% of a clinician's time should be spent on direct service. And she came back and she said we can't seem to get it done. And I don't understand. She said, no joke, she said it must be me, so I will give you my resignation. I was like stop Time out. No, I'm sure it's not you. And what I empowered her to do is to go back and tear everything apart and build it back up from the ground level. And she did that. And she did a time study, basically. And she came back and she looked at all of our clinicians and she said there's no way we're asking people to achieve the impossible. And so we recalculated and restructured their days. So a lot of it.
Speaker 2:I think about my clinicians. They're almost like teachers. They have very prescribed days. So we basically set up their schedules for them. You have an open, you have a close, you have a prep hour, you have your supervision, you have your consult hours. We fill all of those into the schedule first, with what's left, that's, your availability for appointments. Now we also know that novice sort of those emerging new professionals. It takes them longer to accomplish basic tasks right, so it takes them longer to prep, it takes them longer to write their notes, because they're learning, they're developing those skills, so we give them extra time. Because they're learning, they're developing those skills, so we give them extra time.
Speaker 2:We actually have three levels that our clinicians operate at different proficiency levels, and so we give the novices double the documentation time, double the prep time than we give the other clinicians, and so of course they're not providing that 65% of their time on direct service.
Speaker 2:It might be 60. It might be less, depending on where they are. But when we do that and we make work manageable, we also say to them we want you to work 40 hours, not more, not less. Here's how we want you to spend your 40 hours and we make them ask us if they're going to spend excess hours. So we really hold them to that. If they're going to spend excess hours, so we really hold them to that. We hold them to the boundaries. Our supervisors are reviewing their time cards and their schedules, finding out where they're out of alignment, and so we really. That's our commitment to our therapists is to not overburden them, to make work manageable and by setting realistic expectations they're successful, and then that makes them satisfied and really goes a long way in developing that self-confidence and allowing them to stay for the long term.
Speaker 1:So I think you hit on something that can be a struggle in nonprofit work in general, even outside of the counseling space, and that is the idea that you know we're doing good work, so we should sacrifice all our time for it, right, and so I've seen so many nonprofits where, like you know, we work 50, 60 hours a week because the need is so great and we just want to keep providing.
Speaker 1:And that, I think, is where the burnout piece starts, because if you are physically tired, then it's harder to maintain that mental stability. Yeah, so what? Tell me a little bit about how you, in your culture, hold to that, because, at least for me, when I have been in these roles before, the because the need is so great, the pressure is so like, how can we do more? How can we do more and I know a lot of executive directors are fighting that with their board who's saying you know, we need to do more, we need to have a bigger impact, we need to increase, and they're fighting that pressure. How do you, as the executive director, hold that tension of like, yep, the need will always be there, but here's what we're gonna do for our staff. How do you process that tension?
Speaker 2:You're right. Executive directors are often caught in between their boards who are like, go faster, go faster. And their staff are like wait, stop, slow down. This is too much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am very fortunate that I have a board that I work very well with and who understands, and I also am very upfront about explaining how we choose what we work on and a lot of it is. It's not working harder, it's working smarter, and sometimes you have to slow down and stop in order to accomplish. So we do spend a lot of time looking at data and asking ourselves are we getting the results we want and, if not, why? And I don't do that in a vacuum. So one strategy that I use to help me bring those two groups together is I actually, I literally bring them together. So what has worked well for me is when I bring everybody together board and staff. We try to do it about once a year in a special retreat. They get to know each other because they haven't met each other, and then we talk about where we've been, what we've accomplished, and then what are the next steps that we want to take on our trajectory. So we have our guiding pillars and we have our vision and we always talk about okay, so what do we do next? And it's really important that we leave that meeting with consensus, because the board has to understand and they have to raise that money right, they have to be excited about it and secure the resources and understand the why. And then the staff they have to carry out those initiatives, those strategies. So bringing people together and getting that consensus early on in the planning is key. It's key to buy in, it's key to understanding. And then we go back and we do operational planning, we look at data, we do all of that. But I have found that that saves me a lot of headaches and it also helps the board understand you know, gosh, this is a really different world.
Speaker 1:Unlock more funding With tools built for real nonprofit workflows and trusted by over 3,400 organizations. It helps your team grow your impact and better serve your community. You can meet us at bonterratechcom slash nonprofit hub today. I like that call out because I feel like a lot of times the board is this mythical, often another like super disconnected, the thing that like, oh, we don't want to make the board mad, right, but the board is there to support, and so I think it's important for staff to be able to see them and have that relationship and know that they're here to support the work that you're doing and we have to work together with them. So I am all for anything that brings those two groups together. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and at the end of the day, I talk about us being a puzzle and we're all different pieces. So I'm a different piece. I have a different job than a board member, than a middle manager at YFC, then a you know, in the trenches clinician. You need us all and we're just. We just play different roles, and so making sure that we all understand our roles is also super important. So we lean into that with really good job descriptions, reviewing those, making sure those are very visible and transparent so that everybody knows. In my role, this is what I do to advance YFC. Those are the same questions we ask everybody, but it's going to be different, right Based on your role, what strengths you bring, your experiences and hopefully those all mesh together with your personal motivation, whether you're a board member or a staff member.
Speaker 1:So I think one of the most recent statistics that I saw on it said that the average executive director in a nonprofit right now the average tenure is four years, whether for burnout or I'm out of the sector, etc. But four years. You are at 15 years, which well beats the average. Congratulations, thanks. But talk to me a little bit about how you then manage to avoid that burnout in yourself, because you and I have said this over and over again that executive director is such a lonely seat because you do have to balance the board and their expectations and your staff and your middle managers and the program and the expectations. I can see why it's and I again I've sat there I know why it's so easy to get burnt out in that seat. So what have you put in place for yourself that has led you to be able to have that kind of longevity in that seat? Led you to be able to have that kind of longevity in that seat?
Speaker 2:I have a lot of support. I have a really amazing team of directors who report into me. They're amazing women and they step in front of me and let me do my thing, and I know that when I don't have the right people in those roles, that that's when I get burned out. I lean very heavily on my team and I lean heavily on my team at home. I have a you know. My husband and my kids are super supportive, and so I would say, yeah, I noticed that for myself. I need to prioritize my work. I need to do the things that only I can do and let other people do the things that they can't do. That's a good call out. That's really hard, but I've gotten really used to doing that now and I tried to flip it around and use my curiosity, because my number one strength is learner and inputs. Those are my two number two top ones. So I try to use my curiosity to like well, how would you do this and what can I learn from you? And let me watch you do that and learn from you. I've also seen over the years they make the same like different people in the roles. They're going to make the same mistakes that I've seen and that's okay. That's part of their learning journey and I need to step aside and let them do that. I also have to model the boundaries.
Speaker 2:So it was. There was a day. It was just a few weeks ago. I actually posted about it on linkedin, but my clinical director and I we both ended up literally in the middle of the day shutting our computers and saying we gotta go it like. We're needed at home, we're working moms, and for my clinical director it was a she's got littles, it was a sick kid, and for me it was a phone call from my daughter telling me her boyfriend had proposed. So I write that, I model that, I shut it off and I'm like guys, my family, this is. I am not missing this moment no, that's a big deal.
Speaker 2:I also know after 15 years it's going to be there waiting for me in the morning Like for real. So I work hard, I work more than 40 hours a week, but I don't work 50. And some weeks I work 35. It's going to be there. So I know the things that I absolutely must accomplish in my week and I also know that the other stuff is going to be there and if it sits and languishes in my Eisenhower matrix on my not urgent, not important, it's probably not necessary to do Right, and that's okay. I've learned to let things go. It's like good enough parenting right. It's good enough executive director-ness right. Because also, if I do everything, I'm not allowing space for other people to step up and learn and figure things out. So there's more than one way to skin a cat. My ultimate goal is that when I leave that it will be just seamless because I will have allowed people to try things out and I'm transparent enough, so that's my goal. I think that allowed people to try things out and I'm transparent enough, so that's my goal.
Speaker 1:I think that's a really great call out, because culture does start at the top, yeah, right, and that, how we handle our employees and how we set those boundaries, all of that has to come from the top. It has to be modeled and you not just giving lip service to it, but actually showing people. This is what I, this is how we handle this. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:And I think that's where, as a leader I think that's like we have the vision, we have to set the culture, but then we also have to have the policies, yes, and then we have to have the buy in of our middle management, because they are the ones who are holding it on a day to day basis. I'm over there raising money, doing Janelle things, but I know that my clinical supervisors and my clinical director are holding that framework and making sure that their team doesn't burn out. We're not a huge organization, right, but there may be 30 of us. So I hold I don't know maybe four or five people. Each of them holds four or five people, and so on down the way. So if you do more than that, it's overwhelming. We have to break it down and make it manageable and know that we take little steps, intentional steps forward. You have to allow time to look at data, reflect, look back, set new goals. Everything has got to.
Speaker 1:I think that's a great call out because I think there is data to all of it. Yes, right, when we talk about nonprofit burnout or we say, oh, my staff is just really stressed out, or whatever, that tends to feel like a not quantifiable item, right. But there are reasons behind all of it, and if you actually go back to the data, yes, and instead of just living in the ethereal when we can break it down to the practical, I think that's a really good call out for this discussion as well.
Speaker 2:We literally have a dashboard that we track. So we track and see how many excess hours is everybody working. So one of the things also is you have to be able to just work one job, and so you have to make a livable wage.
Speaker 2:And so we track how are our wages measuring against that living wage threshold? So we keep moving the needle. How long do our employees stay? Do they report burnout? Do they report satisfaction with their manager? So we've tried to make it as measurable as possible, right? So we want to avoid burnout, so we're doing these things and we're making work manageable. We're trying to pay them a living wage, we're trying to implement an engaging culture and we have measures for all of those that we're watching. Because, unless you say it, I mean, I guess one of my mantras is plan your work, work your plan, and that's really important to have the data to look back and say, okay, here's how we know that we accomplished what we set out to accomplish, and listen. This does not mean that my employees are all happy all the time.
Speaker 1:Sure Right, it would be an ideal world, but yeah.
Speaker 2:The work is hard, and I will say life is really hard, especially as we get into a space where we have with young professionals. They're coming in with a different level of proficiency in resiliency and grit than what I would say other generations have. It's just different, and so it can be messy. They may not. It may be hard for them to be in that uncomfortable space of working on themselves and working on their clients yeah, but that's really important. Themselves and working on their clients yeah, but that's really important.
Speaker 2:And also when we at YFC, one of the things that we're working on is developing a staff that looks like the community we serve, and so up here in Lake County, Illinois, we have an incredibly diverse population, and so we want to have a staff that reflects the diversity that we have in our community. That's really hard, because we serve a lot of children and adolescents and people of color, and it can be really messy. And it's really hard as a clinician when you are doing work all day during the day, and then you go home and you're doing that exact same work as a parent, as a member of your community, and so that's something I don't know, that we haven't figured out yet, but we know it's happening and we're trying to figure out. What else can we do to support our team?
Speaker 1:So good, janelle. This has been fantastic. I think, some really good wisdom for executive directors out there in how to model that and how to put some of those boundaries in place. As we wrap up the question, I have been asking to everyone if you could give one piece of advice to nonprofit leaders right now. What would that be? Stick with it.
Speaker 2:Stick with it, try to figure out how you can stay, because I think our world needs us to stay and model, and it is when you stay that organizations really thrive. That's when you right, when you have that longevity, that's when you're able to innovate. You have that longevity, that's when you're able to innovate, and so things don't work and it's uncomfortable. I've had total staff turnover two, if not three times in my tenure. It's not comfortable, it's not easy and I've learned every time and that, I think, makes me a stronger leader and that makes YFC a stronger organization because of it.
Speaker 2:So if possible, figure out how to take care of yourself so that you can stay.
Speaker 1:So good. Thank you, janelle. This is a super timely conversation for our leaders. I'm really excited for that, and thanks for sharing all your wisdom.
Speaker 2:Thank you. This was so much fun Time absolutely flew by.
Speaker 1:Yes, again, my guest has been Janelle Miller-Morvec, who's the executive director at Youth and Family Counseling in Lake County, illinois. This has been another episode of the Nonprofit Hub Radio Podcast. I'm your host, megan Spear, and we'll see you next time.