What happens when a VR agency stops leading with compliance—and starts leading with trust?

In this episode of Manager Minute, Carol Pankow sits down with Lea Dias, Director of the Hawaii Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, to talk about rebuilding an agency from the inside out. Facing high vacancies, low morale, and years of monitoring pressure, Lea chose a different path—one grounded in listening, kindness, and belief in her people.

The result?

✔ Renewed staff engagement

✔ Stronger community partnerships

✔ Improved employment outcomes

✔ A culture moving from survival to purpose

This is a powerful reminder that real change doesn't start with spreadsheets—it starts with people.

 

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Full Transcript

 

Lea: I'm proud when I see my staff here at the administration level, thinking less about what the staff are doing wrong and focusing more on how can we help them, getting resources to help them, reaching out directly to help them. People talk a lot about rapid engagement and forget that ongoing part rapid and ongoing engagement. If you focus on culture first, the numbers I believe will follow. And if you focus only on numbers, the culture will crumble.

 

{Music}

Intro Voice: Manager Minute, brought to you by the Vocational Rehabilitation Technical Assistance Center. Conversations powered by VR. One manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host, Carol Pankow.

 

Carol: Well, welcome to the manager minute. Joining me in the studio today is Lea Dias, director of the Hawaii Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. Lea recently participated in a panel at the fall CSAVR Conference, sharing Hawaii's journey to improving employment outcomes and what she calls their secret sauce. So how are things going in Hawaii?

 

Lea: Oh gosh, a lot better now that the shutdown is over. And we got a couple of our grants came through recently. And so that's all good. I think a lot of people think, oh, Hawaii, it's Paradise, right?

 

Carol: Yes.

 

Lea: But we have the same sort of issues I think, that many other agencies do. But things are getting better in Hawaii. I'll say that.

 

Carol: That is awesome to hear. It's so good to see you again. Oh my gosh.

 

Lea: you too.

 

Carol: So for years, Hawaii has faced real challenges, including declining employment outcomes, significant work tied to addressing findings from an RSA monitoring report. In fact, you all were monitored the same year I was when I was still with Minnesota Blind back in 2019. And so I remember having a bond with you guys.

 

Lea: Yeah.

 

Carol: Because we were all going through it together.

 

Lea: Yes.

 

Carol: Now, I know when you stepped into the director role following the former director's retirement, you really brought this stabilizing, steady calmness that the agency really needed. And under your leadership, the team is rebuilding momentum, strengthening systems and really seeing some meaningful progress in the work being done across the islands. So today we're just going to explore that journey. What's changed, what's working and what other states can learn from your experience. So let's dig in.

 

Lea: Okay.

 

Carol: Can you start by sharing your journey with Hawaii VR and what led you into the director role?

 

Lea: Sure, Carol. Well, first of all, aloha, and thank you for having me. I have been with Hawaii Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, we're a combined agency, by the way, for over 30 years. And I started off about 34 years ago as an entry level VR counselor at the general site of our agency. And then in 2000, I moved over to become the supervisor of field services at our Ho'opono, which is our services for the blind branch. And Then I stayed there for a while. I then assumed the role of director of our New Visions Structured Discovery Orientation Center, and eventually I became the administrator of Blind Services, and I was honored to serve in that role until about July of 2023. So the majority of my career so far was spent at home. And I learned so much there, you know, working for a blind agency beyond what I got from my master's degree and all that. I learned so much about consumer empowerment. And, you know, the real dramatic changes that vocational rehabilitation can make in people's lives. So anyway, when the former Hawaii VR administrator left pretty abruptly, our agency was in a tough place. We had a vacancy rate of over 40%, I want to say close to 45% and rising low morale. We had that heavy corrective action plan you talked about from RSA and many staff were feeling really overwhelmed. So initially I stepped in as a temporary assignment just because I care so much about our agency. I love this profession. I care about the people we serve, and I wanted to do what I could to help stabilize and restore hope. And also, I had several staff approach me and ask me to do it, and that meant a lot to me. So I decided to apply after that. And I've been official in this job just a little over two and a half years, since July 2023.

 

Carol: That has gone really quickly.

 

Lea: Yes it has.

 

Carol: Well, and when you said bringing kind of that stabilizing calmness, everybody talks about that. You've been credited with doing that. How did you approach leading through that uncertainty and kind of rebuilding trust.

 

Lea: Oh gosh. Well, thank you for the compliment. But when I stepped in we were struggling across the board. And I know because I was part of that. Right. Coming from within the agency, we had declining successful employment outcomes way down. And a lot of the outcomes we had, they weren't really careers. In many cases, we had something like 77% of eligible participants leaving us before they even got to the point of IPE.

 

Carol: Wow!

 

Lea: Which is really atrocious. Super high vacancies. And because of those super high vacancies, we had counselors having to cover other counselors caseloads. So people were really burned out, overwhelmed. And because we had been working since 2019 to resolve that corrective action plan with RSA, and we had been so focused on that, staff were, I think, drowning in compliance tasks. And not that compliance isn't important because it is, of course, but there was a lot of blaming and overcorrecting in my opinion, and I think the human side of VR had been kind of pushed aside. When I was preparing for my speech for CSAVR, I kind of asked the line staff, I told them what I was going to be doing and asked them what they thought. And one counselor really summed up for me how it was by saying, just quote, we were all just Surviving.

 

Carol: Oh.

 

Lea: That's kind of pretty much where it was.

 

Carol: That's quite a statement.

 

Lea: Yeah.

 

Carol: it really is. And I know I worked with your team too throughout that.

 

Lea: Mhm.

 

Carol: You know, when we were trying to work on getting corrective actions done and just kind of redoing policies over and over and fifth iteration, sixth iteration.

 

Lea: Right.

 

Carol: Oh my gosh. It was.

 

Lea: Right.

 

Carol: It was a lot. And you lose that sense of, you know, you lose the sense of the people and the reason you're all there. I can completely understand that being in the midst of that.

 

Lea: Yeah.

 

Carol: I know at CSAVR the whole panel was talking about the secret sauce. What do you think has been the biggest impact so far for your agency?

 

Lea: Well, I focused on listening first and staff told me they felt hurt and they had felt mistrusted and they had felt disrespected. They talked about too many barriers to getting their work done. And, you know, I believed them because like I said, I know.

 

Carol: Yeah.

 

Lea: So I developed a pretty tight group of folks on my leadership team up here who I knew I could trust really implicitly to help me, you know, listen to people struggle with and overcome these barriers for our staff and our consumers. And this tight group of people, they shared my vision for the agency and my philosophy of the purpose of this great program called vocational rehabilitation. So we opened up leadership meetings. I decided to bring in frontline supervisors rather than just the people in the quote unquote, ivory tower, and line staff at all levels into our conversations. I really emphasize transparency and consistency and kindness and respect for ourselves. I demanded it to each other and to our consumers, because I really had to rebuild safety and rebuild trust. In the beginning because of the way our agency had been. When I would open up the floor, you know, for people to talk, it was crickets. People just didn't want to speak up. All of that to say, I think there's really to me and I think I said this at CSAVR, I don't think there's really a secret sauce, to be honest. We've made many improvements, but we still have a long way to go, particularly with our data collection and data analysis and reporting are performance measures. Still need a lot of work and my staff and I are learning together. I guess you could say our secret sauce is trust plus autonomy, plus removing barriers and trying to find a way to yes for our consumers and for our staff.

 

There's lots of little examples, you know, based on feedback that we got from our staff, we started allowing counselors to close their own cases. They weren't allowed to do that, as a result of the reaction to the corrective action plan. I would say we eliminated some things that were outdated or unnecessary, like some financial needs testing language. I stopped the communicating via solely via memo. All communication via memo. Training via memo. I mean, that kind of stuff just doesn't work. It's a good backup, but you can't rely on just written stuff.

 

Carol: No.

 

Lea: I cut out what I saw as unnecessary multi-layers of approvals for things as simple as a payment for a service to a consumer would have to come all the way up to

Episode ID: 1000743828790

GUID: 13744b43-fed5-4d23-8d9e-4306783725f0

Release Date: 05/01/2026, 20:21:00