Whether you're the world's largest search firm or a specialized four-person partnership, the consistency of your professional culture--its values, recruiting practices and standards--are as important to your future as a well-populated database and a robust client list.

But how does management determine what that culture should be? Most of the time, organizational evolution occurs organically, arising from a founder's or leader's vision and priorities. Yet at some point, it becomes necessary to create an intentional and methodical way of directing future development. In fact, a periodic review of your firm's organizational structure, operating style and systems is critical to keeping your company vital and competitive.

Self-scrutiny may take different forms and the feedback required for evaluation may come from various sources including clients, potential clients, candidates and members of a firm or recruiting practice. But once a process of self-assessment has been identified, communicating and modeling it, both inside and outside the organization, is your next challenge.

To make that challenge a little less daunting, consider the following four strategies that have been successfully implemented by firm owners and development experts. Their experience with forming and reforming their organizations has yielded positive results and promising visions of the future.

1. Institutionalize Processes and Training

The most effective way to ensure professional consistency is to systematize processes. At Management Search Inc., an 18-year old generalist firm of fifty recruitment executives in three New England states, a "proprietary, well-defined 30 step process" is applied to every search assignment, according to Manager Brian Correia.

Similarly, Charlene Turczyn, founder and President of CMW & Associates, a Springfield Illinois-based firm specializing in the recruitment of middle-senior management technical talent, has endeavored to build a "replicable" search process. The process is broken down into steps, as they might appear in a flow chart. Her experience as a Project and MIS manager at McDonnell Douglas is evident on the business development side as well. Says Turczyn, "I look at sales as a science that can be learned. The best people make it an art."

2. Solicit Client Feedback

Paul Ray Jr., chairman and CEO of the executive search firm Ray & Berntson, describes the company's culture as "high impact but collegial." Several years ago the firm decided to change from being a geography-driven organization to an industry and functionally specialized one. In preparing to make the organizational changes, Ray and his partners talked to about 200 clients, and came away with three major directives for providing the most wished-for services and improvements. These were to:

· Be proactive in offering and providing services and to challenge clients' thinking, assumptions and perceptions
· Make the necessary efforts to understand client companies' cultures, as well as their businesses
· Complete search assignments more quickly.

"Those three objectives gave us clarity and focus, and helped us to understand exactly what our training needs were," says Ray. About two years ago, the firm enlisted the help of Rhonda Fisher, director of knowledge development, to oversee both training and research, and continue the process re-engineering that began in the research/discovery phase of R&B's transformation. The results have been impressive.

"The client feedback process never ends," says Ray. "We plan to conduct another client survey early next year."

3. Value, Educate and Develop Your Candidates

At CMW and Associates, Charlene Turczyn's mantra is "Treat candidates like customers," and she makes it clear that she expects her recruiters and clients to do the same, even going into to clients' HR departments to help fine tune their handling of interviewees. She also teaches candidates to be moderate in their use of online search engines. "If a candidate is blasting his resume all over, we won't work with him or her. We're finding that clients who are Internet-savvy are limiting and focusing their sights. There's a little too much spam out there, and a candidate can be viewed as indiscriminate, lazy or desperate if his resume is showing up everywhere," says Turczyn.

Marc Rideout agrees, "I'd rather have 100 great candidates in my database than a thousand mediocre ones." Rideout instills professionalism in his staff by personally interviewing and prepping candidates for senior positions. He also does a lot of coaching and looks over the shoulders of consultants as they work on searches.

David Edell, founder and president of Development Resource Group, a New York City firm specializing in not-for-profit recruitment, tells his team of twelve "Be the candidate. If you were to consider taking this job, think of what would you need to know." That candidate-centric focus has paid off. "In the last four years, a full 50% of our new business has come from candidate referrals, including candidates who didn't get the jobs they were under consideration for, " says Edell.

All three executives subscribe to a consultative, "free agent" model of recruiting. The consultant's objective is to identify and nurture talented individuals with whom he or she will form long-lasting professional relationships. In turn, those candidates reflect and perpetuate the standards of quality that the recruiter and his firm project.

4. Build Consensus Regarding Change

Korn Ferry International's Mark Nevins joined the firm two years ago as vice-president of Human Resources (the Americas) and Professional Development Worldwide. "It was a time of great excitement," recalls the former teacher-trainer at Booz Allen and Harvard. The search giant had just gone public and had announced its strategy to reinvent itself as a provider of "a broad portfolio of services built around clients' needs for and deployment of human capital."

"That first year was tremendous," says Nevins. "We launched five training programs, instituted a new performance management system, and set out on an ambitious program of internal recruitment at all levels."

Last year, when CEO Paul Reilly took over the reins from the company's longtime steward Windle Priem, his most pressing tasks were how to move the organization forward and how, if necessary, to change the culture.

"Nothing is harder than cultural change," says Nevins. "When service firms try to transform themselves, there is often a conflict between who they have been and who they aspire to be." Nevins predicts that Reilly will start by going to the partners and matrix managers to raise tough questions such as "What are you willing to do to bring about change?" And, more fundamentally, "Why do you need to change?"

One has to ask the same questions of principals and partners. Questions such as "What do you like about your work? What do you do best?" Says Nevins, "Then you let them talk and fight it out, and finally agree on what, as individuals and as a group, they are willing to be accountable for."

Nevins, like many change-experts, believes that management can never lead professionals by rules but only by values. Only when values are clearly articulated, understood and embodied by top management will they inspire trust.