Integrity Is Not a Labor Strategy

When I first imagined Kind Therapy Inc, I was working as a therapist while overseeing clinical quality assurance for crisis calls across Colorado.

Therapists would spend eight or ten hours holding other people’s emergencies while the length of their bathroom breaks was monitored.

Therapists in crisis care, community mental health, and group practices alike listen to thoughts of suicide, panic, abuse, grief, psychiatric emergencies, and the ordinary catastrophes that make someone reach for a therapist, then returned to workplaces that seemed strangely uninterested in whether the person providing therapy remained intact.

The contradiction stayed with me.

Mental health professionals were being asked to create conditions of safety for other people inside systems that often created very little safety for them.

Even outside crisis work, the field was lonely.

Group practices advertised community, but therapists frequently had little energy left to participate in one. Everyone had a full caseload. Everyone needed to catch up on notes. Everyone was trying to get paid.

The people professionally trained to understand human connection were often working alone in adjacent rooms, everyday.

I became curious about a fairly simple question:

What would happen to therapy if the therapist’s personhood were treated as part of the clinical infrastructure?

The experiment

So in August 2016, I started a mental health nonprofit in Denver, Colorado.

At what was then Khesed Wellness, now Kind Therapy Inc, we offered things that were unusual enough at the time to feel almost excessive: free clinical supervision, free continuing education, genuinely flexible working hours, and payment on a Net-10 schedule rather than asking therapists to wait months for an insurance company to decide whether their labor had occurred.

We tried to care whether therapists were well. Not symbolically, structurally. The hypothesis was simple: if the environment surrounding therapy became healthier, perhaps therapy itself would become healthier.

The same principle shaped the service model.

Licensed therapists provided deeply reduced-fee and, in some cases, no-cost care without forcing every person into a tiny predetermined allotment of sessions. Therapists were paid above market rate, regardless of what the client paid.

We intentionally centered communities that had the least reliable access to therapy and tried to build an organization in which affordability did not have to mean disposability, for the client or the therapist. I thought the experiment was principally about systems.

Ten years later, I think it was also an experiment about people.

The inverse does not reliably follow

There is a theory hidden inside much of the conversation about the future of work.

People become alienated because workplaces are alienating. Treat workers badly and they will withdraw, protect themselves, become transactional, leave. There is plenty of truth in this.

What I did not understand when I began Kind was that the inverse does not reliably follow.

Treating someone well does not necessarily make them relational.

Giving someone flexibility does not necessarily create stewardship.

Providing security does not guarantee loyalty.

Generosity is not a mechanism for manufacturing character.

This took me a long time to accept.

I believed, perhaps with the optimism of a therapist, that a sufficiently healthy environment would invite healthy participation. If people were not being exploited, they would have less reason to behave defensively. If the organization invested in them centrally, perhaps they would understand themselves as participants in something rather than simply occupants of a job.

Sometimes they did. Those people remain among the great gifts of my working life.

Most others understood work differently. For them, employment was not primarily a relationship to steward. It was an arrangement from which each party should extract what it could. The employer needed labor. The worker needed money, experience, training, clients, credentials, flexibility, a stepping stone, or some combination of them.

Once the exchange stopped being useful, the relationship required little further meaning. This understanding of work is not confined to workers. Companies perfected it first. American business has spent generations teaching people that labor is fungible, loyalty is sentimental, layoffs are strategic, knowledge should be captured, efficiency should be maximized, and every relationship should eventually justify itself on a spreadsheet.

It would be strange if workers learned nothing from the lesson. So they adapted.

The contemporary worker has been taught to maintain options, build a personal brand, collect transferable skills, keep professional relationships portable, maximize compensation while minimizing obligation, pursue status even when others absorb the cost, and leave when a better opportunity appears or before anyone has the chance to discover that the image and the substance do not entirely match.

Employers call this disloyalty when it inconveniences them and agility when they do the same thing. Both sides increasingly approach the other with the expectation that eventually they will be used. The rational response is to use first. That is the capital work environment.

What generosity cannot do

I saw versions of it inside the organization I had tried to build differently.

Early in our history, I used to say that I hoped other affordable therapy practices would emerge from our model. We eventually trained more than one hundred therapists in business because I genuinely believed greater access mattered more than organizational possession.

There was also a practical reason. Therapists are rarely taught how to run a business, even though many will eventually open a private practice of their own. I wanted people to leave with more than clinical skill. I wanted them to understand how to build something sustainable.

Some people built beautiful things from that knowledge.

Others reproduced language, systems, strategies, or ideas developed inside our organization without acknowledgment of where they came from. Some later competed for the same clients and therapists they had first encountered through us.

At first, I understood these moments as organizational problems. Intellectual property. Competition. Retention. Boundaries. Integrity.

Eventually I became more interested in the stories people tell themselves when they do these things.

The stories are rarely: I benefited from someone’s generosity and would now like to exploit it.

Human beings are much more sophisticated narrators than that.

The story becomes that the organization had enough already.

That the idea was obvious.

That everyone borrows.

That the worker had been under-recognized.

That leadership was imperfect.

That past harm justified present behavior.

That they deserved more.

That the mission mattered more than the institution.

That leaving justified taking.

That whatever happened was necessary for growth.

Most of us are extraordinarily talented at constructing an ethical bridge between what we want and what we have decided to do.

This is not principally a workplace phenomenon. Work merely gives it fluorescent lighting.

Therapy does not exempt us from being human

For me, the more difficult realization concerned therapy itself. When I entered this profession, I carried an assumption I did not know I carried: People became therapists because, at some fundamental level, they wanted to be good.

I no longer believe professional identity tells us very much about character.

A person can be the best in a clinical mental health master’s program and remain dishonest.

They can understand attachment theory and avoid accountability.

They can teach boundaries while violating them.

They can speak fluently about systems of oppression while using power carelessly themselves.

They can learn the vocabulary of trauma without becoming less capable of causing it.

Therapy education can teach someone how to recognize a psychological pattern. It cannot require them to transcend the human ones.

This may be one reason the mental health field remains, in my experience, among the most psychologically unhealthy industries I have worked within.

We sometimes confuse knowing the language of health with possessing it.

A therapist is still a person.

A nonprofit worker is still a person.

A progressive workplace is still populated by people formed in the same culture as everyone else.

They bring oppression, ambition, fear, generosity, insecurity, tenderness, competition, avoidance, loyalty, envy, creativity, self-deception, and courage through the door with them.

No employee handbook eliminates this. Neither does a good boss.

Integrity does something smaller

That may be the lesson that took me ten years to learn.

I once thought integrity in leadership could change the terms of the relationship. Now I think integrity does something both smaller and more important. It changes your terms.

Being a boss of integrity does not guarantee that people will treat the organization with integrity.

It does not mean generosity will be remembered accurately.

It does not prevent someone from converting trust into opportunity.

It does not make every person who benefits from a humane system interested in preserving one.

Integrity is not a labor strategy.

It is not an employee retention program.

It is not culture engineering.

It is not even a particularly reliable competitive advantage.

Integrity is simply a decision about what kind of world you are willing to reproduce through the small jurisdiction of your responsibility.

That distinction matters to me now.

I no longer want to create humane working conditions because I believe humane conditions will reliably produce humane people.

That is too much to ask of an organization and a person. I want to create them because unnecessary suffering should not be embedded in the design of work.

People should be able to use the bathroom without being timed.

Therapists should not have to wait six months to be paid for work they have already performed.

A person should be able to attend to their family, their body, their life, and still be considered serious about their profession.

Someone receiving affordable care should not have to accept inferior care in exchange for access.

These things remain true even when no one rewards you for making them true.

The small jurisdiction

Perhaps that is where my understanding of leadership has finally landed.

There was a time when I thought the purpose of building an ethical organization was to demonstrate that another kind of workplace could produce another kind of relationship. Now I am less certain organizations possess that much power.

Work is not separate from culture. It mirrors it.

If the surrounding culture teaches us that everything is a transaction, people will carry transactional instincts into even the most trustworthy environments.

If the culture teaches that success means maximizing personal advantage, some people will optimize generosity itself.

If it teaches us to understand every institution primarily by what we can extract from it, even a benevolent institution eventually becomes another resource.

A good workplace can offer another possibility. It cannot make someone choose it.

So why continue being a boss of integrity when integrity does not guarantee integrity in return?

Perhaps because reciprocity was never the point.

Perhaps we build the conditions we want to live among because someone has to keep those conditions alive.

Not because everyone deserves unlimited access to our trust.

Not because boundaries are unnecessary.

Not because exploitation should be tolerated in the name of kindness.

Quite the opposite.

Integrity eventually requires discernment.

It requires protecting what has been built, naming what belongs to the organization, choosing carefully who receives access, and allowing consequences to exist without becoming cruel.

A humane workplace does not need to be a defenseless one.

Ten years after beginning this experiment, I am less idealistic about what good systems can make people become.

I am more committed to building them anyway.

There are already enough places teaching people that power excuses indifference, that labor is disposable, that generosity is weakness, and that the smartest person in the room is the one who manages to extract the most.

I do not need to build another one.

The world may continue teaching people to perpetuate the pain they know.

Those of us who still want something else around us will have to keep practicing it. Not because it always works. Because it is how it remains possible.