Before You Quit Your Job This Summer, Conduct an Organizational Assessment
Every summer seems to bring the same question for professionals who have settled into their careers: Is it time for a change? The longer days, family vacations, and slower pace outside the office often create enough distance for people to look at their work with fresh eyes. What once felt comfortable can suddenly feel repetitive. It is easy to interpret that restlessness as a sign that a new employer is waiting somewhere else.
Sometimes that instinct is correct.
A company may no longer align with your values, your professional goals, or the opportunities you hope to pursue. Yet many talented professionals leave organizations without first asking whether the opportunity they seek already exists within the walls of the company they are preparing to leave.
Before updating your résumé, consider conducting an organizational assessment—not as an employee frustrated with daily inconveniences, but as someone who has been asked to improve the business itself.
CAN YOU BE THAT LEADER - Shifting your perspective from worker to strategist often reveals possibilities that routine has hidden from view.
The first step is learning to observe the organization as a system rather than a collection of departments. Every company develops processes over time, and those processes are rarely designed all at once. They evolve in response to immediate needs, personnel changes, new technology, and shifting priorities. While each decision may have made sense at the time, the cumulative effect can produce unnecessary complexity. Responsibilities become fragmented, information becomes isolated, and different departments unknowingly create separate solutions to the same problem.
Consider an organization that employs several GIS technicians across multiple departments. One technician reports to Housing, another to Public Safety, another to Cultural Resources, and another to a tourism enterprise. Although each employee performs specialized GIS work, their direct supervisors may have little technical understanding of geographic information systems. As a result, project priorities are established independently, data standards begin to differ, software practices evolve separately, and institutional knowledge becomes scattered across individual departments.
At first glance, this arrangement appears to provide each department with dedicated support. In practice, however, it often produces duplicated effort, inconsistent data management, competing priorities, and unnecessary operational costs. Perhaps the most significant risk emerges when an employee leaves the organization. If critical datasets, documentation, or project history exist only on that individual's computer, the organization may lose years of valuable work overnight. The cost of recreating information frequently exceeds the investment that would have been required to manage it properly from the beginning.
An organizational assessment asks a different question: What would happen if these resources were managed as one coordinated team rather than as isolated specialists? Instead of viewing each technician as belonging exclusively to a department, the organization begins treating GIS as an enterprise service. Work requests flow through a central manager who understands both the technical discipline and the broader needs of the organization. Projects can then be prioritized according to organizational impact, workloads can be balanced across the team, and data governance becomes consistent regardless of which department initiated the request.
Notice that this approach does not require hiring additional employees. It simply reorganizes existing talent into a structure that allows expertise, information, and accountability to be shared. The financial savings come not from reducing personnel but from eliminating duplication, protecting institutional knowledge, and ensuring that technical professionals are led by someone capable of establishing standards for their discipline.
This is where many professionals overlook an important career opportunity. Most employees experience inefficient systems every day, but relatively few take the time to analyze why those systems exist or how they might be improved. The ability to diagnose organizational inefficiencies and propose thoughtful solutions is one of the defining characteristics of leadership. It demonstrates an understanding that extends beyond individual job responsibilities and reflects an investment in the long-term success of the organization.
If your work feels stagnant this summer, resist the temptation to assume that a new employer is the only solution. Instead, spend several weeks studying how work moves through your organization. Identify where information becomes trapped, where responsibilities overlap, and where expertise could be organized more effectively. Develop a well-reasoned proposal that focuses not on criticism but on measurable improvements in efficiency, accountability, and service.
You may ultimately decide that your career does belong somewhere else. However, you may also discover that the role you have been searching for does not yet exist because no one has recognized the need to create it. Sometimes the next step in your career is not finding a different organization. Sometimes it is becoming the person who helps your current organization become a better one.
Downloads: These downloads are provided to help you explore what you would change to help make your organization somewhere you want to stay!