Jason Dana Costa 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome to Jason Dana Costa and worth the work. Today's guest we have is Chris Salyu, who's the executive director of the Bridge Youth and Family Services and the founder of Anchor Point Integrity Therapy. She has more than 30 years of social work experience. She's a nonprofit leader and she focuses on building stronger systems, health teams, and a lasting impact on the community they serve. And she's in Illinois. So we'd love to have you here on the show, Chris. Welcome.

Kris Salyards 0:25

Thank you so much for having me.

Jason Dana Costa 0:27

Thank you. So here at Worth the Work, I'd like to try to connect your family of origin to sort of your professional career. So I'd love to learn a little bit of how you were raised and how that maybe helped you determine that you want to be in a career that's really caring for people, particularly those who are struggling.

Kris Salyards 0:44

That's a great question. And it's too long for the podcast. So I'll give you the nutshell. I'm the biological child of my father and my sister, and then the stepdaughter of my mother and the sister to 10 adopted siblings. All of them are special needs, multiple cultures. Not all of them are special needs. Many of them have special needs, I should say. So I like to tell people I cut my teeth in social work when I was about six. We adopted kids from many states. And when we settled in Illinois when I was in eighth grade, we had six total children, which we landed in Illinois in eighth grade, and we had six more after all was said and done. So I like to believe that I'm a natural social worker. I grew up with foster care, adoptive social workers in and out of the house, dealing with special education systems. And now, of course, as they're adults, dealing with adult systems for people with disabilities. So of course, it's just kind of who I am. And so seeing the world from a lens of systemic, I don't want to say failures because that's too big of a word, but systemic gaps, that's kind of how I started to see the world. So when I started out in social work, I didn't really want to do one-on-one social work, although I've done many things. My whole goal was to become a leader in the nonprofit sector. So again, using that very microscopic to macro lens of seeing people in their environments, people in their systems, that kind of thing.

Jason Dana Costa 2:20

Wow. Well, Chris, I had no idea we share this together. I am the father of adopted children. One of them has spinobithida with special needs. And what gave me the courage in my life was my dad's family, who had two sisters with cerebral palsy, one of which raised two twin boys herself independently. I never saw such an amazing thing. My two cousins, when my aunt, Auntie Ray would shout, stop. You'd see these two six foot five men stop on a dime when this five foot three lady in a wheelchair said, it's something you need to pay attention to. It's the most amazing thing. And it influenced the reason why I ended up in nonprofit work. So what a great thing. I didn't realize in just getting to know you, that was something that we share. That's fantastic. I really think that's amazing. So you just said a moment ago that many of the systems are broken, fractured, frankly, drive some of the failures that exist in the systems that we both clearly have worked in. So when did you see those lessons and sort of become real for me? So I agree with you, they happen, but what was the thing that went, oh yeah, I want to be a leader here, as you just suggested?

Kris Salyards 3:28

I think it goes, it's too big to unpack in a podcast, but I think I very young, I was an adoptive foster care worker. I worked in the juvenile court clinic, I've worked in the UK and the US, and so had the opportunity to evaluate systems from two separate countries. I think the thing about nonprofits, and I love nonprofits, so this is not any sort of dig on nonprofits, but nonprofits by their nature can be some of the most inefficient systems because we are working with strapped resources, high value, mission-driven, and it's a highly subjective environment, depending on who's pulling the levers at the time. So I think that's where systems become front and center in all of the years that I've been uh a supervisor or a leader. I find that people who get into the world of social work and nonprofit, they are good meaning people with a strong social justice lens. So I lead from the space of people don't intend to come to work to do bad work. They just function in the systems that are established. And if this if established, if the systems aren't evolving in lockstep with societal shifts, funding shifts, government shifts, and all the rest of it, you find I like to call it music, your music's out of tune.

Jason Dana Costa 4:51

Oh, I like that phrase. On an upright basis, so I love any connection you have to music and works. And I think that's fantastic. So if there's a person in your experience that really shaped your leadership the most, who is that person? And what was the thing that they really they taught you that you really carry today?

Kris Salyards 5:10

This is the cop-out. I've been very fortunate to have so many people invested in my success. I've had mentors and executive directors who've led, and I could probably pick skills and wisdom from so many of them. Most recently, I would say that it's probably my prior ED who I worked for and was her succession plan at the Harbor, Randy Gurion. And the reason why is because very much we're built on the same chassis. So I understood her, but she had a very business mindset, which I appreciated. And the one of the greatest gifts she gave me, which I needed, was to get over myself and my ego. By the grace of God, go we. So for me, it was very much about she would just tell me how it was. This is a you problem. You need to get out of your head, you need to do this, you need to make a different decision. And I still seek her out today for supervision because this work is too hard to do alone.

Jason Dana Costa 6:15

Oh, that's I agree with you. And for those listeners who are new to social work, when Chris talks about supervision, it's not just a supervisor telling you what it is. It's often looking at a problem, particularly clinically, that you have with a perm and for lack of a better phrase, getting second opinions or different ways to look at the problem. So at least Chris, I'm speaking for you a little bit here, but when she says, get out of your own head, she's giving you that different experience. I think you said she, that person was a different experience, a different way to look at that problem that you may have been stuck in your head about, as you said a minute ago.

Kris Salyards 6:45

Yep.

Jason Dana Costa 6:46

Yeah, it's a very interesting term. I never quite I always thought of supervision in sort of the HR perspective in my career for nonprofits until I got to behavioral health and substance use and really have learned the value of supervision when you look at it through the lens of these particular type of work. It's one of those things that I think I hope worth the work influences and bringing into supervision in other instances, because a lot of organizations just do that supervision at that once-a-year annual HR meeting that you think is tied to your pay, where it in behavioral health, it's almost uh a weekly thing and certainly a thing that you specifically go to when there's a crisis with a particular client. Is that fair?

Kris Salyards 7:27

For sure, yes. And I do think too, it helps examine bias and the highly subjective nature of the way that you see this case. And if you are very good at your job, you want your supervision. It is an opportunity to say, where are my blind spots? What am I missing here? I don't think we as social workers always understand the incredible power and responsibility we have when we are the voice of other people. We are the advocates for the next pathway. So it is an incredible responsibility, but also incredibly rewarding when you can realign the person to the systems that they operate in.

Jason Dana Costa 8:07

Agreed. And I think you said a couple of times there about looking at the system and the structure of things. Social work is deeply relational, at least from what I can tell. I'm an accountant by training, so I only have experience on the outside looking in for some of the organizations, but bringing that sort of structure to these deeply relational cultures. What's been one of the hardest things that you needed to sort of preserve to make that happen when you're trying to create structure in some of these challenging spaces?

Kris Salyards 8:34

That my experience and my knowledge are important to me, but it's how I apply that to the circumstance and the experience of the person sitting across from me. So my way of doing things works for me very well. But my way of doing things and thinking about problems may not translate to someone else. And so it's having the humility, I think, to really take a beat and again divorce yourself from your bias and what you think should happen and grow some patience and allow that person to find their path, not to do to people. And I use this all the time. I don't ever do to my clients, I do with my clients. So if my clients, if it doesn't work for them, it's no longer the thing. And being able to have more than just what you bring to the table in your tool bag.

Jason Dana Costa 9:26

And when you say patience, you're talking about the patience that you have internally, not patience as in clients that you're seeing per se.

Kris Salyards 9:34

Of course, right. Because I mean, I'm a solutions-focused individual, so I really appreciate getting to the end result, but solutions focused only works if the person across from you sees that there is a solution at all. And so it is, again, as a social worker, I'm sure you know, as an accountant, you have your tools and you have your math and everything works out. As a social worker, you are really good if you're agile and you're constantly building your tool bag. I frequently tell my staff, listen, we're not working at Starbucks and we can't do seven pumps of XYZ and get the perfect chai. We are working with people. So their recipe works for them and nobody else.

Jason Dana Costa 10:12

So one of the funniest things about social work for me personally, I say I'm accountant, but I'm definitely a different type of accountant. I'm not the green visor sort of person that's sort of so structured and doesn't see flexibility. It's one of the best skills I've leveraged in my career. One of the most interesting things that happened for me is I expected in most nonprofits, I was a super highly emotionally intelligent person in other structures. When I got into the social work sector in that particular nonprofit, I was the person low on the rung where you had all these highly emotionally intelligent, almost super readers of relationships that you're having. And I'm kind of curious, I'm gonna make a leap of faith that you're probably higher on that rung than I, given your talent and skills. How have you navigated sort of that interrelation between employees that both have your skill set that you do, how to work with the relations, but you also have conflict that you have to manage? I'm always thinking that it must be tougher when you have almost so many tools in your toolkit to be able to navigate those relationships to bring structure to those cultures or trying to do so. Am I making sense of my question?

Kris Salyards 11:22

I think so. I think it's about how to navigate conflict.

Jason Dana Costa 11:26

Yeah, but navigate conflict when you have so many people that have the skill that you have. I imagine the work to get there in the leadership must be so different than what it is in some of my other experiences, because you have just so many tools in your toolkit and everybody else has similar tools. You know what I mean?

Kris Salyards 11:43

Yeah. I always lead with we're all smarter together. And I also leaning into there are no bad people, there are bad systems. So I like to do a pro like a post-mortem, if you will, if we have a less than optimal outcome, like where did the breakdown happen? You know what I'm saying? Not whose fault was it? I try very hard to keep pointing fingers out because once you put people on the defensive, they're no longer listening or learning or participating. And so it's about where did this, where did the system fail within our procedures? Is it a policy? Is it a procedure? Is it a practice? Is it a training? Is it supervision? Is it onboarding? So it's about continuously finding the spaces in your organization and with your relationships on your team to figure out did this fail because nobody owned it? Did it fail because nobody understood it? And so I hope I answered your question, but that's really where I try to lead, even though we know in every organization there is an underperformer. There is somebody who is getting their paycheck and there's stuff going on with them as well. But I don't use that as my global lens.

Jason Dana Costa 12:56

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Saying it more succinctly, how you've used your skill as a therapist to move an organization through conflict is a good example you just gave there. Burnout, which I know is very significant, and it's one of the greatest things about supervision, is it really takes you out of that for a little while and helps alleviate burnout, I assume, and building trust within an organization. So those are the areas I was hoping you'd tap into, which I think you certainly did around the conflict and how you do it. Any more you would add with either burnout management or trust?

Kris Salyards 13:28

For sure. Burnout management is definitely a thing. I mean, this like I always tell the staff, this work is too hard to do alone. Your spouse doesn't understand it. Your best friends, unless they're therapists, they don't understand it. So supervision is the place to reflect, but also recognizing when it's time for you to step away. And I'm not saying step away from the job, but use your time off. Use your time off to gain some perspective and some reflection. Do you even understand what your burnout looks like? Does your burnout make you work harder and faster, or does it make you shut down completely? And so it's really the exercise of internal exploration to be the best version of yourself for your clients that you can be. And then trust is incredibly hard. You want your clients to trust you, you want your staff to trust you as a leader, you want your organization to trust itself.

Jason Dana Costa 14:24

What a great phrase. Tell me more about that one, particularly. You want the organization to trust itself. Tell me more what you mean by that.

Kris Salyards 14:31

Well, just because there are so many cogs in the wheel, and you want to trust, you want your staff to trust that your board is driving you in the right space. As an executive, you want to make sure you want to trust that your processes are working for you and not against you, that your strategy is front and center and identified. So everybody's looking in the same direction. So there is this implied trust that we come together and we're doing this work because we all want the organization to succeed, and the organization wants to support us as we succeed.

Jason Dana Costa 15:01

Yeah. In a nutshell, I'm hearing trust the vision, trust the direction you're heading. That's a great thought. I of all the podcasts that I've done so far, you're the first person I'd say that really brought that as a specific thing to think about. I really do appreciate that. Fantastic. Tell us a little bit while we're thinking of your organization. Tell us a little bit about the Bridge Youth and Family Services and Anchor Point Integrity Therapy to share with my audience here.

Kris Salyards 15:24

Yeah, so the Bridge is a nonprofit. We provide services to kiddos who are in potentially involved with DCFS and juvenile justice. So our goal is to keep them out of those greater systems. We do that by being present 24-7 for families who are in the middle of a family conflict or crisis. We provide long-term counseling to kids who traditionally can't afford it. And we augment those services with things like mentoring or case management. So we have kids who are we have volunteers who work in the school who actually sit with kids on their lunch break to help them if they're having some bullying or being bullied or dysregulation in the classroom, just feeling disconnected from school. And we have long-term mentoring relationships where we pair mentors one-on-one with kids who just need an extra caring adult in their life because they might just not have exactly what they need.

Jason Dana Costa 16:23

Of course, I love that particular one. You don't know much about my personal professional history, but one of the organizations I worked with, called the U.S. Dream Academy, it still exists and it strives to break the intergenerational incarceration cycle that exists for at-risk youth. And they do so in part by one that you pointed right at, providing mentorship to individuals that they targeted elementary and middle school kids specifically, trying to pair them with an adult who can show them that it's a different pathway than necessarily joining gangs and doing things that may put them on a certain path that could have them incarcerated in some way. It was always a child that had either a direct person in the house that was in jail currently, or somebody who was on probation. So you've touched on a part that I have in my heart dearly. It's a lot of hard work really being able to show kids a different opportunity and mentorship, that one-to-one mentorship, particularly, at least in our experience back then, that male relationship that didn't necessarily exist frequently for some individuals to see that there was a different path. I love that. That's fantastic work and hard work.

Kris Salyards 17:33

Yeah, we have a good crew. They're very good with the kids. So we're fortunate to have them. And Anchor Point is just my baby. I mean, I started in this field and I said I never want to do one-on-one. I never want to do individual service delivery. That's not where my life is. And then I sent a kid to Iowa, University of Iowa, and I was like, you know what? I think I'm going to need some extra income. So I started providing individual therapy through someone else, and I fell in love. And to be honest with you, it was actually the thing that filled my tank. So that solved my burnout. Because as an executive director, I don't really get client interaction, but I'm a client interaction person. And Randy would say the same thing. She said, you find your passion from people and not from processes. So you need to find your passion. And so after doing it, I was like, you know what? This is what I'll do when I retire. So I built Anchor Point Integrative Therapy as my next phase of life to provide that with a little flair of leadership coaching. Because to your point, you know, there's a reason that life coaching is so important right now, right? And you see lots of people who are life coaches because we're all doing, we're just trying to survive. And so having the management perspective and the therapist perspective, I think gives me a little bit of a superpower. So I try to use that when I'm able. So that's a little bit about me and my little private practice that's just getting started.

Jason Dana Costa 19:04

Well, that's fantastic. I mean, it was interesting. I was going to ask you a question. Sort of what was a difficult season that sort of tested you in your career and how did you change as a leader from what it became? Is it that realizing you needed to be connected directly to the patient for a little bit of work? Or is there other stories that really tested your resilience and pivoted how you became a lever?

Kris Salyards 19:22

I think that is an interesting observation that Randy had made for me, which I never really touched that rock, if you will. But I think COVID, running homeless youth during COVID, it taught me a lot. And this is the this is the salient lesson for me in my career. I had to build a I had to build a new shelter for the kids. Otherwise, we'd have to get out of the business of our flagship, which was homeless youth. I had never raised money in my life. So I had to put myself through school to become a fundraiser. And thankfully the the Harbor supported me 100%. And then I had to run a capital campaign for this on a sit on systems that were not built for a capital campaign and a donor database that wasn't established for a capital campaign and a feasibility study that said you cannot run a capital campaign.

Jason Dana Costa 20:18

You were building a plane while you were flying it for sure.

Kris Salyards 20:20

I exactly. That is so funny you say that because I say I'm building the boat while I'm rowing the boat constantly. And I'll wrap the story up really quickly, I promise. But when I was going through this process, COVID also was happening. And so a lot of my staff decided that they didn't want to work in the office or in the houses. So while I'm doing this capital campaign, I'm also trying to figure out how to keep these houses staffed and the kids protected and safe. Meanwhile, I have my own kids at home and a husband who's trying to manage the home. So my stress level was incredible. However, I had several amazing people who stepped forward and who partnered with me on the capital campaign. The day that I got my final gift, which is a story in itself, I decided that was the day that I had to leave the organization because I had reached the end goal and also needed to focus on my life and my kids. And after that, after leaving that, now I poured my soul into that not profit. And here's the take-home message. And I tell it to all of my partners you do not own that nonprofit. It is not part of you, and you are not part of it. You are only the steward of that nonprofit for the years you are allowed to hold the strings. Because when I left, so many of the things that I thought I had done well were either redone or dismissed. And it was very personal for me. And so once I was like, okay, here's the lesson. The lesson is that this isn't my thing. This is my thing for as long as I am. Given the honor to hold it. So I'm sure that there's a more succinct way to say that to other nonprofit executives who are pouring their entire life into their work. But the take home for me is to what end? What are you sacrificing? And is the sacrifice worth the journey? You know what I'm saying? So there's so much in there to continue on with.

Jason Dana Costa 22:24

But Boy, we should have asked you that question up front, Chris, because I mean that in and of itself tells us what's worth the work. I mean, you've clearly engaged in organizations that from the outside people would be challenged. I mean, homeless youth, what makes that still worth the work? A lot of people would perceive that as a lost cause. Even foster care, what a difficult system. Clearly, your background, my personal life, has the experience of how complex and convoluted those works are. And then you're touching on sort of that 5,000 foot up when you're in the leadership of that organization. And I myself have run seven of them now, that very real, and I share it with you, that sort of almost uncomfortable feeling you have after you've decided you've run your course there, and I've done that before, and then left. And you thought, great, it's all just going to run automatically without being no nope, that's not going to be the way we do it. That's not going to be the way we're going to do it. And is both a proud thing you have, you've taken it for as where as it needs to be, but also a little disconcerting as they re-envision the dream that you had in some respects, just something else completely different. And that's a very good lesson. I think it is true that nonprofit leadership both has to keep their pulse on it, but also has to keep the pulse on themselves, to be just that little bit agnostic and realize, as all nonprofits are, they're for the public good, not necessarily your personal, I don't know, brand, maybe, for lack of a better phrase, or equity. Hope you bring it to the next greatest thing, and then somebody will take that baton from you for the next experience. Oh, I agree a hundred percent. Boy, we might have to have a Chris 2.0 conversation here for sure to unpackage some of those thoughts you have there. So I'll still ask my question because that I usually ask towards the end here. I always like to know what still makes it worth the work for you. You've can definitely been working in some of the more challenging areas of social work. So, what continues to make it still feel worth the work and worth the investment for you?

Kris Salyards 24:27

This is just something I know about myself. I have an incredible amount of compassion. And I really do care about the part of our society that doesn't have what it needs to become the best part of our society. We I often tell people we are only as good as our weakest member. And so if we have that vision and that view, then we should be out supporting people and giving people what they need, providing people with this the filling those gaps or helping them fill their gaps, especially in today's political climate where everything feels like the gap is becoming bigger and bigger. And that so many of us, people that I work for me, they're not that far off from the gap. And so it's worth it to me because I feel like I still have skills and I still have things to offer that would probably make me crazy if I were in corporate America.

Jason Dana Costa 25:25

Yeah. I've joked on this podcast before that I could have done a different version of finance and management work, but I always feel wonderful actually when I go back home at the end of the day and know that there are people that are safer, happier, healthier, and contribute more to this society that we all participate in, that it's worth the work. It's one of the greatest things my father said to me once before. You go somewhere and everybody goes to that thing, whatever it may be, a party or a work, to see what's happening, to see if it's an interesting party. And when you realize that you're actually in it, you're part of it. You're actually what's making it a better place. Remember, your participation, even when it's small, is really worth the work because you're making it a better place simply because you arrived and participated for it to be a better outcome.

Kris Salyards 26:15

Yeah, for sure. Well, and also to close it with both of our shared experience, who knows what would happen to the kids that didn't find a family? Who knows what the length of their life would be? And who knows anything? And so the fact that somebody cares and cares enough to wrap their arms around that individual, I think that makes it worth the work from a very micro level.

Jason Dana Costa 26:45

Yeah. And I would say for my own part, my well, often people would say to me that wasn't it wonderful that you adopted kids with special needs. And very much so, my kids saved me. I wanted to be a father, I wanted to be a parent. And every day they pour amazing things into my life. It's it is the two-way street. It is that relationship that you create with them, and it's better for it. Chris, I've really enjoyed having you here on Worth the Work. We thank you so much for your time. Our guest today has been Chris Salyards, who's the executive director of the Ridge Youth and Family Services and founder of Anchor Point Integrated Therapy out in Illinois. We wish you all the success in the world, Chris.

Kris Salyards 27:28

Thank you so much. It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the conversation. You're welcome.