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

The best psychotherapists often hear "clinical manager" as a contradiction — one word relational and attuned, the other structured and directive, usually with a memory underneath it of leadership that arrived as rupture. So the strong clinician concludes that to manage is to amputate the part of themselves that made them good in the room.

We've built the clinic around that dichotomy being false. The disciplines that make an excellent psychotherapist — attunement, containment, boundary clarity, regulation, fidelity to role — are the same ones management in a relational system requires. What changes is not the skillset but the frame: from the growth of a client to the conditions under which a whole site is held. And we can make that claim credibly because of who owns the place.

Most large behavioral health organizations in Minnesota answer to private equity or hospital systems- not us. We are owned, led, and governed by psychotherapists. A clinic organized around throughput needs site administrators. One organized around the depth of the work needs clinical stewards — people who take responsibility for the commons and hold the mental health system together because they understand, from the inside, what the work asks of the people doing it.

The Clinic

Lorenz Clinic is a psychology clinic built on the values and norms of professional psychology, known across Minnesota for a model of care that treats the second-order problems holding symptoms in place. We treat systems, not symptoms — we tend to 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 the work, 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 practice clinical stewardship.

Professionalism is our superordinate value — 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.

The Care

Our care is organized around one twofold focus, whether delivered in weekly outpatient therapy or in the higher intensity of IOP:

• Corrective interpersonal experience. Clients arrive having learned things about themselves and others inside relationships, and they carry those learnings into every room they enter, including ours. The work offers 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 a frankly systemic case formulation — rather than managing symptoms in isolation.

This systemic, relational, and developmental approach is what makes Lorenz different. The manager protects it: in who delivers care, in how groups are run, in whether family work actually happens, and in whether the clinical culture stays faithful to the model when census pressure and 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, supervise pre-licensed clinicians, lead the site's reflective practice, and hold operational responsibility for the clinic location across both levels of care.

The clinical work keeps your judgment current and your credibility intact. 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. Holding the site's reflective practice is what binds the three together.

A word on that last function, since it is central here and easily misread. We do reflective practice at scale: each site has a standing reflective consultation in which the team brings its actual clinical experience, uncertainty, and difficulty to be thought about together rather than solved or managed away. The manager leads that space — keeping it reliable, receiving what the team cannot yet hold without handing it back, and attending accurately to what is happening in the room. A separate consultant, who holds no authority over anyone's employment, supports that work from outside the management line; you would not be that person, and you would be supported by them. You do not need to arrive fluent in this. You need the underlying capacity it grows from, and the willingness to be held while you develop it.

Core responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Holding clinical and operational responsibility for the clinic location across outpatient and IOP care
• Carrying a clinical caseload as assigned, sufficient to keep clinical judgment current
• Providing clinical and administrative supervision to pre-licensed clinicians
• Leading the site's reflective consultation as a function distinct from managerial authority
• Protecting the fidelity of the systemic, relational, and developmental model — in group culture, family-therapy delivery, case formulation, and who is entrusted to deliver care
• Holding the clinical spine of IOP: debrief, group quality, family work, and the upstream referral and screening rhythm that keeps census healthy
• Appraisal, performance development, scheduling, coverage, and ordinary operational discipline
• Participating in clinic leadership consultation, case consultation, and Grand Rounds
• Compliance with clinic documentation standards, managed-care requirements, licensing board rules, and the APA Code of Ethics

What This Seat Asks

Management at Lorenz 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, for a clinician's development; a manager, for the conditions under which an entire site of clinicians and clients is held. Being excellent at the prior rung does not guarantee readiness for the next — and we treat each transition as its own developmental act, scaffolded rather than assumed.

The hardest thing the 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, and employment. You will also hold a reflective space where the team brings genuine uncertainty to be metabolized rather than solved. When a team cannot tell whether it is being led or assessed, the reflective function closes. The managers who do this well keep 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. This is the integration the role is built on: not leading from friendship, and not disowning the therapeutic mind in the name of operational credibility, but leading from role with both available.

This is a demanding environment and a supportive one; the two are not in tension. The demand is developmental, not evaluative-punitive. We hold people to a real standard precisely because we are invested in their formation, and the structures around this role exist to hold the manager while the manager learns to hold everyone else.

Who Thrives Here

The strongest candidate is clinically strong, systemically oriented, and genuinely curious about their own impact on the rooms they are in, and treats supervision and management as crafts to develop rather than boxes already checked.

You are a psychotherapist, not a counselor. Relational and systemic psychotherapy competence is the non-negotiable floor. You organize your work around the transformation of underlying relational and developmental patterns — using the therapeutic relationship itself as the vehicle of change — rather than around skills delivery, symptom management, or crisis stabilization. You can traverse a full case formulation, root the 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 grow that register in others and protect it as the defining feature of the clinical work.

You can lead IOP in the relational, systemic register specifically. Competence in relational and systemic group psychotherapy and in family therapy is required — including the judgment to protect group culture, to keep family work happening rather than quietly dropping it under load, and to hold the clinical debrief an intensive level of care depends on for ethical and safety coherence.

You can 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 space where that same clinician brings real uncertainty — and keep those functions genuinely distinct.

You have reflective practice competence, or a genuine willingness to develop it. You do not need to arrive fluent. You do need the capacity it grows from: the ability to observe your own internal states and relational impact without collapsing into defensiveness, to stay with a team member's difficulty long enough for their own thinking to emerge, and to tolerate not-knowing in company. If you have that and want to deepen it, we will scaffold the rest.

Clinical supervision is a distinct practice area, not merely a credential. You will be assessed against a competency-based model of supervision (Falender & Shafranske), including structured 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 kinds of mismatch are expensive here, 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 stand on briefly on the way to a title, who manages 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. Both can interview extremely well, and both produce the same downstream cost: a site that learns its leader is performing the role rather than holding it.

What we select for is the opposite posture. A manager here takes responsibility for the 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 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. 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 individual, family, and group psychotherapy delivered at both the outpatient and intensive outpatient levels of care
• Designation as an approved clinical supervisor with one's own licensing board, and supervision competence assessable against a competency-based framework
• Reflective practice competence — or a demonstrated capacity and genuine willingness to develop it
• Demonstrated capacity to hold operational authority and a reflective space 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. 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.

How to Apply

Selection is competitive and reviewed by clinic leadership. To apply, submit a cover letter and CV via the online job portal. A cover letter is required. Applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

The cover letter is the primary means by which we assess whether a candidate has understood this role, why they want to hold it specifically, and whether their goals represent a genuine match. We read it as much for how you think as for what you've done. Cover letters should address:

• What draws you to clinical leadership at this stage of your career, and what you hope to develop in the role
• Your experience delivering relational and systemic psychotherapy across individuals, families, and groups
• How you understand the relationship between holding authority and holding a reflective space — and where you are in your own development as a supervisor and leader
• Your relationship to the common good and to the profession as a field

Candidates invited to interview may be asked to provide writing samples, references, or a letter of recommendation from a past clinical supervisor.

For questions about benefits, including the student loan repayment program, contact Human Resources.

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 therapeutic moment but not yet ready to hold the team level of the system should consider the Clinical Supervisor posting.