What We Do
We partner with organizations to design and deliver communication development programs built specifically around your leaders, your culture, and your most important communication challenges. Engagements begin with a structured needs assessment process that ensures the work reflects real organizational priorities rather than a generic curriculum.
- Frontline and production leadership communication: Helping operational leaders communicate priorities and expectations with greater clarity and consistency in team-facing settings
- Executive communication development: Strengthening how senior leaders communicate in high-visibility settings and the interactions that shape employee trust and organizational alignment
- Communication needs assessment: Identifying where communication breakdowns are occurring, why, and where development will have the greatest impact
- Individual communication consultations: Personalized coaching and feedback tied to each leader's specific communication goals and needs
- Impact assessment and reporting: Measuring whether communication is actually improving and providing leadership with clear, evidence-based reporting on what changed
Our Approach
We start where most communication consulting programs don't, with a genuine understanding of your organization. Before we design anything, we listen. We gather input from leaders, employees, and stakeholders to understand the specific communication challenges, contexts, and goals that should shape the engagement. What we build reflects what we learn.
Nothing we deliver is drawn from a pre-existing curriculum. Every session, every scenario, every practice activity is designed around the real communication situations your leaders face, the refresh meeting, the company-wide event, the difficult question from the floor, the message that needs to carry across three organizational levels without losing its meaning.
We also measure. Each engagement includes an assessment component that tells you whether communication is improving, not through assumption, but through data gathered from the people most directly affected.
What to Expect
- Leaders communicate more clearly, confidently, and credibly in the settings that matter most
- Employees experience leadership communication as more direct, responsive, and trustworthy
- Messages translate consistently across organizational levels — from the executive suite to the front line
- Leaders handle high-visibility moments, difficult questions, and unexpected pushback with greater composure and effectiveness
- Organizations gain a measurable picture of where communication is improving and where continued development is most needed
Why Olive Tree
We are a locally rooted boutique consultancy founded by communication and professional development professionals at Purdue University Fort Wayne. We bring academic expertise in communication, organizational behavior, and leadership development, and we bring it without the overhead, geographic distance, or rigidity of a larger firm.
Our team has spent decades studying and teaching communication at the highest levels of academic rigor. We have also spent those same decades working alongside real leaders in real organizations, which means we know the difference between communication theory and what actually works when you are standing in front of your full team, wondering if your message is landing.
Fort Wayne and the surrounding region is where we live and work. The organizations and institutions here are not case studies to us. They are our community, and strengthening how they communicate is work we take seriously and personally value.
