Training Director

Description

Who This Is For

You have spent years supervising early-career clinicians — and somewhere in that work, your attention shifted toward something harder to name. You became more interested in the conditions that form good psychotherapists than in any single case or outcome. You've been thinking about what supervision is actually for. About why some training environments produce a certain kind of practitioner and others don't. About the difference between a clinician who was credentialed and one who was genuinely formed.

You may be inside a large institution where the infrastructure is impressive but the formation work keeps getting crowded out — by productivity metrics, bureaucratic maintenance, or the slow drift that happens when no one is protecting the intellectual center. Or you may be in a setting where the clinical depth is real but the institutional architecture hasn't caught up to the ambition.

Either way, you have been looking for a place that has thought carefully about this — and built something accordingly. Professional development happens in relationships.  If that sentence means something specific to you — not as a clinical principle but as a lived experience of how people grow — keep reading.  

About Lorenz Clinic

Lorenz Clinic is a private outpatient practice and psychotherapy training institute serving children, families, and adults across six 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 training program 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Bateson's systems epistemology, Falender's supervision doctrine, and the Tavistock group relations tradition — not as historical references but as living frameworks actively applied in supervision, consultation, seminar design, and organizational life. The pod model that structures our training program is grounded in this lineage: small, stable, interprofessional reflective containers anchored at each site, explicitly designed to hold the developmental experience of fellows and protect it from operational urgency.

This body of thinking is not finished. It is alive. The Training Director will be shaped by it and will contribute to it.Joining Lorenz as Training Director is not a move into a service delivery setting. It is a move into an institution actively developing a theory of how psychotherapists are formed — and building the clinical, supervisory, and organizational architecture to demonstrate it. For a doctoral-level clinician who has been doing serious formation work inside someone else's institution, this is not a lateral move. It is a step toward the center of the work.

Lorenz pioneered Minnesota's first organized, competency-based post-master's fellowship — a model since replicated across the region. We consider it our most enduring contribution to the profession, and it remains the center of gravity of everything we do.

We serve a predominantly suburban and rural population, including many clients without insurance. Reduced-fee services are not a footnote to our mission. They are part of it.

The Position

The Training Director stewards the Post-Master's Fellowship — a two-year, full-time formation program for master's-level clinicians in MFT, counseling, and social work working toward licensure. The fellowship is among the most selective pre-licensure programs in the country, receiving over 1,400 applications annually for a small cohort. About half of fellows relocate nationally to participate. The current cohort includes clinicians from across these disciplines, each in the first years of post-degree practice, doing real clinical work with individuals, couples, families, and groups inside a structured developmental environment.

The fellowship is not merely a licensure-hours accumulation program. It is a formation experience — organized around the conviction that the pre-licensure period can be made genuinely developmental rather than merely survivable, and that the right institutional environment produces a fundamentally different kind of psychotherapist.
The Formation Ladder at Lorenz runs from master's practicum through the Post-Master's Fellowship, doctoral internship, and postdoctoral fellowship. The Training Director owns the PMF rung of that ladder — holding it with precision and fidelity, ensuring the developmental arc of the fellowship remains coherent, protecting the intellectual commitments that make it work, and ensuring that what the Fellowship is designed to do is what it actually does.

This is a stewardship role, not an administrative one. The right candidate will read that description and feel recognition, not just interest.

The Training Director works in close collaboration with the CEO on program design, training architecture, and institutional direction. This is a thought-partnership relationship. The CEO holds the ladder; the Training Director owns this rung — with full authority over the formation environment of the Fellowship and a genuine voice in the broader institutional direction.

Core Responsibilities

• Steward the developmental arc of the Post-Master's Fellowship cohort across the full two-year formation sequence, calibrated to each cohort's developmental stage
• Lead and coordinate individual and group supervision structures within the Fellowship, ensuring supervision functions as a distinct professional discipline — not an extension of clinical seniority
• Maintain and strengthen consultation processes organized around the clinic's formulation-first method: from clinical data through diagnosis, problem formulation, case conceptualization, and treatment formulation
• Design and facilitate the monthly PMF Seminar — integrating theory with lived practice in the room, holding group process and tone as curriculum, designing for enactment and reflective processing, and scaffolding professional identity formation across all 16 APA Competency Benchmark domains, with particular emphasis on the functional competency of Teaching
• Work with live group dynamics — reading what is happening between people in real time, holding the cohort as a system, and using here-and-now process as a developmental resource rather than a problem to manage
• Protect the intellectual coherence of the training program against the drift that tests every living institution
• Evaluate fellow development and hold expectations with clarity and appropriate authority
• Collaborate as a peer with other Associate Training Directors and with operational leadership within a distributed leadership structure
• Coordinate with the CEO on fellow hiring, program design, and long-term development of the training architecture
• Contribute to the clinic's broader intellectual community: grand rounds, invited speakers, cross-program consultation, and the growing research and publication program

What We're Looking For

The ideal candidate has moved beyond the developmental stage of individual practitioner into the orientation of institutional steward. They understand that their job is not to be the primary source of energy in the program — it is to design and protect conditions under which others develop. The Fellowship should grow stronger because of the architecture they maintain.

We are looking for someone who brings together two competencies that are often found separately but rarely together: deep systemic and relational clinical formation, and genuine group relations competence — the capacity to work with what is happening between people in a room, not just within them or between them theoretically.

Specifically, we are looking for someone who:

• Thinks systemically — whether that means structural, intrapsychic, or relational systems grammar, or all three simultaneously — as an internalized way of understanding clinical problems, supervisory dynamics, and organizational life
• Has supervised early-career psychotherapists and can describe what they were actually trying to do developmentally, not just procedurally — and holds supervision as a distinct professional discipline with its own theory, ethics, and competencies
• Can read and hold group process in real time — comfortable in the here-and-now of a seminar cohort, a consultation group, or a supervision system enacting something that needs to be named and metabolized rather than managed around
• Can design learning experiences that integrate theory with lived practice, hold tone as curriculum, create space for productive enactment and rupture, and build professional identity rather than merely transmit knowledge
• Can hold authority without becoming authoritarian, support trainees without fusing with or rescuing them, and maintain structural clarity under relational pressure
• Is drawn to building and tending institutions, not to accumulating personal platform
• Is genuinely comfortable in a smaller, entrepreneurial organization where the work is visible, the culture is deliberate, and the stakes of stewardship are real
• Has the intellectual depth and relational groundedness to engage a serious clinical and training culture — and the openness to be shaped by it

About the Training Program

The fellowship sits within a vertically integrated training architecture spanning master's practicum, Post-Master's Fellowship, doctoral internship, and postdoctoral fellowship. At any given time approximately 20% of clinical staff are in active training or supervision — which means the intellectual vitality of the training program moves through the whole institution, not just the fellowship cohort.

Fellows receive 8 hours per month of professional supervision — 4 with a doctorally prepared psychologist, 4 with a professional supervisor — plus a monthly full-day PMF seminar covering all 16 APA Competency Benchmark domains, a weekly didactic seminar shared with doctoral interns, monthly grand rounds, and monthly specialist case consultation. Fellows earn approximately 100 hours of board-approved continuing education annually simply by participating in the program. Supervision hours count toward Minnesota licensure requirements.

Many of the clinic's current supervisors and senior clinicians are PMF alumni — clinicians formed in this program who returned to hold others the way they were held. That continuity is not accidental. It is what a formation culture looks like when it sustains itself across time.

Recent invited speakers have included Drs. Froma Walsh, Mac Baird, Irvin Yalom, Bruce Perry, Pauline Boss, Sue Johnson, Mary Catherine Bateson, Harry Aponte, and Carol Falender.

The Training Director inherits a program with strong bones, a national reputation, and a leadership team actively investing in its next chapter.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

• Doctoral degree in psychology or a related field (PhD or PsyD) from a regionally accredited program
• Independent clinical licensure in Minnesota or documented eligibility — LP (Licensed Psychologist) or LMFT (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) at the independent practice level
• Experience providing clinical supervision to pre-licensed clinicians in a psychotherapy setting
• Grounding in systemic and relational models of psychotherapy — structural, intrapsychic, or relational systems orientations all welcome

Preferred Qualifications

• Board certification or active pursuit of board certification in Couple and Family Psychology (ABPP/CFP)
• Experience designing and facilitating graduate-level clinical seminars or training programs
• Demonstrated engagement with the supervision literature — Falender, Watkins, Bernard and Goodyear, or equivalent
• Familiarity with group relations theory, experiential group learning, or the Tavistock tradition
• Experience in community-based or outpatient private practice settings
• Bilingual candidates are strongly encouraged — expanding access for underserved communities is central to our mission

A Note on Fit

We are a small institution with a long horizon and an outsized intellectual ambition. We do not have the infrastructure of a large academic medical center or the name recognition of a flagship university training program. What we have is a carefully designed formation environment, a clinical and intellectual culture that takes psychotherapy seriously as a discipline, a growing research and publication program, and a leadership team building something with a generational timeline in mind.

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

For that candidate, this is not a step away from serious professional life. It is a step toward the center of it.

Process and Timeline

Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. First-round conversations are anticipated for April and May 2026. Target start date is summer 2026, with flexibility for the right candidate.

To apply, submit a CV and cover letter via the online job board at https://lorenzclinic.com/join-us/. Cover letters should outline your professional formation as a supervisor and clinical leader, your interest in this specific role, and your commitment to serving diverse communities. Finalists may be asked to provide writing samples and a letter of recommendation from a clinical supervisor or colleague.

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

Search terms: training director, post-master's fellowship, clinical training director, psychotherapy training, supervision, group relations, Tavistock, here-and-now process, experiential group learning, systems thinking, relational psychotherapy, family systems, psychodynamic supervision, APA competency benchmarks, formation, reflective practice, LMFT, licensed psychologist, doctoral, PhD, PsyD, marriage and family therapy, counseling psychology, clinical supervision, Minnesota, Minneapolis.

This position is listed under Minneapolis for search visibility. Lorenz Clinic's locations are in the southwest metro — Victoria, Chaska, Prior Lake, Rosemount, Minnetonka, and Wayzata — approximately 30–35 miles from downtown Minneapolis. The primary in-person worksite will be one of these suburban locations, with hybrid flexibility depending on program needs.