McKinsey & Company's Self-Assessment Grid can help your organization identify particular areas of capacity that are strong and where improvements are needed.

An important aspect of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation’s work with youth-serving nonprofits are the assessments we conduct during due diligence. These assessments, which often take more than 200 hours to complete, identify strengths and weaknesses of an organization and essentially provide the basis for beginning work on a business plan to guide future growth.

Many groups have told us that these assessments provide a rare and valuable opportunity to determine how their organizations rank in key areas that affect their ability to deliver quality services effectively. These include strength of management, soundness of finances, and commitment to ongoing improvement, among others measure of performance and capacity.

Recently, many organizations that the Foundation is not able to work with directly have asked if we might provide some guidance on how they could conduct a self-assessment that would help them better understand the things they do well and identify where improvement is needed.

Because we do not yet have a tool or any other kind of “off-the-shelf” solution to offer, we have done the next best thing–reviewed diagnostic instruments that other organizations have developed. Of those, we have found one developed by the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company that we can confidently recommend. Although it supports a different assessment methodology than our own, we believe that McKinsey’s tool, which it has used with its nonprofit clients, can help organizations develop a solid picture of their current organizational capacity. McKinsey has very kindly given us permission to make its self-assessment grid, along with instructions for its use.

A word about McKinsey’s diagnostic instrument:

It is broken down into categories or grids that McKinsey has identified as the seven elements of organizational capacity and their components. Each grid features four individual descriptions that describe different levels of organizational performance. McKinsey developed the overall grid and the individual descriptions based on its many years of work with a range of organizations as well as help from many nonprofit experts and practitioners.

According to McKinsey, the grid can help an organization:

• Identify those particular areas of capacity that are strongest and those that need improvement;
• Measure changes in an organization's capacity over time;
• Draw out different views within an organization regarding its capacity.

McKinsey also cautions that the grid is not a scientific tool and should not be used as one. It adds that it is very difficult to quantify the dimensions of capacity, and the descriptive text under each score in the grid is not meant to be exact. Instead, the scores are meant to provide a general indication–a "temperature" taking–of an organization's capacity level, in order to identify potential areas for improvement. Furthermore, the results of the exercise should be interpreted in the context of the organization's stage of development. For example, a score of "2" on organizational processes may be sufficient for a new organization, and this area may not merit immediate attention. In fact, many organizations may never get to level 4 on many elements.

One final note: In addition to McKinsey's seven elements, the Foundation believes that a thorough assessment should take into account the quality of an organization’s products and services. The Foundation has developed a Guide to Assessing Youth Development Program Quality and Effectiveness that can help an organization judge whether and to what degree a youth development program is effective or what additional work will be required to achieve that level of quality.

Download Self-Assessment Capacity Grid