Monday, June 3, 2013

Assessing Your Organization

By Virgil R. Carter

Are you new to your organization and trying to get a handle on it?  Or have you been with your organization for a period of time and trying to better understand your organization?   Perhaps you’re working with your volunteer leaders and/or senior staff and thinking about what makes organizations successful.  If so, a McKinsey Quarterly article may be interesting.  “A Watershed in Thinking About  Organizations” revisits McKinsey’s “7-S Framework”, introduced in the 1970s. 

The interactive article, the first in a series, “reflects on 7-S…introduced…to address the critical role of coordination, rather than structure, in organizational effectiveness.”  Readers can click on any of the seven elements in the framework and listen to McKinsey’s description of the element.

The 7-S framework “maps seven interrelated factors that influence an organization’s ability to change—shared values, skills, staff, strategy, style and systems—and shows how these forces interact”.  The framework suggests that achieving progress in any one part of the framework “will be hard to achieve without progress in the others.”

The article goes on to note “While an increasingly complex business environment has rendered some (organizational) models obsolete, others have endured.”  McKinsey says the series presents “frameworks that are as relevant today as they were when first created.” 

For those looking to assess their organizations, this is a good reference.

The article can be found here: 

No comments: