Clinical Manager

Clinical Manager — Outpatient & Intensive Outpatient · Full-time · Salaried · Benefits-eligible · W2 · This position may be eligible for student loan repayment.

We are a training institution with a clinical practice — not a clinic that happens to train. The manager's chair is where that distinction stops being a tagline and becomes the work. A site does not hold itself, and a program does not hold itself; people hold them, and managers hold the people who hold them. If you read "manager" as a title that sits on top of an org chart, this is not your posting. If you read it as a discipline — holding the commons and the conditions within which other clinicians grow, and the steady presence a team reads before it reads anything you say — keep reading.

These are leadership roles for clinicians who are already strong in the room and are ready to become responsible for more than their own caseload. We are filling two: one in Chaska, one in Rosemount. Each site houses both an outpatient psychotherapy practice and an intensive outpatient program (IOP). The manager holds both.

The Clinic

Lorenz Clinic is a psychology clinic built on the values and norms of professional psychology, known across Minnesota for the density of its doctorally-prepared clinicians and for a model of care that treats the second-order problems holding symptoms in place. We treat systems, not symptoms. We locate the presenting problem in its relational, developmental, and systemic context — because here there is no such thing as a problem that resides solely within the individual.

Three logics govern everything we do, in therapy and in leadership alike. We are systemic: people are understood in context, and problems are maintained by patterns rather than isolated traits. We are relational: change happens through lived interpersonal experience, not insight alone. We are developmental: growth unfolds over time and must be scaffolded, not forced. These are not clinical preferences we set aside when we manage. They are how we manage.

Professionalism is our superordinate value, understood as obligation rather than polish — a duty to clients, to the field, and to the people we develop. Reflective practice is not a wellness amenity; it is our developmental spine. For the better part of two decades, Lorenz has been the psychotherapist's clinic — one of the few practices clinicians would entrust with their own career, and in many cases, their own family.

What These Two Programs Share

Our outpatient and intensive outpatient programs are not two different philosophies of care. They are the same philosophy at two intensities. Both are organized around the same twofold focus:

Corrective interpersonal experience. Clients come to us having learned things about themselves and others inside relationships, and they carry those learnings into every room they enter — including ours. The work offers them a different experience of themselves and of other people than the one their history predicts. The relationship is the instrument.

Treating the system the symptom lives in. Symptoms are adaptive responses inside relational contexts, not defects inside individuals. We treat the family, the developmental history, and the system that holds the presenting problem in place — through family therapy and through a frankly systemic case formulation — rather than managing symptoms in isolation.

The systemic, relational, and developmental approach is what makes Lorenz different. A manager here protects that approach at the program level: in who delivers care, in how groups are run, in whether family work actually happens, and in whether the clinical culture of the site stays faithful to the model when census pressure and operational fatigue push toward something shallower.

The Role

This is a clinical, supervisory, and management position, in that order of foundation. You will carry a clinical caseload, provide clinical and administrative supervision to pre-licensed clinicians, lead a site-level reflective container, and hold operational responsibility for an outpatient practice and an IOP at a single location.

The seat is genuinely load-bearing. It is not three jobs bolted together; it is one role with a specific competency profile, and the competencies reinforce one another. The clinical work keeps you credible and keeps your judgment current. The supervision is where you become responsible for someone other than your own client. The management is where you become responsible for the conditions the whole site works inside. The reflective leadership is what holds it together.

Core responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Holding clinical and operational responsibility for an outpatient psychotherapy practice and an IOP at one site
• Carrying a clinical caseload as assigned, sufficient to keep clinical judgment current and credible
• Providing clinical and administrative supervision to pre-licensed clinicians
• Leading the site pod — the reflective container in which the team's clinical experience is held and metabolized — as a function distinct from your managerial authority
• Protecting the fidelity of the systemic, relational, and developmental model in both programs: in group culture, in family-therapy delivery, in case formulation, and in who is entrusted to deliver care
• Holding the IOP's clinical spine — debrief, group quality, family work, and the upstream referral and screening rhythm that keeps census healthy
• Appraisal, performance development, scheduling, coverage, and the ordinary operational discipline a site depends on
• Participating in the Pod Leader Roundtable, case consultation, Grand Rounds, and reflective consultation
• Compliance with clinic documentation standards, managed-care contract requirements, licensing board rules, and the APA Code of Ethics

What This Seat Actually Is

Clinical leadership at Lorenz is not administration with a clinical background attached. It is the next rung of clinical stewardship — and like every rung, it asks something the previous one did not.

A clinician becomes responsible for a client. A supervisor becomes responsible for a clinician's development. A manager becomes responsible for the conditions under which an entire site's worth of clinicians and clients are held. Being excellent at the prior rung does not guarantee readiness for the next, any more than having had parents guarantees that one will parent well. We treat each transition as its own developmental act, and we hold it to its own standard.

The hardest thing this seat asks is the capacity to hold two registers in the same body without collapsing them. You will hold operational authority — over schedules, caseloads, performance, employment. You will also hold a reflective container — the pod — where the team brings genuine clinical uncertainty and has it metabolized rather than solved. These are different modes. When a team cannot tell whether they are being led or assessed, the reflective function closes and the container fails. The managers who do this well hold a real internal distinction between what needs to happen here and what is here that needs to be held — and the people they lead can feel the difference.

The manager who holds the pod well is, in the clinic's terms, three things at once. Reliable — present consistently, boundaried, not leaking their own anxiety into the room, because every cancelled session and every drift left uninterrupted is a withdrawal from the team's trust that this space is what it says it is. Containing — able to receive what the team cannot yet hold, its dread and its friction and its unprocessed difficulty, without being overwhelmed by it and without discharging it back into the room. And attending — able to notice and accurately name what is actually happening with this specific person, in this specific moment, rather than running a generic script. A manager does not need to arrive fully formed in all three. The role is scaffolded — by the Roundtable, by reflective consultation, by a written architecture — precisely so that a good-enough manager can grow into it. What cannot be scaffolded is the willingness to be held while you learn to hold.

Who Thrives Here

The strongest candidates are clinically strong, systemically oriented, and genuinely curious about their own impact on the rooms they are in. They treat supervision and management as crafts to develop, not boxes already checked.

You are a psychotherapist, not a counselor. Relational and systemic psychotherapy competence is required, and it is the non-negotiable floor for leading these two programs. The clinicians who fit here organize their work around the transformation of underlying relational and developmental patterns — using the therapeutic relationship itself as the primary vehicle of change — rather than around skills delivery, symptom management, or crisis stabilization. You can traverse a full case formulation, root the presenting problem in the client's relational field, work with rupture and repair, and treat your own reactions in the room as information about the system. You will be expected to grow that same register in others, and to protect it as the defining feature of both programs you hold.

You can lead IOP in the relational, systemic register specifically. Our IOP is not a higher-frequency version of symptom management. It offers corrective interpersonal experience and it treats the family system the symptom lives in. Competence in relational and systemic group psychotherapy and in family therapy is required — including the judgment to protect group culture, to keep family work actually happening rather than quietly dropping it under load, and to hold the clinical debrief that an intensive program depends on for ethical and safety coherence.

You hold authority and reflection without collapsing them. This is the capacity the seat most depends on and the one most often missing. You can be the person who signs off on a performance review and the person who holds a reflective space where that same clinician brings real uncertainty — and you can keep those two functions genuinely distinct rather than letting one quietly contaminate the other.

Reflective practice or reflective supervision competence is required — or a genuine willingness to develop it. We mean this precisely. You do not need to arrive already fluent in the pod model or already expert in holding a reflective container. You do need the underlying capacity it grows from: the ability to observe your own internal states and your relational impact without collapsing into defensiveness, to stay with a team member's difficulty long enough for their own thinking to emerge rather than resolving it for them, and to tolerate not-knowing in company. If you have this and want to deepen it, we will scaffold the rest. If you regard reflection as soft or beside the point, you will be unhappy here and your team will feel it.

Clinical supervision is a functional competency- a distinct practice- not merely a credential. You will be assessed against a competency-based model of supervision (Falender & Shafranske), including structured supervisor self-assessment and an individualized learning plan. Holding the designation is the floor. Demonstrating the competency is the role.

A Word on Fit, Offered Plainly

This is a development-centered environment, not a credential to be collected or a service to be consumed. We invest a great deal in our people and we ask a great deal in return.

We say this directly because two specific kinds of mismatch are expensive here, and they are expensive for the team as much as for the person. The first is the careerist orientation — the candidate for whom this role is principally a rung to be stood on briefly on the way to a title, who will manage the impression of the work more than the work itself. The second is the credential orientation — the candidate who treats "supervisor" or "manager" as something one has rather than something one does, a designation to maintain rather than a discipline to practice. Both can interview extremely well. Both reliably produce the same downstream cost: a site that learns its leader is performing the role rather than holding it.

What we are actually selecting for is the opposite posture. A manager here takes custody of conditions other people depend on, with an eye on a horizon longer than their own tenure. They surface difficulty early rather than holding it privately until it becomes a crisis. This environment values the clinician who can say I am not yet sure I can hold this well — and treats that kind of candor as a mark of readiness rather than a liability. We are willing to say not yet, on both sides, and we consider that a kindness rather than a rejection. Everyone in this field eventually holds the same license and the same titles. What differs is the person who holds them — and that is the difference we are hiring for.

If you want a quiet caseload and a line on your CV, this likely isn't the right environment, and we say so plainly. If you want to become the kind of clinician other clinicians can be formed by, this is one of the few seats in Minnesota built to make that happen.

Requirements

The position requirements include, but are not limited to:

• A master's or doctoral degree in a mental health profession from an accredited academic program
• Full, unrestricted licensure as a Mental Health Professional in Minnesota (LP, LICSW, LMFT, or LPCC)
• Demonstrated competence in relational and systemic psychotherapy
• Demonstrated competence in relational and systemic group psychotherapy and in family therapy, sufficient to hold the clinical spine of an IOP
• Designation as an approved clinical supervisor with one's own licensing board, and demonstrated supervision competence assessable against a competency-based framework
• Reflective practice or reflective supervision competence — or a demonstrated capacity and genuine willingness to develop it
• Demonstrated capacity to hold operational authority and a reflective container as distinct functions
• Prior leadership, management, or program responsibility (preferred)
• Formal training in child or family therapy (preferred)
• BBHT-approved supervisor status (strongly preferred)

Internal candidates who meet Manager-in-Training program criteria may be considered through an MiT nomination — speak with your director about the process.

Benefits

This position may be eligible for student loan repayment. Full-time, independently licensed clinicians enjoy a robust benefits package that includes paid burnout time and an annual CEU allowance. Employer-sponsored health, dental, vision, and life insurance are available, along with short- and long-term disability. A 401(k) with matching is available, as are tuition reimbursement and privately-funded student loan forgiveness. Paid time off, paid holidays, paid service/volunteer time, paid continuing education hours, paid parental leave, an employee assistance program, a flexible schedule, and professional development support round out the offering. Did we mention student loan repayment and paid burnout time?

As an active training clinic, most clinicians here earn roughly 100 hours per year of board-approved continuing education simply by showing up to work. The clinic hosts an annual conference, monthly Grand Rounds, and four hours per month of case consultation with a specialist. Leaders additionally participate in the Pod Leader Roundtable, the clinic's formational container for those who hold sites and programs. For an unabridged job description or more detail on benefits, including the student loan repayment program, please contact Human Resources.

Compensation

The hiring range for this position is $90,000 – $150,000 annually, depending on experience, credentials, breadth of clinical competence, leadership history, and clinical program. The hiring range for independently licensed master's clinicians (LICSW, LMFT, LPCC) is $90,000 – $130,000, and the hiring range for doctorally-prepared licensed psychologists (LP) is $125,000 – $150,000.

Individual & Cultural Diversity

Lorenz Clinic is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. We are an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Navigation & Search

Clinicians may find this posting using the following search terms: clinical manager, clinical program manager, behavioral health manager, IOP manager, intensive outpatient program, site manager, licensed psychologist, LP, LICSW, LMFT, LPCC, mental health therapist, psychotherapist, marriage and family therapist, family therapist, child therapist, children's mental health, group psychotherapy, outpatient psychotherapy, clinical supervision, approved supervisor, BBHT supervisor, reflective supervision, reflective practice.

Pre-licensed clinicians — including Licensed Graduate Social Workers (LGSW), Nationally Certified Counselors (NCC), and Licensed Associate Marriage and Family Therapists (LAMFT) — should consider the practice's Post-Master's Fellowship instead. Independently licensed clinicians who are strong in the room but not yet ready to lead a site should consider the Clinical Supervisor posting.