Take care of the people and the mission takes care of itself.
Structural consulting for human service organizations that are tired of losing the people they need most.
Your people are not the problem. Your structure is.
Most organizations in this field run on a quiet assumption: that turnover, burnout, and disengagement are the cost of doing mission-driven work.They are not. They are the cost of broken structures failing to do mission-driven work, and that is fixable.
The Open Table Workshop
A half-day session for human service leaders ready to give every voice in their organization a real seat at the table.
Most human service organizations run on a borrowed structure. The people who lead the org sit in a senior management meeting once a month. Everyone else gets what filters down. Decisions get made without the people most affected by them. Problems that the frontline could have named in five minutes stay hidden until they become crises. The people doing the actual work — the ones closest to the mission every day — have no structural way to shape the organization they work inside.That is not a culture problem. It is a design problem. And it is fixable.Open Table replaces the senior management meeting with a monthly session built on a different premise: that every role and every program has a voice in how the organization operates, and that when people are actually heard, they stay.Representatives from each role and each program come to the table with their team's input, bring what gets decided back to their team, and rotate so that leadership development spreads across the organization rather than concentrating at the top. The table gets bigger. The problems get solved earlier. The people doing the work stop feeling like they are invisible to the people running the place.This is the single structural change that I would recommend first to any organization willing to do it.
What you walk away with.
1. A clear understanding of why your current decision-making structure is producing the disconnection, disengagement, and turnover you are trying to solve.
2. The full Open Table model — how to structure it, who sits at it, how reps are selected and rotated, and how the communication loop back to teams works.
3. Your implementation plan built during the session, specific to your organization's size, staffing structure, and schedule.
4. A follow-up Zoom call thirty days after the workshop to troubleshoot what is working and what you are stuck on.
The details.
• Date: Tuesday, July 15
• Format: half-day Zoom, three hours
• Capacity: five organizations, up to five participants each.
• Investment: $2,500 per organization. The first two organizations to register by June 27 pay $1,750.
Questions? Email me: [email protected] or DM on LinkedIn
100% to under 20%
An organization I worked with had over 100% annual turnover. Four years later, it was under 20%. Same people, same pay, but we improved the framework.We changed the structures that decided who had voice, how power got shared, and how the work was actually supported. The caring, as well as retention, followed from there.
Tim Vaughan, MissionWorks
Same people. Same pay. Same caseloads. They changed the structure. The retention followed.
The Mission-Aligned Framework
People are not complicated. They need to feel connected, they need to grow in competence, and they need to have real autonomy in how they do their work.Build around those three needs and your people stay. Ignore them and they leave, no matter what your mission statement says.
The work is structural, not training. It changes how your organization relates to the people doing the work, from the inside out.
How we improve your organization's structure.
1. Diagnose. We look at the actual structure of your organization and its outcomes. Where the work is supposed to happen, where it actually happens, and where the gaps are hurting your mission.2. Align. We bring the leadership team into one understanding of what needs to change, in what order, and what the tradeoffs are.3. Build. We make the structural changes that move connection, competence, and autonomy from values on a wall to defaults in the building.4. Sustain. We put the practices, language, and accountability in place to keep the changes after I leave.
Full engagements run six to eighteen months depending on size and complexity. Targeted structural projects (like supervision model or decision-rights redesign) can run shorter. Pricing scales with scope. I work with a small number of organizations at a time because the partnership requires it.
About Tim Vaughan
Twenty plus years in human services. Every seat in the building.
I started in direct care working with court-involved kids and individuals with significant disabilities, trauma, and explosive behavior, and worked my way through supervision, program leadership, and Executive Director.I have been part of real turnarounds and I have also been the only person in the room who thought things could be better.I know what both of those feel like.About fifteen years ago, I was leading the implementation of a trauma-informed program meant to reduce physical restraints at a residential school.Every principle was about meeting human needs. Safety, trust, connection, predictability.The further I went into it, the more obvious it became. Every one of those principles applied just as much to the staff as to the kids. A four-year-old in crisis and a forty-year-old burning out are both people whose needs are not being met. The tools are different. The truth is the same.MissionWorks is what came out of that.I live in Littleton, New Hampshire, with my wife, two dogs, and the comings and goings of three adult kids. I write for human service misfits on LinkedIn and consult with organizations that want to operate differently.Person by person, org by org, we are changing the field for the better.
Working inside one of these systems?
If you are a human service professional reading this, you are looking for something different than what an Executive Director is looking for. Fair. I write for you regularly on LinkedIn, and the Human Service Playbook is a free PDF that gives you a starting point when you do not know what your next move is.
Human Service Misfit? You are not alone.
Talk to Tim
First conversation is free. Thirty minutes. No pitch. No obligation.
If you lead an organization in human services or a related mission-driven field, and you are looking at the people, the turnover, the morale, or the structure and thinking "this could be so much better," let's talk.You tell me what is happening. I tell you honestly whether I think MissionWorks is the right fit, and if not, what I would do in your position.
Take care of the people and the mission takes care of itself.
© MissionWorks | Tim Vaughan