If We Want Burnout-Proof Organizations, We Must Support the People Who Support Everyone Else 

By Liz Friedman, CEO & Co-Founder of GPS Group Peer Support 

Across behavioral health, public health, homelessness services, recovery programs, and community-based care, frontline workers are carrying a level of emotional and structural strain that no training program ever prepared them for.

We talk often about burnout among clinicians, case managers, outreach workers, and direct service staff. But there’s a group we don’t talk about nearly enough:

The supervisors who hold all of them.

Supervisors, managers, and program directors sit at the exact pressure point where staff trauma, organizational demands, and community needs collide. And although their role is framed as oversight and guidance, it is—at its core—emotional labor.

Supervisors are the ones absorbing:

• The secondary trauma staff bring back from the field
• The moral injury of systems that cannot meet community needs
• Staff defensiveness during formal evaluation
• Their own anxiety about conflict, performance, and expectations
• Pressure to model stability while everything around them shifts

And while supervisors are expected to be steady, professional, composed, and supportive, almost no one asks the most obvious question: Who is supporting them?

The Invisible Burnout

Supervisors often carry the emotional load of an entire team without acknowledgment, training, or protected space to process what the role requires. They are the first line of response when staff members are overwhelmed—and the last to receive support themselves.

In high-trauma environments like homelessness services, overdose response, infectious disease, or emergency behavioral health, supervisors face a dual exposure:

They carry their staff’s trauma, and they carry their own.

And yet most organizations only intervene once a problem reaches HR, which is not a sign of failure, but of a support system that is simply not built for the emotional complexity of this work.

Peer Support Is Not a Bonus. It’s Infrastructure

If we want organizations that withstand burnout, turnover, and moral injury, we have to build systems that care for the people at the center of the work.

Supervisors need a confidential, structured space to talk about what’s hard. They need a community of peers who understand the pressure of the role. They need both support to navigate defensiveness (both theirs and others’!) and tools for holding staff through trauma, change, and conflict. And, they need a place to reflect before challenges escalate to HR

Without these structures, supervisors become isolated. When they become isolated, they burn out. And when they burn out, entire programs destabilize.

The GPS Group Peer Support model was designed for exactly this kind of workforce challenge.

GPS provides:

• Structured, trauma-informed support groups for supervisors and managers
• Training in a replicable group model that supervisors can bring to their own teams
• Curriculum development tailored to supervisory challenges

GPS groups integrate evidence-informed modalities like motivational interviewing, CBT tools, somatic grounding, and reflective listening practices into a seamless format that helps supervisors process, reflect, and return to their teams with more clarity, calm, and skill.

Supervisors repeatedly report that the groups break isolation, normalize difficult emotions, and help them re-engage with their teams from a grounded, compassionate place.

Burnout-Proof Organizations Start Here

Supervisors are not simply middle managers. They are the backbone of the behavioral health and public health workforce. When they have no outlet, the entire system feels it. When they have support, the entire system strengthens. If we want lower staff turnover, healthier team dynamics, better outcomes for clients, more resilient leadership pipelines, and sustainable public and behavioral health systems, then we must start by stabilizing the people who are holding the workforce together every day.

Supporting supervisors is not soft. It is not optional. And it should not be a wellness perk. It is core infrastructure in any organization that expects to survive the emotional, structural, and societal pressures surrounding behavioral health and community care today.

If we want burnout-proof organizations, we must start by caring for the people who support everyone else.

Join our GPS Supervisor Training, starting March 4th! 

This training is for anyone in a supervisor role supporting staff to run GPS groups. Learn more about GPS’s trauma-informed, evidence-based group approach, how to support your team, how this group approach is different from other group models that your team may be implementing, and how to integrate GPS into the heart of the services that your program offers. SIGN UP HERE.

Bring MASStrong to Your Workplace

GPS’s MASStrong program offers free GPS trainings, support groups, curriculums, and toolkits for Massachusetts medical, behavioral health, and community care workers and organizations. Eligible organizations can also apply for GPS partnership support and grants up to $10,000.