‘I love them. They are full-hearted warriors’
aria Coutant Skinner likes to stay busy.
Eight years ago, right around the time she was executive director of the McCall Center for Behavioral Health in Torrington, she co-founded the Litchfield County Opiate Task Force. She’s still co-chair of that group and
also chairs the board at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, part of Hartford HealthCare, and she co-chairs the treatment committee on the Connecticut Alcohol and Drug Policy Council.
If managing a behavioral health and addiction services agency in a global pandemic wasn’t enough, Coutant Skinner has spent the last 18 months merging her business with Help Inc., a Waterbury-based provider with a 34-bed inpatient addiction recovery facility and mental health group homes along with outpatient work. She’s now executive dirctor of both, and the affiliated nonprofits will become one next year.
Coutant Skinner, 52, is the Hearst Connecticut Media Top Leader award winner for midsize employers in the 2021 Top Workplaces contest. She joined McCall 24 years ago in the prevention department, with a degree in psychology and therapeutic recreation from Springfield College. She also holds a masters degree in social work and specializes in children’s trauma.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Are you thinking about the mental health of employees as you manage people in a mental health enterprise?
This to me should be sort of standard operating procedure because everybody has mental health. We’ve
never had a time in our history where people can relate more to what it feels like to be anxious, what it feels like to be lonesome or depressed or filled with fear, sort of having the ground be uneven underneath your feet. So that’s going to impact staff, it’s going to impact productivity, it’s going to impact relationships in the workplace. And so it just makes so much sense that it’s the primary thing that we pay attention to, is how is the mental well-being of the workforce? And what do we have in place in terms of supervision to be able to identify somebody who might be struggling? And then what resources do we have built in, so that we can support folks if we can see that they’re hurting?
Is that stress because of COVID?
I was referencing COVID specifically because I think that was the great equalizer of all of us, to recognize what a sleepless night after a sleepless night feels like. Everybody could access an empathetic part of ourselves and say, I can’t imagine how they could live with this all of the time.
How did remote work affect your ability to lead in the workplace?
There was a time when some of our outpatient therapists were doing their work from their own dining room tables. There is a phenomenon called vicarious trauma that a lot of professions are vulnerable to, but certainly therapists who are holding space and hearing the heartbreaking stories of their clients hour after
hour, day after day. And a really important piece of how therapists cope with that is to talk amongst their peers. You share a cup of coffee together and maybe tears of a hug. And when you’re doing that in isolation, that’s hard. So we brought everybody back as soon as we could. A lot of staff never worked from home.
Did people feel vulnerable working with patients face-to-face?
Some did. Some people, I would say less than a handful, it was too risky for them because of their preexisting conditions. But we were able to get access to the vaccine very quickly and we had amazing, amazing community partners help us with risk mitigation, PPE and access to COVID tests. We do everything possible to help our sister organizations and then that definitely gets reciprocated to us.
Is there a situation that really tested your ability to lead?
There is so much heartache in the form of suicide and overdoses and people suffering and my staff are the people that show up for those people that are hurting. And I think as we appropriately celebrate health care heroes, we have to remember the people who take care of the spirit and the minds of the people who are struggling. The mom who lost her son to overdose. And so my biggest challenge as a leader is to stay connected, to let people know that I see them. I love them, and I tell them that and I know how much they love their work. They are full-hearted warriors and my challenge is to continue to show up with my whole heart.
Have your employees expressed stress over the merger with Help Inc.? How have you managed that?
The way that we have approached the merger is the way that I would approach anything, which is with full transparency and tons of communication. Let’s talk about it, let’s bring it out into the open. During the height of the pandemic I was recording a video every single day, for 90 days. And now I do a video every week and I send it out to every staff person. Some of them were silly, like I’d put on ridiculous costumes and dance around. Some of them were serious. Some of them were informational, some were just deeply personal, but it was my way of staying connected. We also created inter-agency work groups – and these involved staff from both organizations.
How do you balance your nature as a healer, listener and nurturer vs. the need to run a multi-million-dollar organization?
There’s a quote that I love from Brene Brown, which is, ‘Clear is kind, unclear is unkind.’ So if there’s an issue then it’s incumbent upon me as a leader that you confront that. You’re clear, you’re respectful. You handle that with integrity. You don’t go around it, you lean into that difficult situation.