For many young or small companies, managing processes and meeting goals is pretty straightforward. They have a team of three or four people committed to the mission. They’ve defined roles and responsibilities. There are few barriers to communication.

Then they start to grow.

Now they’re a team of 15 or 20, and they’re not sure why exactly, but things aren’t going so well. That’s where an organizational assessment can help.

What is an organizational assessment?

Before an organization can improve, the leaders need to know where problems arise. That’s not always easy to do. They are too close to the situation and likely don’t have time to dig into the issue.

During an organizational assessment, a coach or consultant delves deep into the organization. They identify strengths and where gaps lie between current performance and desired performance. With this outside-in perspective, leaders are able to improve how their organizations function.

Instead of wasting time with ineffective fixes or patches, they invest their resources into the root of the problem.

Who needs an organizational assessment?

Almost any organization can benefit from an organizational assessment.

We often work with CEOs, founders, and leadership teams that are seeing a lack of effectiveness. The organization isn’t meeting its goals. They’re experiencing unhealthy conflict among leadership or their employees.

Sometimes they’ve tried to resolve the issues themselves. They’ve let go someone they believed was causing the problems. They created an improvement plan for certain employees.

Still, they’re not seeing the results they want.

Many organizations don’t know what an organizational assessment is. They simply know they need help with their organization’s performance. After all, the purpose of an assessment isn’t to gather information for its own sake. The purpose is to help organizations better meet their goals.

For instance, the leaders of a company came to us concerned about friction, that their team members weren’t working well with each other.

Through the assessment process, we discovered two important things. First, employees had vague job descriptions and weren’t sure what was expected of them. Second, employees didn’t understand the parameters of their own positions. Where did their responsibilities end and some else's begin? The general lack of clarity caused confusion and conflict.

One of our recommendations was that the leadership develop clearer job descriptions. These helped employees understand their own roles as well as where they fit into the process alongside their colleagues.

How do we approach assessments?

When we begin an organizational assessment, we start from the bottom up—looking first at people and processes.

Why? Because if you've got people issues, you won’t see change if you start at the top and work your way down. Hiring the right people is often challenging for young or small businesses. If you have the wrong people in the wrong seats, the best strategy in the world won’t move you toward your goals.

We often find that systemic issues exist. Frequently, there's a lack of alignment between the people doing the work and the people leading the work.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we never find problems at the top. Systemic issues could be the result of bad leadership. Until we do an assessment, we (and you) don’t know. We look at leadership with 180°.

We use an assessment tool called BestWork Data to evaluate each person’s strengths and gaps. We identify how different dynamics might come into play within an organization, how people might experience significant conflict. Our evaluation could reveal that one is detail-oriented and another focuses on the big picture. That difference might be impacting their communication.

With this information, we make recommendations for more effective interactions.

During a recent assessment, we evaluated a key employee whose performance was inconsistent. We learned that the employee was experiencing conflicting direction from two supervisors. Each supervisor had a different communication style and different expectations. The employee was often confused about how to proceed.

The company's leadership had approached us because they saw problems with the company's internal processes but didn't have time to address them. They knew that if these didn't improve, they wouldn’t be able to continue effectively serving their customers.

Through the assessment process, they learned more effective ways to manage individual employees. They also identified an employee that could take over some operational responsibilities. This delegation gave the leadership more time to focus on clients and on their team.

What is the organizational assessment process?

Our organizational assessments generally include 3 steps. The specifics of each assessment depend on the particular needs of the organization.

Gathering information

To help an organization reach its goals, we must first understand where it is now. What are the existing strengths? What's holding them back? During the initial information gathering process, we:

Ask employees and leadership to complete assessments. These help us understand their performance capabilities and potential areas of conflict.

Attend key meetings and review documentation of processes as well as roles and responsibilities.

Interview team members one-on-one. During these interviews, we also review each team member’s assessment with them.

Sharing early findings

After team member interviews, we meet with the leadership team to clarify our focus. We share initial findings and make sure our intended direction aligns with the organization’s goals.

For instance, we may observe that team members don’t understand roles and responsibilities. We might see a disconnect between the sales process and product development process.

After this meeting, we may speak again with specific team members or view more documentation.

Providing recommendations

Our process ends with a written report. We offer our observations and recommendations as well as a plan for making necessary changes.

From beginning to end, the process generally takes between four and eight weeks. The specific length depends on the size and complexity of the organization.

How teams respond to the process

Many teams are hopeful about (or even excited by) the organizational assessment process. In general, if management is feeling frustrated about an organization’s direction, so are its employees. They would like for things to improve too.

The assessment process can feel like a breath of fresh air, confirmation that management is aware that the employees need help.

There are instances where the process isn’t presented in a healthy way to start. People may see it as intrusive or invasive. They may start out defensive and cautious about their participation. In those cases, the burden falls on us to earn employee trust.

We do that by offering each employee a confidential one-on-one environment, a safe space. There, they can say whatever's on their mind to someone outside the company. For many, the process is cathartic.\

Of course, there are people who will always be distrustful. Those people are probably already distrustful of management or distrustful of their peers. Sometimes their response to the process is an indicator of a bigger issue.

What happens after an organizational assessment?

A final organizational assessment report provides all the findings as well as recommendations for addressing identified gaps. Organizations can choose to implement those recommendations on their own or work with a coach.

We recently worked with a company whose leadership was quite self-aware. They knew there were people issues, so they wanted to invest in coaching. They bundled the coaching with the organizational assessment before we even got started because they knew they were going to need it.

Some leaders simply need the perspective and decide to self implement the report’s recommended actions. For example, when we work for an investor evaluating a company in which they may invest, they may not need ongoing support after the assessment.

Often, the information we provide to organizations and their leaders isn’t particularly revelatory. We’re coming in with that crucial unemotional and outside-in perspective. We can objectively gather information and come up with priorities for how to address it.

We talk a lot about getting the outside-in perspective. That’s because it’s at the heart of our work as coaches. None of us is immune to the confusion or paralysis that comes from being too close to a problem. We can all use help stepping back and seeing through a different lens.

Learn more about how our organizational assessments can help your organization meet its goals.