Three sessions at one conference describe the same gap: a field that promotes clinicians into leadership roles it never trained anyone to hold.
At an industry conference in Boston this August, in one room, a celebrity dating coach and former television casting director ran ABA leaders through a mirror exercise, an emoji quiz, and a call-and-response game about the difference between answering a colleague with yes, but and yes, and. In another room, a consultant told operators that their training directors probably should not be behavior analysts. In a third, a former clinical leader explained why the field stopped producing executives who understand both halves of the business.
Read separately, they are three unrelated sessions. Read together, they describe one problem: ABA does not develop its own leaders, so it rents them.
This is not a small operational quirk. The field has consolidated into platforms that concentrate more than a thousand clinics inside the ten biggest operators, each of which needs clinic directors, training leads, and regional operators, and every playbook for running clinics at scale assume those people exist. Mostly they are behavior analysts who were good at their previous job.
Why Your Training Director Probably Should Not Be a BCBA
Adam Hockman’s argument is structural rather than personal. “Nobody ever said the training director needs to be a BCBA,” he said. “That’s something that just ABA organizations, as they grew, that was just something that went along with it, because owners were clinical directors and trainers and all of those kinds of things.” The credential attached itself to the role by inheritance, and the job it describes is a different job.
What that job requires is not mysterious, and it is not undocumented. The Association for Talent Development’s Talent Development Capability Model, built from research with more than 3,000 practitioners, defines 23 capabilities for the profession, including instructional design, training delivery, and learning evaluation, and underpins two certifications. It is a mature field with its own literature, and almost nothing in it appears in a behavior analysis graduate program. Hockman’s proposal is a learning and development professional in the seat, paired with a Board Certified Behavior Analyst serving as subject matter expert.
He is candid about where the resistance comes from. Intervening at the technician level almost always forces retraining at the analyst level, he said, and that is where organizations encounter friction from people who object that this is not how they were trained, that they do not select prompts that way, that they fade differently. The objection is professional identity wearing the costume of a methodological argument.
The Training Gap That Produces Turnover
The same session supplied the clearest example of what happens when nobody in the building has training design expertise. Clinical teams write an ideal technician persona, typically someone with a psychology or social work degree and prior experience with children. Talent acquisition ignores it, because that person does not take a job at $15 an hour, and recruits from the service industry instead. Then clinical builds training for the persona it wrote rather than the person the company hired.
“You’re not training someone with a bachelor’s in psychology,” Hockman said. “You’re training someone who’s never had a job before.” What follows is a curriculum calibrated to the wrong learner, sequenced by tradition rather than design, which is how safety training lands on day two before the trainee has met a child, and how belief systems about autism and disability that will determine whether someone follows a protocol unsupervised go entirely unexamined during onboarding.
His colleague Allison Betz put the diagnostic plainly: most organizations conclude they need to hire more people, when what they have is a performance readiness problem. The distinction has money attached. Their rebuild of onboarding at Little Leaves, the multi-site provider LEARN Behavioral acquired in May, cut turnover across the first 90 days from 23 percent to 13 percent, and the reason it worked was not clinical insight. It was instructional design applied by someone who does it professionally, in a field where keeping technicians matters more than finding them.
Hockman is equally pointed about what the absence of design expertise produces structurally. Organizations stack requirements rather than sequence them: a technician credential course sitting in a learning management system, a separate vendor for first aid, another for safety training, then in-person clinical training on top, each added by someone solving their own problem. The result at one provider was an onboarding program that had grown past a hundred hours, not because anyone decided the job required that much preparation but because nothing was ever removed.
He also names the visibility problem that lets it persist. Senior leaders stop seeing the training their organization actually delivers, and he is unsentimental about why: it is easier to stay in your office, he said, because you do not like what you see when you go out there.
The Closed Path From Clinical Work to Business Leadership
Stephanie Bates supplies the other half of the explanation, which is why the people who might have filled these roles never got the chance. Organizations, she said, decided on their clinicians’ behalf that business performance was not something they wanted to know: they want to be with the kids, it is off-putting to them, they do not want to think about this as a business. So nobody taught them, and the path from clinical work into operations quietly closed.
Her own career is the counterexample. A Chief Financial Officer took her under his wing and taught her to build a business case for headcount, showing her how to argue that three people who are pure cost in one place generate revenue in another. He rarely denied her a hire afterward. She learned budgeting, then the next piece, then the next. That is a leadership development pipeline, and it happened because one executive decided to build it rather than because the organization had one.
The alternative is what the field does now, which is buy the capability at the senior level when it needs it. Acuity’s own tracking of executive appointments across ABA and behavioral health shows a steady flow of operating and financial leadership arriving from outside, while BACB data show the clinical pipeline tightening. Hiring outward is a reasonable answer to an immediate gap. It is not a substitute for growing people, and it gets more expensive every year the internal route stays closed.
Bates does not frame this as clinicians being wronged. The business side takes a comparable beating, she argues: finance staff get treated as spreadsheet functionaries, are rarely told how their decisions land on clinical teams, and absorb the reputational cost of saying the company has to make money while everyone else gets to say the company helps children. Both sides were denied the other’s vocabulary, and organizations pay for it in the same currency, which is decisions made without knowing what they cost elsewhere.
What the Keynote Slot Is Actually Telling You
Which brings the point back to the mirror exercise. The keynote was Damona Hoffman, a dating coach and author who spent her early career casting television at CBS and who now markets herself, accurately, as a communication keynote speaker. The session was not weak. Its argument, that most workplace communication now runs through screens and that leaders misread how their messages land, is sound, and its most useful detail was her figure for the average response time to a text message, about 90 seconds, which means a Sunday evening message to staff starts a clock whether the sender intended one or not. That is a real observation about after-hours communication and burnout, and it came from someone who has never run a clinic.
The fact that it had to come from outside is the story. A field with mature internal leadership development would have its own people teaching this, grounded in its own settings, the way the conference circuit itself has matured into a professional infrastructure. Instead ABA imports communication training from entertainment, instructional design from corporate learning, and finance from healthcare generally, then wonders why its clinical and business sides speak different languages. Hockman thinks that friction is partly a vocabulary problem. He is probably right, and vocabularies are learned from the people around you, which requires there to be people around you who have already learned them.
