An Organisational Assessment

Are you on the quest of building a high performing and healthy organisation? Do you wonder how your organisation is actually doing, or if you are on the right path? Are you struggling with an approach? If so, please continue reading!

In a recent post we talked about what Organisational Development is and the importance of embracing a system’s view of solving upstream problems in a sustainable and impactful way. We will build upon that and add to the picture by presenting a powerful tool that can help you achieve tremendous positive impact. At the same time, it constitutes an effective way of communicating with stakeholders and C-level executives.

Necessary for understanding what needs to be changed in order to move closer to the organisational vision, is to be able to assess the status quo.

The realisation here is that it is quite challenging to identify a holistic overview of the current state of the organisation. And this means in turn that it is difficult to evaluate progress continuously. There is simply a need for a visualisation that captures the parameters of a high performing and healthy organisation, a tool or a framework helpful in the process of making the assessment. Now, these frameworks exist and there are good ones for sure. What we found, though, is that we always end up tweaking, adding, reducing, extrapolating, to meet our own needs and perspectives.

Since the need for depth and level of detail will vary, depending on who we are talking to and what the purpose is, a framework should both be easy to grasp at a first glance while also providing help and guidance when getting to work. Armed with this knowledge we chose to develop our own framework, based on our experiences and learnings through the years. By no means do we aspire to cover every aspect of challenges an organisation may face, and we are iterating and improving continuously. The framework consists of a few layers of depth to cater for different levels of knowledge within organisational development, but the main purpose is to make it pragmatically helpful.

The framework may be holistic and all-encompassing, but in practice you will most probably focus on one or two aspects at the time. And this may change over time, when you make progress.

The organisational assessment framework

First a reminder:

A High Performing and Healthy organisation consistently achieves its strategic goals and maintains an excellent performance over time. It has the capacity to learn and adapt quickly when faced with new challenges.

Great! Now we only need an assessment framework that can be used for analysing organisations from a high performing and health perspective. And then there is a second purpose of the framework: it should guide us over time so that we can continuously improve the organisation and move towards the vision we set out to achieve.

There are five areas of impact that we have identified as crucial for organisational success:

Let us dive a bit deeper into these areas. In an ideal high performing and healthy organisation, most of the following is probably true:

Direction — A clear orientation and compelling vision

There is a clear direction for the organisation, it is well perceived and understood and the organisation knows how to get there.

Perceived is a keyword here. It is not so difficult to put together a vision, strategy and a bunch of goals that moves you in the right direction (well, it is not that easy actually). But where most organisations struggle is in communication, so that people understand the vision and are excited by it and keep on having it on the top of their minds.

Leadership — Role model leadership

Great leadership is highly valued, it is a significant way to influence the behaviour of people to drive high performance. Role model leadership based on authenticity, trust and respect.

This may very well be the most important aspect. Without the right leadership, any organisation will deteriorate — no matter how high performing it is. Leadership is not only about leading, it is equally important to be a culture driver. To be vulnerable and authentic, to respect others and show trust in people, to hold team members accountable. Everything a leader does will trickle down in the organisation and set examples.

We can hopefully all recall that great leader who, only by being themselves, delivered so much through others and made people thrive and engage voluntarily. Their followership most probably developed organically.

People & Culture — Organisation collectively powered by the people

Unleashing the full potential in our people. Growing existing talents as well as ensuring the talent base for the future. Inclusion, psychological safety and trust is fundamental.

Our people are the true assets of the organisations and business. Without people, nothing can be done. Creating an environment where we can attract, develop and retain talent is absolutely business critical. Culture — what it is, how it is created — is widely debated. We think of it as an outcome of people’s beliefs, values and behaviours, of role modelling, structures and processes. These are all intertwined, making changes in one dimension will ripple through the others.

Product — High performing product organisation

A product organisation focused on providing true value to the customer. An efficient organisation with ability to repeatedly deliver on its aspirations.

Obsessing over our customers is fundamental in order to solve real problems for them, and solving customers problems is the main objective of the organisation. At the core of a product organisation is the learning ability to gather new insights and convert it into new actions.

Tech as Enabler — Providing opportunities through tech

Flexible processes, tech platform, and code infrastructure that enables rapid iteration of innovative product ideas with fast learning.

“Technology moves fast” is almost like a law of nature, something we have to accept, relate to and make use of. For most companies, tech perfection is never the purpose or ultimate goal. Tech is a way to enable your business, if tech is flexible and provides great quality, it supports an organisation in learning and rapidly transforming to respond to an ever-changing world.

For each area, a number of key aspects are presented. These are characteristics of the area and constitute a guide to what to investigate. Bear in mind that an organisational landscape is a complex system: the areas are not isolated, they relate and affect one another.

So, how then is the organisation actually doing? Despite having the key aspects on the table, is it difficult to define the status quo? In order to guide you through the assessment, add perspectives and point in the right direction, we have developed a large set of questions. These questions can be used to pick up the signals from the organisation that help you analyse the situation.

An initial advice, do not over-complicate it! All these areas and aspects can be graded in a simple way using a three step scale, like the red, yellow and green traffic light. It is often tempting to use a granular scale, like 1–10 or similar. To avoid losing the holistic perspective, it’s often better to choose a less granular grading system. And often it is hard to actually compare one level to another when the rating is too granular. With a less granular grading system you will quickly get the picture of where the organisation has development potential and what is the strength of the organisation. It also gives you a good indication where to start designing an intervention.

How to make an assessment

The assessment can be made on different parts of an organisation or the organisation as a whole, depending on what suits your circle of influence, the scope, or even the knowledge base.

Even though having a vision of an end state for the organisation is very valuable, the iterative approach is recommended. Assess the organisation continuously over time, take new snapshots to view progress or catch new signals. By doing so the trajectory is more clearly visible. This deeper qualitative assessment in combination with quantitative measure can give you an extensive view of where you are heading. Each time changes are made, a new unforeseen challenge may arise. Go back to the framework, make your assessment and improve the organisation, step by step.

Gathering information and signals to make the assessment often requires using a combination of many different sources. Financial and strategic documents, HR data, Jira or other ticket systems, brief interviews and deep interviews, surveys. Conversations by the coffee machine and tools like Slack. Observing company communication, watching demos. It is about sensing and responding, finding and analysing the tonality of what is said or communicated. Talking to individual contributors and C-level executives and everything that comes in between.

After performing the assessment and presenting the result to relevant leadership, the next step is to prioritise and find the scope for an improvement road map. Basically, a visualised timeline for the different org assessment areas. The crucial part here is that the ownership of the improvements needs to be with the stakeholders. As we mentioned in the previous blog post, lack of ownership is one of the main barriers why upstream problems are not resolved. But with the right ownership and buy-in, the acceptance of and willingness to actively support and participate in the change is in place. This is the foundation for implemented advisory.

This may seem overwhelming. We haven’t even mentioned the behavioural science aspects: people have agendas, they have strengths and weaknesses, and we must take this into account as well. But do not let that put you off. Just keep it simple! The framework is there to guide and support, and the iterative approach is a way to decrease risk and provide a way forward towards your vision!

/Sarah Rygart & Peter Lindgren, Organisational Developers