Real challenges. Meaningful change.
Every organization has its own culture, complexities, and challenges. Meaningful change starts with understanding what's actually happening—and translating those insights into practical action.
Throughout her career, Dr. Kristine Gentry has worked with organizations across healthcare, education, aviation, and other industries to understand complex challenges, strengthen organizational effectiveness, and help people navigate change.
These examples highlight selected projects Kristine has led through her consulting and organizational leadership roles.
Turning Organizational Values into Everyday Behaviors
Houston Community College | Culture & Organizational Effectiveness
The Challenge
Houston Community College was undergoing a systemwide transformation designed to create greater alignment across its campuses and departments. New organizational values and behavioral competencies had been developed and were being incorporated into hiring and performance management.
But there was a missing piece: How would employees understand, remember, and apply these expectations in their everyday work?
The Approach
Kristine recognized the gap between defining organizational values and making them meaningful to employees. She proposed connecting the values with specific behaviors and creating a simple, memorable framework that could be reinforced throughout the institution.
The result was HCC FORWARD, a culture initiative that translated organizational expectations into seven memorable themes.
Kristine helped develop a proposed seven-month engagement strategy incorporating a coordinated campus launch, monthly learning activities, communications, and employee recognition. She also presented the initiative to HCC's Board of Trustees and leadership teams, working with senior leaders, Human Resources, and Learning & Development to build support.
The Impact
HCC adopted and launched FORWARD as an institution-wide culture initiative, and the Chancellor made it a central part of his State of the College message. The campaign helped establish a common language for discussing organizational values and expected behaviors across the college.
The larger lesson: Values become more useful when people can connect them to what they actually do.
Making Safety Behaviors Part of Everyday Work
PHI Air Medical | Culture, Learning & Behavior Change
The Challenge
PHI Air Medical operated a geographically dispersed, around-the-clock organization where attention to routine safety practices was critical. The organization had identified patterns of small but consequential oversights and wanted to strengthen employees' awareness of life-saving behaviors.
The initial request was straightforward: create a safety video modeled on an example from another industry.
But a generic video wasn't necessarily going to address the behaviors PHI needed to reinforce.
The Approach
Kristine began by interviewing PHI Air Medical's CEO, safety leaders, and employees to understand the underlying challenges and the situations employees encountered in their work.
She worked with the creative team to develop a customized video grounded in PHI Air Medical’s operations and specific safety behaviors.
The video was so well received that the CEO asked for a more comprehensive initiative rather than simply distributing it.
Kristine then led development of a nine-month Life Saving Thinking learning program, including:
Monthly, hands-on activities designed to demonstrate how attention, distraction, and automatic behaviors influence safety.
Detailed facilitator guides and supporting learning materials.
A train-the-trainer event in Houston to prepare facilitators to deliver the program across operating bases.
Discussions connecting the learning activities to real operational responsibilities, including preflight checklists.
Opportunities for employees to share practical techniques that could be reinforced across the organization.
The program was designed for local delivery, recognizing the realities of different shifts, locations, and operational responsibilities.
The Impact
The initiative received an industry Vision Zero Aviation Safety Award. Beyond the recognition, the program created opportunities for employees to actively engage with safety concepts, identify their relevance to everyday tasks, and share practical approaches with colleagues across locations.
The larger lesson: Lasting behavior change requires more than communicating expectations. People need opportunities to experience, practice, and reinforce them.
Preparing People for Enterprise Transformation
Enterprise Infrastructure Organization | Change & Transformation
The Challenge
A large organization was introducing new enterprise technology alongside significant changes to workflows, responsibilities, and how teams would coordinate their work.
Although the transition was initially described as moving existing work into a new system, employees faced considerable uncertainty about what would actually change. Project details were evolving, and the implementation timeline left limited room for adjustment.
The Approach
Working alongside the organization's change management lead, Kristine designed readiness assessments to understand how prepared employees and leaders felt for the transformation.
She used employee personas and segmented survey findings to identify where uncertainty and information gaps were greatest.
Those insights informed targeted communications, manager engagement, FAQs, and interactive learning activities designed to help employees understand new expectations and prepare for changing ways of working.
Follow-up assessments provided evidence of progress and helped identify where additional support was needed.
The Impact
In the groups surveyed, measurable improvements included:
44% to 6%: People leaders reporting uncertainty about their future roles.
67% to 32%: Respondents reporting insufficient information to prepare for the change.
These results demonstrated improved understanding and reported readiness ahead of implementation. Longer-term technology adoption was outside the scope of the engagement.
The larger lesson: Successful change requires understanding where people are uncertain and giving them practical information and support—not simply announcing what's coming.
Understanding How Work Really Happens
Texas Health Resources | Research & Organizational Insight
The Challenge
Texas Health Resources was exploring ways to help nurses practice at the top of their licenses. Before making changes, leaders needed to understand how nurses were spending their time, where inefficiencies existed, and how technology and organizational processes affected their work.
The Approach
Kristine helped design and conduct research involving nurse shadowing, observation, interviews, and digital diaries to capture the realities of day-to-day clinical work.
During the research, the team discovered that a newly introduced documentation requirement was adding work to already demanding nursing routines. Nurses were being asked to enter additional information every hour for every patient.
The research also revealed unexpected workarounds. Rather than using computers in patient rooms as intended, nurses frequently recorded information elsewhere and completed documentation later.
Conversations revealed practical reasons, including slow technology, disruptive updates, and computer placement that interfered with patient interactions.
Kristine and the team brought these findings to leadership, connecting frontline experiences with broader operational and technology decisions.
The Impact
Leadership removed the additional hourly documentation requirement after receiving the research findings.
The work also prompted further investigation into technology and workflow issues and informed conversations about future hospital design.
The larger lesson: The way a process is designed and the way people actually experience it are not always the same. Understanding that difference can prevent well-intended changes from creating new problems.
What Could Be Possible for Your Organization?
Every engagement starts with understanding the people, systems, and circumstances shaping an organization's challenges.
Whether you're navigating transformation, strengthening culture, developing leaders, or trying to understand what's getting in the way, Culture Grove helps turn insight into meaningful action.