When Teams Connect, Performance Accelerates
For nearly 50 years, we've helped organizations transform their teams through structured frameworks that create measurable, sustainable change in how people work together.
Our Mission
Help organizations transform connection into competitive advantage.
Our Vision
Shaping a future where connection drives organizational performance
Our Values
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"How organizations connect across differences will either be a tremendous source of strength or weakness, but it will never be neutral.”
About Us
Nearly 50 years ago, our late co-founder, Merlin G. Pope, Jr. came to understand something critical about organizational performance: How teams work together across differences will either be a tremendous source of strength or weakness, but it will never be neutral.
His research proved that organizations that effectively connect their people's varied perspectives achieve better business results and retain top talent more effectively. Those that don't often struggle with collaboration barriers, decreased productivity, and lower engagement.
This insight became the foundation upon which Merlin and his wife, Patricia, built Pope Consulting. They created practical frameworks to help organizations build high-performing cultures where connection accelerates results.
Today, we are a second-generation consulting firm helping organizations create environments where strategic connection drives measurable commercial success.
Approach
Our approach meets organizations wherever they are in their performance journey. Led by experienced facilitators, we help teams understand the patterns that either accelerate or hinder collaboration, enabling them to build stronger working relationships that drive results.
When you partner with Pope Consulting, you work with a team committed to transforming how your organization connects and performs. We guide you through meaningful conversations that strengthen your culture and create lasting commercial value. While change isn't always easy, the return on investment compounds over time, both in measurable results and sustained performance.
These are the seeds of organizational wisdom that Merlin and Patricia Pope began cultivating in the 1970s, and we continue to build on their legacy of transforming how organizations perform through strategic connection.
Today, their legacy of transforming organizational performance through strategic connection has impacted over 1 million people globally, delivering measurable business results across industries.
Our History
1970s
Merlin G. Pope, Jr., Pope’s late co-founder, pursued his doctorate at Yale University while simultaneously commuting from New Haven, CT to Cincinnati, OH to work as an external consultant at Procter & Gamble—monumental achievements for a Black man faced with numerous race-related barriers during that time.
Companies, like P&G, were doing what was required of them by the recently passed Affirmative Action laws passed to help combat racial discrimination—and later gender discrimination—in the workplace, recruiting and hiring Black employees. But they were unsure of how to make it work once Black engineers had been hired.
Several visionary Division Leaders at P&G realized their managers and employees would benefit from racial awareness training.
In 1976, Merlin co-founded Behavioral Science Applications, Inc. and shortly thereafter, he created the first business case for diversity and inclusion, which examined racial/ethnic diversity and the average annual productivity increase. His work at P&G contributed to his doctoral dissertation research at Yale, which compared how long it took newly hired White vs Black engineers to be “earning their keep plus $1.00.”
Patricia also worked in the engineering division of P&G in Cincinnati. Her curiosity about how things work created new opportunities that led to her appointment to a newly created position in the Organization Development Department of the Engineering Division. Her focus was creating development programs for women and increasing the representation of Black women in the Division.
In 1977, Patricia and Merlin began seeing each other outside of work, personally, while also professionally developing diversity & equity training content and tools, as well as creating marketing materials and the business systems that would be necessary to scale the consulting business beyond one client.
By the late 1970s, other Fortune 500 companies outside of Cincinnati began hearing about Pope Consulting’s unique approach to Affirmative Action that focused on leveraging diversity to increase productivity.
Patricia left P&G in 1979 to join Merlin founding the new business.
1980s
In 1983, they reincorporated as Pope & Associates, Inc.
With Merlin and Patricia’s guidance, many organizations began to see the link between having a workforce that reflected their diverse customer base and innovation, productivity, and growth.
2000s
When Merlin G. Pope, Jr. passed away in 1998 Patricia took over as CEO and Chief Creative Officer.
In 2018, Merlin and Patricia’s first son, Merlin G. Pope III, joined the company as Vice President and eventually became President.
Second son, Adam Pope joined in 2020 as Project Manager and eventually Marketing Manager.
To date, more than 1 million people across the globe have benefited from Merlin & Patricia’s unique bottom-line approach to diversity, inclusion, and culture change.