The transcript for this presentation was edited for ease of reading. The 
intent of the original content was not changed by these edits.

Slide #3

It's hard to talk generally about some ways to restructure. Every organization 
is so different. In this example, I hope to just trigger some thinking on your 
part about how you are currently organized? How you might begin to shift?  Let 
me explain this deprogramming Phase I idea.  This shows that you still might 
have your CEO, fiscal, marketing and HR folks, in their current roles. But what 
you're trying to do is take your staff still wearing their traditional role as 
social worker (SW), team leader (TL), community participation (CP) staff, 
supported employment (SE) staff, day activity (DA) staff, residential service 
(RS) staff.   You'll take the folks wearing their hat or their roles.  Put them 
together into a team to begin to work together, to share what they do and what 
they know in some role sharing kind of a way.  Then, begin to focus on the 
individual in a more cohesive or coherent fashion.  That would be the first step 
to get your staff working together and trying to smooth out those edges of 
service delivery.

From there, in a Phase II approach of deprogramming, move them towards 
individualized services.  Some organizations have moved to a unified job 
description.  Our role as a community resource specialist or staff person, is to 
support individuals in their community in the way that they want to be 
supported.  That's a generalist kind of approach, where you might still have a 
team leader.  This has led to self-directed teams in some organizations. The 
team leader with the circle of staff members, may begin to make the day to day 
decisions and even begin to hire into their team when there are vacancies. They 
know the expertise that they need to compliment the other staff members.  They 
know what will work with their own dynamics.

In all of this essentially, we think about, "Where might we begin? What are some 
of the lessons that we've learned?" With my colleagues in Indiana, we found that 
organizations have needed to take a step back and take a real close look at, 
"How are we doing right now based on some of these components?"  I know some 
executive directors have actually invited in an external review team. Experts 
around the country come and spend days. [They] take a look and talk with staff. 
[They] talk with individuals receiving services and others.  [They] come away 
with some reflection, a mirror held up against the organization. “This is how 
you're doing.”  Sometimes it's not a pretty picture, when you see that there's a 
great bottleneck in services. 

People want to move into employment. But, the way we're structured is that we've 
got one job developer, and no one can get through that narrow pipeline.  It 
might be that somebody falls out of the job. And, it's a year or two years 
before they get attention to be replaced into the job.  It could be that there's 
a communication loop because of the multiple players or multiple cooks in the 
kitchen.  It could be that it's very cost inefficient. We've got staff driving 
long distances to support somebody two counties away. It really is helpful to go 
through and put a mirror up and take a good hard look at your current structure 
organization and outcomes. [Then] use that as a launch pad for restructuring.