It’s All About the Team: Recruiting, Developing, and Rewarding Talent in a Nonprofit

Yerachmiel Stern is the Executive Director of Pesach Tikvah. Before being appointed Executive Director, he served for ten years as the Borough Park Clinics Director. In that role, he helped Pesach Tikvah to build up a rich and effective group of resources in all capacities including psychiatry. Directing the Borough Park Clinics was of particular importance to Mr. Stern because he grew up in Borough Park. When he began his tenure as Clinical Director, the Borough Park, Kensington, and Flatbush areas lacked affordable mental health care. He successfully brought excellent, sophisticated mental health care to those underserved neighborhoods. Mr. Stern completed both his graduate and undergraduate degrees at Touro University. He joined Pesach Tikvah as an intern and weekend counselor at the agency’s Community Residence. In his second year of internship, he proved to be an asset to the agency: Mr. Stern is bilingual in Yiddish and English and had a talent for treating children and adults of all denominations and backgrounds. He was particularly adept at treating children and worked as a school-based clinician for three of his early years at Pesach Tikvah. Though he came from a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy training background, Mr. Stern pursued training in other modalities including Psychoanalytic, Psychodynamic, and Sand Tray Therapy for children. His mastery of multiple modes of psychotherapy has served as a model for Pesach Tikvah’s clinicians, many of whom pursue trainings beyond what their universities provided. As Pesach Tikvah enters its 40th year, Mr. Stern is guiding the organization toward a future of excellence in mental health care and developmental disability services

I believe that the core of a successful nonprofit is the people who work there. I want to show you how recruiting, developing, and rewarding talent can turn a small organization into a thriving one.

More at – https://www.pesachtikvah.org 

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
This is Hugh Ballou. Welcome to this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange. That’s also the link where you find all the episodes, thenonprofitexchange.org. I have a special guest today, Richard Stern. And, you know, we have an interesting title today, and it’s something that we’re all concerned about. It’s all about the team, recruiting, developing, and rewarding talent for nonprofits. Richard, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. But before we get into the topic, tell people a little bit about yourself, your background, and the passion for the work that you’re doing.

Robert Stern:
Yes. So I’ve been with my company for about 18 or so years. I began as an intern many moons ago in our group home. We are a social services non-for-profit. About 12 years ago, I was given the opportunity to become a clinic director of two outpatient clinics within the company. And over those 10 or so years, I was able to sort of flex my abilities to go into upper leadership, more of an executive level leadership. And and so so I’m here today. So I’m here today, you know, a few years in about a year and a year or so into executive leadership for the company that I began with close to two decades ago.

Hugh Ballou:
And the company is?

Robert Stern:
The company is Door of Hope, Door of Hope. It’s a we provide mental health services of all kinds to you know, a wide array of clients and client types across the tri-state area. The Williamsburg, Borough Park, Flatbush area of Brooklyn, as well as Queens, the Rockland County area as well. We’re based out of North Brooklyn, known as Williamsburg.

Hugh Ballou:
And you have several clinics?

Robert Stern:
We have four freestanding actual outpatient clinics. Yes.

Hugh Ballou:
A little more about the work. Who do you serve and why do they need your services?

Robert Stern:
We serve people who are struggling with mental health diagnoses for the most part, in large part. That’s the big, big segment of our population. whether we serve them in individual therapy, psychotherapy, versus serving them in the form of care management, helping them pull their lives together, and so on. And as well as servicing some of the severe and persistently mentally ill population as well, which need a different kind of service as well.

Hugh Ballou:
So tell us a little bit about your title today, your topic. It’s all about the team. So why is that of interest to you? And why do you want to talk about it today? Because we have a lot of non-profit leaders that struggle with getting the right team and getting the team to function like they want to.

Robert Stern:
A great question. The team is something that, it’s a slow cook. I’ve been able to, as clinic director, formulate a longstanding team that has stayed with me literally 10 years in the making. That was on the more, call it, local level of clinic directorship. The secret to building a team is, I’ll go cliche first, There is a definite trial and error to it. That’s piece one. You can’t always put the right personalities together. You always have to hear out each party and see if those team members really clicked. You cannot force compatibility. That’s just to keep it real simple. But more complicatedly, you have to do not have to it’s it’s encouraged in my opinion to do different team building events that sort of um cross into different teams so like you can do one event that has like two teams put together and another event that has segments of team A and team C. And if you cross pollinate some of these team building events, and they don’t have to be these buttoned up events, they can be something like nonchalant, something unintimidating. something gentle. And it depends who you’re in. None of these team events have to be 20 or 30 people either. They can be two, three, four people. And you let people bond and cultivate a work workplace relationship. What I’ve noticed is that chances are, if you’re nice to and cordial to two or three of your team members that you spend time with, You’re just, it’s very hard to edit that out and not be as cordial to people you don’t have much to do with, you know, from a morale standpoint. So that sort of, it becomes an infectious style once these team building events you know, manifest. It becomes infectious. It’s not just, you know, oh, I have a soft spot for person X because I spent time with them in a restaurant. It becomes, oh, yeah, like if I’m going to be nice to him, I’m going to be nice to her as well. And that’s kind of the effect that takes off.

Hugh Ballou:
In his writing, psychiatrist Murray Bowen, in his family systems theory, wrote about guiding principles. And I find that if people create principles together, there’s some synergy of how do we make decisions together? How do you get into the place where people actually function together in solving problems, creating visions, and creating action plans together? How does you do that, and how does that help people come together?

Robert Stern:
So there are two schools of thought on having agency meetings. There are really three schools of thought. There is the reactive style, where when something goes wrong, you just call a meeting with either everyone or a very uncurated group of people. That’s one. There is another sort of proactive style. where you’re just constantly calling these large sum team meetings, and half the people on these meetings, on or in, are just inattentive. They’re not interested, and it just doesn’t pertain to them. The synergy is not there. Then you have the third, the third of where, and again, you gotta be careful with this, but it does work, where you handpick who you’re meeting with, And you’re constantly mixing and matching parties together, knowing in the worst moment and best moment what parties are going to need one another, and you’re constantly meeting with clusters of people that may not be on the same team, but based on what you need from them, you know that they’re going to need to interact with them for this item you’re meeting about. And these meetings, as long as they’re not too frequent, and they’re done in sort of preemptive, preventative style, These do cultivate, and the reason I say preventative, it can’t be when you’re up against a wall. You have to do it, you have to conduct these meetings in an unintimidating kind of situation, best case, for people to gain a comfort with one another. And all of a sudden you’re, again, not to overuse the word cross-pollinating, but you’re mixing and matching personalities for a specific item, but you’re not overexposing any multiple parties of people to one another incessantly. You’re just accomplishing what you need in these one or two or three instances, and you’re moving on to another cohort of people that you put together for what your needs are, for what you’re meeting about. And I’m talking from an executive vantage point.

Hugh Ballou:
So what are you observe a lot of people in other organizations? What do you observe are some of the top misconceptions from leaders about teams?

Robert Stern:
I think that leaders, I think we have a major advantage being in the therapy psychology field of, and it comes with immense amount of downsides as well. Everything in life, what’s good is also there’s a fallout element to it. But I think from what I’ve heard and people reaching out to me for advice and whatnot, I don’t think team leaders utilize a nuanced lens per member. I think they’re viewing it sort of like an old school sports team, like one size fits all. They’re not taking into account the respective team members’ individual needs. Unfortunately, In the modern day, team members need to have a very, very strong psychological prism, not in a over-diagnostical way, but more so in understanding who you’re dealing with, what they’re able to give you, what the expectations should be. And it’s not just one team, one expectation, figure it out, work together. You have to sort of mold each person separately to work together. on this thing. And I feel like people are a little more sterile in the workplace. They just call on something. You didn’t meet an expectation. You failed. And they’ll dress that sentiment up. But essentially, that’s the sentiment. And that doesn’t work anymore. People are way too, I’ve seen, way too emotionally brittle to absorb such a sentiment. You have to really understand exactly what the person is saying, really get into their space and then decide if they didn’t meet expectation.

Hugh Ballou:
So go through this cycle that’s in your title, excuse me. You know, recruiting, it’s getting the right people for the right spot. And there’s an assimilation piece. And then there’s the, you say developing, what does that look like? And then rewarding. That’s something we don’t think about much, especially in the nonprofit space. So from the recruiting, what are the issues to deal with there through that continuum?

Robert Stern:
From the recruiting you started with?

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, the whole series. Recruiting. I added assimilation to your list. Recruiting, assimilating, developing, and rewarding.

Robert Stern:
Absolutely.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s a continuum.

Robert Stern:
Yeah. So recruiting, very simply put, I’ve seen the most success with young, multiple talent. I don’t mean necessarily young in age, but I mean more so a blank canvas of sorts where you bring in somebody with raw ability of any age and you mold them. It’s a lot of work. I haven’t seen the most success, and this is a personal thing, with developed talent. I’ve seen the most success with interns or young talent, young in the industry that need moldability and cultivation. And it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of work. But once you put that work in, you have exactly the most customized, fittable version of a work atmosphere. That’s the recruiting element is, Raw is better. Raw is better. And cultivating talent from the ground up is, in my estimation, the only way to go. I understand there’s a free agency concept out there that also works. But again, it depends on what your work culture is. That’s piece one. Piece two, there’s a lot of gray area in the world and in the workplace of when to incentivize and give people bonuses as per, A, money that’s meaningful to them, number one. Number two, money is timing. If the bonus is not meaningful in number, and it’s not given in the right positioning when they really need it emotionally, as per what you’re asking from them, You missed the boat. You can give thousands more three weeks later, and it’s wasted money. And the other pieces with bonusing and incentivizing work is you really have to absorb and introspect as a team leader, as an executive. this gray area of like, oh, am I bonusing? Am I giving a bonus for that? Isn’t that what their job description is? Why am I giving a bonus for that? And the answer is very simple. What their job description is doesn’t take into account what they expected to have to deal with on a whim’s notice for what you needed, even if it’s umbrellaed into their job description. So if you’re catching them off guard, your best bet to really procure them emotionally is to give them a bonus if funds and revenue allow for it. That’s what cultivates loyalty. They start to, in their unconscious, realize, wait a second, He asked something of me, he caught me off guard, but he’s aware of that and he’s compensating me for that. And a very introspective employee will say he didn’t even need to because this is technically my job. On a broader level, it’s my job. And that’s how you really acquire loyalty, A, and people really reaching above expectation to perform.

Hugh Ballou:
So underneath leadership, communication, and other things is relationship. So you’ve talked about it, but deal a little deeper into the relationship factor of leadership and team building.

Robert Stern:
Are you talking about relationships from colleague to colleague or team leader or executive to employee?

Hugh Ballou:
All of it.

Robert Stern:
I think, okay, well, let’s go trickle down first. I think an executive has to know clusters of employees, what interests them, what makes them tick, what kind of fun events interest them. He or she has to really understand what interests them. What could interest other employees? In other words, some people are sort of like to be in this, you know, space of like, they don’t want to, you know, be made happy. They’re just like, leave me alone. I don’t want to participate. You know, it’s an executive’s job to gain an understanding of what makes people tick from a a non-work standpoint in terms of team building events, and then also to go to the periphery and fringes to usher in people that would enjoy a certain team building event. It’s very hard to get that right. It’s very hard to understand that. I think workplaces often lean on just sort of like generic things that like workplaces do. They do help. They do help. They’re fun. They’re not a net negative. But if you really Know the hearts and minds of your employees and know and even if it even if you have, you know, 20 people and only 13 people it really interests. That’s that synergy piece you were referring to in another context where the remaining seven people are like, wow, you know, I didn’t realize I’d like this that much and look at these people enjoying and, you know, and all of a sudden, they gain an interest in this and that really it’s a very bonding experience. That’s I guess that covers both. That is both colleague to colleague and executive on down as well. Yeah.

Hugh Ballou:
sets the pattern for the culture. Like my background is in conducting, music conducting. And so, the culture is a reflection of the leader. So, a lot of this coming out what you’re talking about. So, differentiate, you’ve talked about paid staff. Now, all of us in nonprofits have volunteers. So, what’s different about this whole dynamic with volunteers than what you were saying with staff?

Robert Stern:
Well, a lot of nonprofits are now shifting away from a heavy, a heavy leaning on of volunteers. I mean, we do have that as well. It’s it’s sort of like even even in those instances, it’s merely there’s there’s like a stipend attached to it or some sort of compensation today. So the classic volunteers, it does exist. definitely still exists a lot in non-for-profit, but in large part, non-for-profits, to my knowledge, and I’ve seen this with our interns here, have largely shifted to some form of compensation. It could be exponentially less than market value post-graduation. So, I mean, again, that’s a decision a non-for-profit has to make of how much they want to sort of, I don’t want to call it hedge fund managing, but you have to know what your profit margins are and how much you want to eat into it. to procure future flourishing. So you would ask most not-for-profits in my industry, would you pay interns? I would say, no. No, we barely make x, y, and z on whatnot. And honestly, The fact that we pay interns procured those interns and then had them stay with us. And it was it was dividends like well, well repaid. And that was you have to you have to be able to see that in advance. You have to be able to foresee that stuff. Again, it depends what not for profit and what you’re asking people to do. You know, it can be a setting that really doesn’t allow for pay. It’s a come and go quick situation. You put in two hours of sort of community service somewhere and you sit with certain demographics and you give them, you know, some TLC. And you can argue that there’s no money for that. That’s a different situation.

Hugh Ballou:
Well, sure. And in your situation, it’s very sensitive work that requires a lot of confidentiality and a lot of skill to manage that kind of work. And most volunteers don’t have that. So that’s a very good pivot of of perception for me, because there’s always other volunteers, we can’t ask them to do much, there’s this misconception around volunteers, but you just laid another lens on it. There’s an accountability matrix that’s very different when you have a paycheck. So that’s a really good thought. So folks, if you’re listening to this, you missed a few of the notes along the way. There will be a full transcript of this on thenonprofitexchange.org. You’ll find this episode with Richard Stern and you’ll listen to it, watch it. Some people are watching this live, Richard. A lot of them will download the podcast. Do you want to tell us a little bit about the website for your work before we leave?

Robert Stern:
Yes, go on the website. It gives, we’ve… What’s the link?

Hugh Ballou:
Yes, it’s www.PesachTikva.org, as you see it up there, P-E-S-A-C-H… For those people that are listening only to the podcast, it’s P-E-S-A-C-H-T-I-K-V-A-H.org. It will be on the website and your podcast platform. So Richard, tell us a little bit about the work here.

Robert Stern:
Tell us about the website you’re saying it the web. Yeah, the website definitely tells a nice story. We’ve recently Republished it, you know, and there’s there’s where to go You can see all our programs. You could see our mission statement. You could see a lot most of our top-level employees and Their bios, you can really get a decent feel for what a modern day non-for-profit social services agency looks like, you know, get a feel for it. It’s programs it has, things are pretty well explained. Um, and it does break everything down. It breaks down every single program pretty, pretty simply. Um, it goes through every program, uh, that we have to date and it kind of sheds light on it. Um, and you can see the, the, uh, some faces to names, some names to faces.

Hugh Ballou:
And it says, no one will be denied access to the services due to inability to pay. There’s a sliding scale. That’s really good. So we’ve come to the end of our time slot, Richard. What do you want to leave people with as a thought or tip or challenge?

Robert Stern:
Always think outside the box. Never feel locked into a situation. Never feel entrapped. Always think outside the box. There’s always a way out. There’s always somebody above you, beside you, who can be spoken to, who can be explained or lobbied in a certain sense. And if you’re making an innovative enough point that’s merited, at some point, someone will hear you and someone will act for the positive.

Hugh Ballou:
Words of wisdom heard right here on the nonprofit exchange. Richard Stern, thank you for being our guest today.

Robert Stern:
Thank you.