West teaches graduate courses  on communicating strategy and change, global leadership, and communicating corporate social responsibility. She joined USC Annenberg in fall 2008 from the USC Marshall School of Business’ Center for Effective Organizations, where her research focused on employee development and evaluation to enable strategic change. West has been an active consultant to a wide variety of organizations, including Asian Development Bank, Alliance for Redesigning Government, Barclay's Global Investors, Cedars-Sinai, Chevron, DreamWorks, Hospital Council of Southern California, Hitachi Data Systems, Invisible Children, Northrop Grumman, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, San Diego Union-Tribune, University of Iowa, U.S. Department of the Navy, Westin Hotels and Xerox.

West specializes in organizational change and effectiveness. Her current research focuses on large-group techniques to increase cross-organizational innovation as well as other communication mechanisms to deal with the complex, multi-stakeholder problems of integrating corporate responsibility and sustainability. She has been a member of the Triple Bottom Line (a university-wide research consortium) and the Annenberg Innovation Lab Research Council.

West is a co-author of Designing Performance Appraisal Systems: Aligning Appraisals and Organizational Realities and a finalist in the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize: Innovating Innovation.