About
What is Organizational Effectiveness?
Our Organizational Effectiveness (OE) training and technical assistance practice empowers human services at all levels- systems, organizations, departments, and individuals- toward their desired vision.
Since 2004, our team has collaborated with 40+ states, facilitating training and technical assistance resulting in strategic impact within human serving agencies and community partners.
Learn more about our Consulting Practice, including our approach, services, and expertise.
What Guides Us?
Our premise is straightforward: effective organizations are foundational to building healthier and stronger communities.
Purpose
- APHSA’s Organizational Effectiveness (OE) team provides training and technical assistance tailored to support organizations dedicated to enhancing its impact and effectiveness. Our solution-focused approach uses customized tools aligned with your organization’s strengths and needs, empowering leaders and teams to innovate and solve challenges through continuous learning. Using the Human Services Value Curve and other strategic tools, we co-create actionable steps that build momentum for change, empowering members and partners to address unique needs and leverage strengths to achieve integrated goals within their communities.
Guiding Principles
| Open Systems | Social systems, including agencies, are comprised of inputs, performance capacity (leverage of inputs), performance actions and outputs, client impacts, and relationships within their environment, all of which are dynamic and interrelated. |
| Functional Capacity | Building and sustaining organizational capacity requires a rational organizational structure with well-aligned departments, roles, functions, and hierarchical levels |
| Effectiveness | Results are best achieved by identifying and improving upon the processes and activities that lead to them rather than focusing primarily on the results themselves. |
| Experiential Learning: “Learning by Doing” | Learning happens best through a cycle of reflecting on personal experiences, generating new ideas, making specific behavior changes, evaluating their impact, and adjusting accordingly. When done effectively, this creates a continuous cycle. |
| Readiness | Readiness to learn, change, and perform advances through stages. At each stage, change becomes quicker and more thorough, with less need for support. |
| Empowerment | Energy and buy-in for change aligned to system goals are best accomplished by increasing participation in decisions, sharing information, and enabling discretion within clear and healthy boundaries. |
| Relationship – Task Balance | Building strong relationships and completing tasks aren’t opposing goals; progress in one supports the other, while setbacks in one can harm the other. |
| Facilitation | Effective consulting and facilitation use techniques that prioritize participant safety, energy, and contextual focus. This approach gradually fosters accountability and enables participants to make broader connections and insights. |
| Evaluation | Professional development interventions should not be evaluated with an assumed cause-and-effect chain linking participant satisfaction, knowledge retention, performance, and agency impact. Instead, they should be directly tied to how they improve performance and impact in line with agency or system goals. |
Meet Our Team
Consulting Practice
Our Approach
APHSA’s OE team supports state, local, city, and community-based human services agencies by providing leadership development, coaching, facilitative support, technical assistance, and tailored learning opportunities to strengthen performance and impact. As human services agencies navigate complex challenges to enhance community well-being, our agile, adaptive approach—focused on “learning by doing”—helps agencies build resilience and optimize client outcomes, reinforcing the value of OE in fostering successful, adaptable organizations. Acting as thought partners in change efforts, we offer on-site and virtual consultative services and training that drive both immediate and long-term improvements.
What Makes Us Unique?
Since 2005, our OE team has delivered over 1605 unique projects within 45 states using our custom tools and processes. We understand that true organizational and community transformation requires collaboration toward shared goals to advance community well-being. Our team of former social workers, human services leaders, and change management and training professionals have extensive experience across human services divisions. Our OE Team works closely with staff to dig beneath symptoms to identify root causes, asking key questions about underlying issues and sustainable solutions.
Using APHSA’s customized tools, we co-create tailored plans that leverage your organization’s strengths. Through our “Learning by Doing” approach, participants engage with models, tools, and methods to drive continuous improvement, using monitoring techniques to assess and refine progress.
What We Offer
- Learning and Staff Development
- The Learning and Development Team develops and delivers in-person and virtual training on human services topics, helping agencies and staff thrive. Additionally, the team develops engaging eLearning courses in APHSA’s THRIVE Learning Management System (LMS), allowing users to learn at their own pace. Each course targets core objectives and includes interactive activities that enhance the user experience and success.
- Technical Assistance
- Our team of highly skilled OE Consultants provides targeted support
ito human services organizations/divisions in defining, assessing, planning, implementing, and monitoring strategic efforts toward long-term sustainable. Using our DAPIM™ model, we assist in guiding your team and system through the phases of development to promote strong, connected, and effective Human Services organizations nationwide.
- Our team of highly skilled OE Consultants provides targeted support
- Where have we worked?
- Since 2005, our OE team has delivered over 140 custom projects within 38 states using tools and processes from the field of Organizational Effectiveness to human services agencies and community partners.
Focus Areas
- Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging (EDIB)
- Embedding CQI
- Mission/Vision/Values Development
- Organizational Culture
- Leadership Development
- Emotional Intelligence
- Community Engagement
- Strategic Planning
Expertise
- Continuous Improvement:
- DAPIM™ (Defining, Assessing, Planning, Implementing, and Monitoring) is APHSA’s approach to systematic continuous improvement.
- Organizational Culture
- Leadership Development
- Change Management
- Strategic planning
- Bridging and Belonging
- Value Curve
- The Human Services Value Curve (HSVC) is a lens or a way of looking at the services that organizations provide from the point of view of the consumer.
- Community Partnerships and Ecosystem Development
- Capacity Building
- Coaching
- Facilitation
- Training Development
