Lauren Mobertz partners with leaders building better kinds of business, from nonprofits and mission-driven teams to B Corps and worker co-ops, to create the systems for delivering the best work of their lives.

Previous Work

Lauren’s work sits at the intersection of operations, people, work design, and communications.

  • Challenge: As Berlin-based biotechnology firm xbird faced rapid growth, its leadership team wanted to apply a science-based approach to its hiring process to improve hiring quality and create a more diverse set of candidates and new hires, with a particular focus on hiring more women.

    Design question: How might we hire strategically and improve diversity?

    Solution: After conducting initial stakeholder research with xbird’s staff and leadership team, I mapped the company’s existing hiring and onboarding flows. In a series of workshops, I brought the xbird team together to identify areas where they’d like to evolve hiring and onboarding. Finally, I trained the team on strategies for inclusive hiring. I also worked with xbird to set up its first applicant tracking system and created step-by-step documentation on hiring and onboarding, including how to create job descriptions, how to screen applicants, how to rate candidates after interviews, and ultimately how to select the best candidates for the job. I also worked with the team to design an ideal 90-day onboarding plan for future new hires.

    Results: Over the next two years, xbird was able to double the representation of women across the company.

  • Challenge: Common Group had a clear mission and strong values, but as the team entered a period of rapid growth it became clear that they would need the infrastructure to ensure their values scaled with their team. Without formal policies or consistent processes, the team risked culture drift, slow decision-making, employee turnover, and burnout.

    Design question: How might we right-size process and policy to support team growth and bolster company values?

    Solution: As the company's first people hire, I partnered closely with the CEO to translate company values into concrete policy. Deliverables included: employee leave policies and stipends that echoed the company’s value for employee development; CEO office hours that facilitated information sharing and increased decision velocity; and an employee development and promotions process that ensured employees and leaders shared a common understanding of what growth and recognition looked like at Common Group.

    Results: Over ~12 months, Common Group was able to 3x their team with repeatable people and operations infrastructure in place that gave employees clarity and a genuine sense of being supported while enabling leadership to operate with consistency and confidence. With systems in place that could scale alongside the team, the CEO gained back bandwidth to focus on the mission rather than day-to-day tactical decisions.

  • Challenge: As social impact startup Common Group grew, expectations for people managers were inconsistent and sometimes unclear. Managers lacked a shared understanding of their role, and employees didn’t have a clear sense of what to expect from their managers or how performance would be evaluated.

    Design Question: How might we create clarity and consistency in people management while staying true to company values?

    Solution: I interviewed team members across levels to understand what was working, where managers needed support, and what behaviors best reflected the company’s values. From there, I defined clear manager standards, expectations, and a role description so both managers and individual contributors understood what good management looked like. I also introduced role expectations and a leveling guide to give managers a practical foundation for delivering feedback and supporting growth. To build capability, I identified key learning needs, selected a right-fit training partner, and complemented formal training with a manager community of practice. I also rolled out feedback training across the company to strengthen day-to-day development conversations.

    Results: Managers had a clear, shared foundation for how to lead, and employees gained greater consistency in how they were supported and evaluated. The organization was better equipped to deliver meaningful feedback, develop talent, and scale its culture as the team grew.

  • Challenge: eBay launched Retail Revival in 2018 to help small business owners tap into its global marketplace. After a successful pilot, eBay green-lit the program to expand across the U.S. and globally, requiring new levels of visibility and coordination across multiple cross-functional teams.

    Design Question: How might we align teams and information to increase decision-making speed and capacity while allowing the program to scale to more customers?

    Solution: I partnered with eBay’s Impact, Government Relations, Customer Success, and Communications teams to create a shared source of truth for the program. I oversaw the design and implementation of a centralized dashboard to track program performance, surface bottlenecks, and guide decisions. Alongside this, I introduced new decision-making cadences across teams that served as regular checkpoints to review data, prioritize work, and stay aligned. This replaced scattered workflows with a clear, coordinated system that made it easier to move faster together.

    Results: The program scaled to four additional U.S. cities in 18 months while expanding to Canada and Europe. During that time, customer retention improved by 58%, applications to the program increased 153%, and participants reached their first sale in half the time.

  • Challenge: When a company sets a bold new strategy, leaders across the organization need to figure out what capabilities they'll need to pull it off: new skills, new hires, new ways of working. But day-to-day demands limit the time for thinking that far ahead. The result: planning happens too late, and recruiters, trainers, and partners are left scrambling.

    Design question:How might we help leaders to think ambitiously about what their teams will need in three to five years, and turn that thinking into a repeatable process the whole organization can use?

    Solution: Pull leaders out of the day-to-day with a facilitated offsite built around a tight, scalable process for mapping future capabilities. Using appreciative inquiry, a method that starts with what's already working before imagining what could be, leaders follow a focused set of prompts to shift from "what we're missing" to "what we could become." The output is a clear picture of future talent and capability needs that HR, recruiting, and leadership can immediately act on.

    Results: Delivered a ready-to-run toolkit and facilitation process for a two-day offsite, designed to work in-person or virtually. People partners across the organization can now lead this process independently, giving the firm a repeatable way to stay ahead of its own growth.

  • Challenge: Restore Oakland is a community advocacy and training center in Oakland, CA, aiming to bring job training, restorative justice, and crucial social services to the Fruitvale community under one roof. Before opening their building, Restore Oakland planned to host a series of community conversations in English and Spanish to introduce their mission, listen to the community’s concerns, and give community members a say in which nonprofits and service providers should move into Restore Oakland’s building.

    Question: How might we synthesize the voices and needs of our community members to identify the best path forward for Restore Oakland?

    Solution: As part of a team of five researchers, I spearheaded the design of our discovery process. Over the course of 4 weeks, we gathered input from 56 English- and Spanish-speaking community members in a series of listening sessions. My team inductively coded our notes, a process that allows key themes to emerge without outside bias. Finally, my team compiled key insights into a report with suggested action steps, which we presented to Restore Oakland’s founding team to inform the build-out of their opening plan. To create capacity for continued community listening, we also took a train-the-trainer approach and created a guide for Restore Oakland members looking to host additional listening sessions to gather further insights.

    Results: Insights from 56 community members were gathered, synthesized, and prioritized to inform Restore Oakland’s offerings.

What clients & collaborators say:

“Lauren helped us to redesign our HR process and opened up a world of new learnings. She showed a very high understanding of hiring best practices and employee engagement. Lauren was extremely reliable, communicated clearly, built an excellent rapport with my team, and delivered above expectations while meeting tight deadlines.”

— Sebastian Sujka, CEO & Founder, xbird

“Effectiveness is the driving motivation behind Lauren’s work. She has the rare ability to work in the weeds of the details but also see how all the pieces fit into the big picture. She can zoom in and out as needed, which makes her an incredible thought partner.”

— Alexis Gallivan, founder, Over Yonder & Blue Marble Ice Cream

“Lauren's key strengths that contribute to her success include the ability to listen to her clients and understand their needs; proactive thinking and action-oriented solutions; resourcefulness in asking relevant questions, brainstorming, and seeking answers across the organization; professionalism in her deliverables and communications from C-levels to peers to clients to vendors; her analytical and creative approach in designing and implementing technical, organization, and process solutions; and her kind and calm manner that brings people in."

— Grace Lam, marketing operations leader

“Functioning as the team lead on a project with a client she had no previous relationship with, Lauren was able to build trust by executing consistently outstanding deliverables, signaling reliability to the client. Over the course of the project, the client was visibly more comfortable and confident with the direction of the project which was in huge part a result of the security he felt in his investment - which was the result of Lauren’s remarkable ability to keep a project rolling despite the fast-paced and sometimes ambiguous process.

— Collaborator, consulting project

Work with Lauren

Every collaboration is tailored to your needs. That said, here are some examples of ways I have partnered with previous clients:

    • Audit current hiring process

    • Implement hiring process fit for your growth needs

    • Design and implement onboarding to improve effectiveness and maintain culture during scale

    • Design your organizational or team Operating System for clear and consistent collaboration and decision-making

    • Implement goal-setting and reporting systems

    • Implement performance management

    • Stand up team infrastructure such as a knowledge base, leadership office hours, and reporting dashboards

    • Run effective and engaging town halls/all-company meetings, including planning, design, documentation, facilitation, measurement, continuous improvement, and/or follow-ups

    • Host unforgettable retreats and offsites that move strategy forward and gel teams

    • Manager role design & training

    • Manager coaching

    • Team chartering & bonding

    • Strategic thinking training and coaching for ICs and managers, resulting in more effective executive 1:1s

    • Strategic advising to implement policies and benefits that align budget, company values, strategy, and employee needs

    • Cross-functional alignment and collaboration

    • Leadership communication support

    • Executive coaching

    • Leadership coaching

    • Leadership coaching for new managers

    • Executive presence coaching for ICs

Education

University of San Francisco
MS, Organizational Development

Carnegie Mellon University
BA, Professional Writing

Freie Universität Berlin
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Center for Executive Coaching