ASK AN ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE CONSULTANT: HOW CAN YOU PROMOTE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT?

Your standard-issue organizational culture consultant is an expert brought in to assess and enhance a company’s culture to align with its values, vision, workflows and business objectives. Rather than being a generalist focused on broader business strategy, a corporate culture consulting firm zeroes in specifically on the interpersonal, behavioral and social dynamics within an organization.

Top organizational culture consultants provide a mix of advisory, coaching and training services all concentrated on optimizing organizational culture for greater cohesion, engagement, innovation and sustainable high performance. Four examples of services a consulting firm in the space delivers are below.

Cultural Assessment – The organizational culture consultant immerses within the client organization to survey employees, analyze norms and leadership styles along with conduct focus groups. Experts diagnose patterns in communication, conflict resolution, change adaptation and more to reveal strengths, disconnects, opportunities and obstacles tied to culture.

Vision & Values Articulation – If leadership seeks culture change, consulting firms facilitate defining aspirational cultural attributes aligned to strategy and clarifying company values providing ethical guardrails. Explicit visions for social dynamics and conduct codes steer cultural reshaping.

Team Effectiveness Design – Top organizational culture consultant providers engineer or overhaul processes guiding how diverse teams interact, make decisions and solve problems to limit dysfunction. Installing best practices for information sharing, giving feedback, managing disagreements and the like improves teamwork.

Leadership & Behavior Coaching – Flawed interpersonal approaches or philosophies among leadership ranks often negatively cascade down an organizational hierarchy infecting culture. Experts coach leaders to grow self-awareness around counterproductive styles while adopting behaviors that model desired cultural values.

Also leading providers incorporate quantitative workforce sentiment analysis, communication campaign design, conflict mediation processes, change adoption toolkits and training around harassment, diversity or ethics topics to comprehensively nourish organizational culture consultant work on all fronts.

Some consulting firms even focus explicitly on cultivating innovation cultures centered on openness to creative thinking styles, experimentation, learning through failure, collaborative work modes and flattening hierarchies. Each strives to be dissolving inhibitions or perceived risk around sharing unconventional ideas.

At its core though, a skilled organizational culture consultant partners with leadership to engineer human connections, unspoken codes and shared mindsets that lend meaning, community and behavioral guardrails to a company. Aligning cultural vision to purpose and strategy propels an agile, energized collective able to intelligently adapt to market realities.