Clinical Manager (Outpatient Psychotherapy)

Description

Clinical Manager — Outpatient Psychotherapy Practice — Prior Lake, MN

If you have spent several years as a strong outpatient clinician, taken on supervision, and found yourself increasingly interested in how the system around the work either holds clinicians or doesn’t — this posting is for you. Keep reading.

Who This Is For
You are a licensed clinician with a real practice. You have been supervising for a while now. Somewhere in the last year or two, your attention has shifted. You have begun to notice that what determines whether early-career clinicians develop well is rarely the supervisor alone — it is the system around them. You have started to think about culture, accountability, supervision quality, and what it means for an institution to actually hold the people who work inside it.

You may be inside an organization where the management layer feels mostly administrative — calendar maintenance, audit chasing, productivity nagging. You may have noticed that the people who become managers in that setting tend to do less of the clinical work and more of the email. And you may have wondered, quietly, whether that is what management has to be.
You have been looking for a place where the answer is no.

About Lorenz Clinic
Lorenz Clinic is a private outpatient practice and psychotherapy training institute serving children, families, couples, and adults across multiple locations in the southwest Minneapolis metro. We use both words — practice and institute — deliberately. The clinical work funds and grounds the mission. The institute is what gives the clinical work its shape, its meaning, and its reach.

We treat systems, not just symptoms. We develop clinicians, not just employees. We hold clinicians so clinicians can hold clients — a principle that runs through every level of the organization, from the therapy room to the supervisory relationship to the architecture of the management layer itself.

Over fifteen years we have built a coherent body of clinical and organizational thinking. We draw on Winnicott’s holding environment, Bowlby’s secure base, Bion’s work on group dynamics and containment, Bateson’s systems epistemology, Friedman’s differentiated leadership, Falender’s supervision doctrine, and the Tavistock group relations tradition — not as historical references but as living frameworks actively applied in supervision, consultation, and organizational life.

Lorenz pioneered Minnesota’s first organized, competency-based post-master’s fellowship. The Post-Master’s Fellowship remains the center of gravity of everything we do. The work of the Clinical Manager is, in the end, the work of protecting the conditions under which that formation happens — and of bringing the same care to outpatient services that we bring to training.

Site Leadership and Reflective Practice at Scale

In addition to operational stewardship, the Clinical Manager leads a small group of clinicians at the site in shared reflective practice. This is a structural part of the role, not an honorific or an additional meeting. It is how Lorenz holds reflective practice at scale: not as something that happens only inside individual supervision, but as a standing institutional discipline that shapes how a clinical team thinks together.

This work is a learned discipline, distinct from the clinical and operational work the manager does elsewhere. The container is not a decision-making forum — it does not perform task assignment, performance management, or operational problem-solving. Those forums exist; this is not one of them. What it holds is the structural conditions under which ambiguity, anxiety, and developmental strain can be metabolized rather than displaced into gossip, escalation, or burnout. The manager’s job inside that container is to protect it. Which means, often, interrupting drift toward the things it was not designed to hold.

What this looks like in practice is a manager who can shift register: who can hold authority outside the room without exercising it inside it, who can sit with a flat or uncomfortable group without rescuing it, and who can read process in real time well enough to notice when curiosity is contracting in the room. We treat this as a clinical discipline because it is one. The capacity to hold a reflective group well is closely related to the capacity to hold a difficult therapy session well — and the failure modes are isomorphic.

The model at Lorenz is mature but actively developing. The right candidate will be working inside a structure that is already in place, with colleagues who are themselves practicing it, and they will be expected to participate in its evolution rather than treat it as fixed scaffolding to inhabit.

Caseload

Every clinical manager at Lorenz Clinic carries a clinical or supervisory load of 0.5 FTE. This is structural because we are a clinicians-first institution. Management at Lorenz is a stewardship function held by an active practitioner, not a credential earned by stepping away from the room. A manager who stops doing the work loses contact with what the team is actually navigating. They become an administrator of a practice rather than a steward of one.

It is not negotiable because the post-licensure career path that ends in administrative escape from the clinical room is one we are explicitly not building. If you have been managing somewhere else and the appeal of this role is the prospect of seeing fewer clients — or of trading direct service hours for executive-track credentialing — we would rather you know that now. There are organizations that build that path. We are not one of them.

The right candidate reads this paragraph and feels recognition, not friction. They are not looking to leave the work. They are looking for a setting where management does not require them to.

Core Responsibilities

• Hold the operational health of the Prior Lake site — productivity, documentation, compliance, staffing, day-to-day functioning — to the standards set by the Director of Clinical Operations
• Lead a small group of clinicians at the site in shared reflective practice, under explicitly delegated authority from the CEO to maintain fidelity to the model
• Carry a 0.5 FTE clinical or supervisory caseload, modeling the practice the team is being asked to sustain
• Provide clinical and administrative supervision to assigned clinicians and trainees, in alignment with the formation ladder governing each rung
• Hold accountability conversations with clarity and warmth — neither softening standards in the name of relationship, nor deploying authority in ways that fracture trust
• Coordinate with the Associate Training Directors as peers — collaborating on issues that intersect formation and operations, without triangulating, escalating prematurely, or absorbing work that belongs elsewhere
• Steward the relational field of the site so that anxiety is metabolized at the level it arises rather than routed upward by default
• Translate the institution’s clinical and operational standards into local practice — and translate site-level patterns back to leadership when something the institution should know about is emerging
• Participate in the management team’s reflective and operational rhythms
• Other duties as assigned

What We’re Looking For

The right candidate has moved past the developmental stage of the strong individual practitioner who happens to supervise, and into something closer to the orientation of a system holder. They understand that their job is not to be the primary source of clinical or emotional energy on the team. It is to design and protect the conditions under which others develop and the work gets done well.

We are looking for someone who:

• Thinks systemically and relationally about clinical work, supervision, and organizational life — not as theoretical commitments, but as the way they actually understand what is happening in front of them
• Practices and thinks as a psychotherapist, not a counselor — meaning their clinical identity is organized around depth, the relational field, and the experiential register of change, rather than around symptom reduction, psychoeducation, or technique sequencing
• Has supervised pre-licensed and early-career clinicians with intentionality — and can describe what they were trying to do developmentally, not just procedurally
• Can hold authority without becoming authoritarian, and can support team members without rescuing them
• Tolerates ambiguity without rushing to resolve it — including in a meeting that has gone quiet or flat. Social smoothness is not the same as differentiation, and the manager who relieves a group of every uncomfortable silence is not, in the Lorenz sense, holding it
• Reads relational and group process in real time and can name patterns without weaponizing them
• Can deliver accountability cleanly — without softening the standard to preserve harmony, and without deploying power to displace anxiety
• Can shift register between roles — exercising operational authority in operational forums and stepping into a different posture when reflection is privileged and authority is held outside the container even when authority holders are physically present
• Is interpersonally secure enough to be challenged without becoming defensive, and to challenge without becoming punitive
• Has the intellectual depth to engage a serious clinical and training culture — and the openness to be shaped by it
• Is drawn to building and tending an institution rather than to accumulating personal platform

A Note on Fit

Lorenz Clinic is a small institution with a long horizon and an outsized intellectual ambition. We do not have the infrastructure of a national hospital system or the scale of a venture-backed care platform. What we have is a carefully designed clinical and training environment, a coherent body of organizational thinking that gets revised as we learn, a leadership team building something with a generational timeline in mind, and a meaningful number of colleagues who have stayed because the work was worth staying for.

The right candidate is not looking for the most prestigious title. They are looking for the right room — one where the work is serious, the people are formed, the standards are real, and the institution holds what it asks its clinicians to hold.

For that candidate, this is not a step away from clinical life. It is a step into a kind of clinical life that most behavioral health systems no longer attempt.

Process and Timeline

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. First-round conversations are anticipated through the spring and summer of 2026. Target start date is flexible for the right candidate.

To apply, submit a CV and cover letter via the application portal. A cover letter is required. Applications submitted without one will not be considered. This is not a formality. The cover letter is the primary means by which we assess whether you have read what we wrote, understood what we are asking, and want to be here specifically rather than somewhere generally.

Your cover letter should outline your professional formation as a clinician and as a supervisor or manager, your interest in this specific role at this specific institution, and your understanding of what makes management at a formation-first practice different from management elsewhere.

Lorenz Clinic is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a diverse and inclusive clinical community.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

Either:

• A) The equivalent of one year of experience as a Mental Health Professional at Lorenz Clinic with a documented track record of leadership and exceeding position requirements and an active Manager-in-training nomination; or
• B) The equivalent of three years of post-licensure experience as a Mental Health Professional providing clinical services, of which at least one year was in a management or clinical supervisory capacity in an outpatient setting

And:

• A master’s or doctoral degree from an accredited program in marriage and family therapy, social work, clinical counseling, psychology, or a closely related field
• Independent clinical licensure in Minnesota: LP, LMFT, LICSW, or LPCC
• Board-approved clinical supervisor status, or eligibility to become board-approved within the first year
• Experience providing clinical supervision to pre-licensed or early-career clinicians (required for external candidates; internal MiT candidates assessed against program-defined supervisory development milestones)
• National Provider Identifier (NPI) prior to first day of employment
• Approval for Medicare participation within 180 days of hire, where Medicare participation is allowed for the license type

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior management experience in an outpatient mental health setting
• Grounding in systemic, relational, or psychodynamic models of psychotherapy
• Familiarity with group relations theory, reflective supervision practice, or the Tavistock tradition
• Engagement with the supervision literature — Falender, Watkins, Bernard and Goodyear, or equivalent
• Bilingual candidates are strongly encouraged — expanding access for underserved communities is central to our mission

Other Requirements

• Ability to work full-time, in-person — our leaders are in the clinic, not on Zoom
• Demonstrated ethical and moral character; references will be requested
• Strong written and verbal communication skills

Compensation & Benefits

The hiring range for this position is $90,000–$135,000 annually, depending on experience, credentials, breadth of clinical competence, and clinical program. The hiring range for master’s-prepared clinicians is $90,000–$110,000; the hiring range for doctorally-prepared psychologists is $110,000–$135,000.

Full-time, independently licensed clinicians at Lorenz receive a robust benefits package, including:

• Medical, dental, vision, life, and short- and long-term disability insurance
• 401(k) with employer matching
• Paid time off, paid holidays, paid service/volunteer time
• Paid Burnout Time — a structured, protected leave benefit designed to support sustained clinical performance, separate from standard PTO
• Twelve weeks of paid parenting leave regardless of gender
• Annual continuing education allowance
• Employee assistance program
• Professional development support

As an active training clinic, most clinicians at Lorenz earn approximately 100 hours per year of board-approved continuing education simply by participating in the work — through monthly grand rounds, four hours per month of specialist case consultation, the annual conference, and the broader intellectual life of the institution.

Lorenz Clinic is proudly committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. We are an Equal Employment Opportunity / Affirmative Action employer. 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.