What next? Making evaluation part of the management cycle

Assessment findings should lead to improvements in the management system. The long-term goal is to repeat the assessment at regular intervals to allow managers to track progress over time.

A one-off assessment, while beneficial, is only a diagnosis at a given moment. The results of the follow- up actions and recommendations you defined to address the gaps and challenges throughout the assessment can only be measured after implementation, which requires time. This is why management effectiveness assessments should be embedded in the management cycle and linked with scheduled timings for revisions of the management plan.

When you undertake a management effectiveness assessment for the first time and the findings show numerous gaps and challenges, people can feel discouraged and lack motivation to define concrete follow-up actions to address gaps and challenges, or feel unwilling to implement them. However, the situation will never improve unless you are prepared to take action, and the assessment will need to be repeated at regular intervals to see how far a gap or challenge has been addressed. This in itself can be motivating and beneficial for the whole team.

If there are a great many gaps and challenges, it will not be possible to address them all in a single management cycle, and longer periods of time will be required. This reinforces the need to repeat the assessments at regular intervals in order to evaluate how management effectiveness is progressing.