- What Assessments Do
- The Four Principal Functions of Assessments
- The Analytical Function of Assessments
- Assessments Function as Fulcrums of Positive Change
- Assessments Transform Organizations by the Way They Work
- Assessments Educate as They Analyze, Motivate, and Transform
- Why Gaming the Results of an Assessment Doesn't Help (Though Many Try)
- Can Assessments Really Change an Organization? A Preview of an Extended Case History to Be Found in Chapter 12
- Bottom-Line Profit and Cost Numbers: Assessments Pay
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
1.6 Assessments Educate as They Analyze, Motivate, and Transform
Assessments Educate by Giving People in Organizations a Broader Knowledge of Their Own Company and by Encouraging Organizations to Contemplate Industry's Best Practices and Compare Them to Their Own
Assessments involve perhaps dozens or even hundreds of an organization's employees, many of whom have only a vague idea of how what they do is done on other projects in the same organization, much less in other organizations around the world. When they are required to compare their own practices to the ideals of an assessment model, however, and to listen to how their fellow employees' practices also relate to that model, they begin what may be a transformative education in the field of their expertise.
The venue and framework of this educational process, moreover, is as important as its content. Assessments force people to think hard about the pros and cons of what they do. It is in the midst of this rethinking that they encounter other ways of doing the same thing—at a moment when they are uniquely receptive to alternative procedures and in an atmosphere that is structured to be non-punitive about past performance.