Managerial Capabilities Assessment
How to surface cultural problems and opportunities within one's organization
Published: 2025-05-17 by Luca Dellanna
When new leadership takes over a company, particularly following an acquisition, the incoming CEO and executive team need to rapidly assess the organization’s managerial capabilities to discover internal problems and opportunities both at the level of individual managers and managerial culture, habits, and processes.
I have worked on such projects in the quality of an external consultant brought in to help with the task, and here are some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.
First of all, what are Managerial Capabilities, and why are they important?
The term “Managerial Capabilities” refers to an organization’s ability to maximize employee effectiveness by developing internal talent, providing clear guidance, sustaining engagement and motivation, and effectively addressing underperformance. A Managerial Capabilities Assessment focuses on whether managers have the required competencies and whether the managerial culture and benchmarks across the organization are conducive to excellence or mediocrity. Its output is a set of recommendations on how to increase managerial capabilities by acting on both individuals and culture.
Managerial Capabilities are of paramount importance, for even a company with a perfect strategy and great product-market fit might only realize part of its potential if its employees are poorly managed. Similarly, even in more mature markets, how well managers run operations and develop talent is often the difference between survival and death, or between barely making it and becoming highly profitable.
After a change in top management, it is often tempting to focus on strategic efforts rather than on improving internal managerial capabilities, as everyone is busy and under the impression that there is not enough time to do both. But why is there so little time, and why do things take so long? Often, the reason is insufficient Managerial Capabilities, and improving them might actually be the fastest way to help achieve other strategic goals.
How do you measure Managerial Capabilities?
It is paramount to avoid using methods that scale, such as surveys or large data collection, for they are unreliable and suffer from the same blind spots you’re trying to uncover. For example, a common reason some team meetings are run poorly is that the people involved do not know what a well-run meeting looks like. In that case, a survey that asks how well meetings are run might collect positive feedback even in teams whose meetings have a large opportunity for improvement. A second reason that surveys are not very effective is that, when they surface problems, they do not reveal their root cause, with the risk that the findings are misinterpreted and the wrong solution selected.
A much better tool to measure Managerial Capabilities is to run a series of short one-on-one interviews with people at all levels of the organization: a few top managers, a few middle managers, a few line supervisors, and a few line employees. Only in a one-on-one setting can a competent interviewer dig deep enough to uncover root causes and receive honest answers with full context.