Self Assessment

Feeling stuck but not sure what’s keeping your team from moving the work forward? Take 3 minutes to answer these questions honestly to understand more. No email required.

We built this because most people can't tell us what they need, they can only tell us what's going wrong. Answer these the way things actually are right now, not how you wish they were.

1. If you took a month off with no contact, what would happen to your organization?
A. It would stall. I'm the one holding most of it together.
B. It would survive, but a lot would slip, and some of it we might not catch in time.
C. It would run fine day-to-day, but nothing big would get decided.
D. It would run. Honestly, that's part of what worries me, we've never really tested it.

2. Be honest: how much of "how things work here" is actually written down?
A. Almost none of it. It's in my head, or scattered across old emails and group texts.
B. Some of it, but half of it is outdated and nobody follows it consistently anyway.
C. Most of it's written down. I'm just not sure it holds up as we keep adding people.
D. It's documented and mostly followed. We're due for a refresh, not a rebuild.

3. What's your board actually doing?
A. We don't have one that functions, or it exists mostly on paper.
B. They show up and they care, but nobody's totally clear on where their job ends and staff's begins.
C. They're active and structured, but the committees are hit or miss.
D. They run well. What we're thinking about now is who replaces them when they age out.

4. When you talk to funders, what are you actually able to tell them?
A. Mostly stories. We haven't formally measured whether what we're doing works.
B. We can tell them how many people we served. Not really whether it helped.
C. We're tracking some outcomes, but the data isn't shaping decisions yet.
D. We have real outcome data, and it drives what we do next.

5. What keeps you up at night about how this place actually runs?
A. That I'm the single point of failure, and everyone kind of knows it.
B. That we're going to outgrow what we've got before we get around to fixing it.
C. That growth is going to break something we haven't pressure-tested yet.
D. That we'll lose momentum, or lose what everyone's learned, in the next transition.

  • ou're running on momentum, and it's working, for now. The next real risk isn't a bad decision, it's that too much depends on you. Start by getting what's in your head onto paper.

  • You grew faster than your systems did. That's a good problem, but it's still a problem. A focused stretch of work on process and structure now will save you a much harder cleanup later.

  • Growth is real, and it's starting to find the seams in how things were built. The fix isn't working harder, it's building infrastructure that can actually hold what you're becoming.

  • The systems are solid. The real question now is continuity: who keeps this running when you're between leaders, or when the person who built it all takes a step back.