Alysin Foster

"Strategic Thinker, Integrator, Consultant – Coach, Facilitator, Planner, Implementer"

Alysin Foster is a results-oriented consultant and coach to executives and their senior management teams on organizational and business strategies. Helping her clients increase their flexibility, responsiveness, and overall organizational performance, as a way to maximize profits and sustainability, are the hallmarks of the way Alysin works with her clients. Large-scale planning and change efforts are her specialty. Alysin brings a broad range of experience in both the public and private sectors. Her public sector clients include government entities, municipalities, and universities. Clients in the private sector span a broad spectrum including financial services, healthcare, pharmaceutical, telecommunications, manufacturing, utilities, service call centers, and architectural/interior design firms. Alysin works effectively with all levels of staff from senior management to front-line employees, including a wide range of staff in various job classifications, professional disciplines, and of culturally and ethnically diverse backgrounds. As a result, she has also been instrumental in facilitating creative interdisciplinary collaborations up, down, and across organizations, as well as between organizations.

Alysin has coached executives and management on a variety of human resources issues from planning workforce growth or reduction, to integrating cultures in mergers and acquisitions, to design and implementation of human resources programs and processes, to leadership, management, and employee development. She is a partner at the table with senior management to link the HR strategy to the overall organizational strategy.

Alysin is published in client trade journals and magazines and has been invited to present multiple times at national conferences in her own professional field, specifically for the Organization Development Network, the American Society for Training & Development, and the International Quality & Productivity Center. She has also been invited to present at national conferences of some of her client organizations.

Alysin has a passion for the "built" environment–the physical environments in which we live and work in. Her interest includes the design, use, and re-use of these structures. Alysin strongly believes that what is important in organizations is not only the work that gets done, and the people who do it, but the physical environment in which it happens. She has been a long-term student of building design and its impact on worker productivity, innovation, and health. She incorporates that perspective into her work with her clients.

Alysin holds a Masters in Social Work from the University of Michigan and a B.A. in Psychology from Eastern Michigan University. She has a background in design, and has also completed a 2-year program in Facility Management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Feeling that she has been the beneficiary of many opportunities in her life, Alysin believes in giving back to the communities where she works and lives. She has served in many volunteer leadership roles both on the local and the national level. She is a Past President of the Golden Gate (San Francisco) Chapter of the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD), and a Past Director of the ASTD Hospital & Healthcare Industry Group. She has also held leadership roles in non-profit community service organizations to which she has belonged.