Assessment methodology requires a team to interview a broad selection of people, both managers and development staff, to provide representation across the assessed organization. Mitigating resistance, this broad participation fosters internal change.
You need to find out what’s wrong with something before you can fix it. However, even in a problem-solving organization, the sudden exposure that accompanies real examination may cause people to feel frightened and stressed by having their work patterns examined: "When performance is measured objectively, you and your work can be seen by all" . It is not uncommon for this response to lead to the erection of self-protective walls, which serves as a major barrier to organizational improvement.
With the kind of broad participation required by an assessment, though, issues are shared, and turf protection either diminishes or becomes more obvious, in which case it can be dealt with directly.
Assessments also elicit specific, local response to possible avenues of improvement, reinforcing practitioners’ sense that their experience and opinions are valuable. An assessment provides a chance to respond not only for the members of the assessment team but for all the assessment participants who are interviewed over a long assessment process. Staff members are given a chance to shape the way improvements are proposed. They may recognize, for example, that new practices may not be valid for certain circumstances either in themselves or in the way that they are to be implemented. Imposing such changes by fiat makes workers want to throw out the baby (the principles behind the best practices) with the bathwater (the particular circumstances in which the practices are executed) and to respond negatively to the whole project of process improvement. When workers are allowed to consider a set of "best practices" in the context of their own understanding of how to make things better, though, they stop resisting them and start thinking of ways to make them work.
A positive approach to change is strongly associated with empowerment (decisions are made by people who know most about the issue regardless of rank) and collaboration (departments and functions work actively with other groups on a regular basis) .
According to Boyett, "People don’t resist their own ideas. Our gurus agree that people who participate in deciding what will change and how things will change not only are more likely to support the change, but are actually changed themselves by the mere act of participation. …Participation has become the standard method for accomplishing change and is a key feature of everyone’s change process" .
In the words of Kotter, "Major change is essentially impossible unless most employees are willing to help, often to the point of making short-term sacrifices. But people will not make sacrifices, even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they really believe that a transformation is possible. Without credible communication, and a lot of it, employees’ hearts and minds are never captured" .
Assessments provide a forum that helps focus general but unarticulated discomfort because people are encouraged to articulate problems and because the assessment team listens to everyone’s ideas empathetically and objectively. Assessments thus provide a way to examine and address problems that may be collectively perceived, but not acknowledged. Frequently, it is heard at the conclusion of an assessment that "we didn’t learn anything new." What people don’t realize however is that assessments allow old problems not only to be articulated but also to be addressed.
Assessments also force management to listen. Sometimes they hear what everyone except them seems to know. Sometimes they too know about problems but have no way to engage them without making them worse. Assessments require managers to acknowledge what everybody knows and to work with their employees on problem resolution. Assessments thus provide an arena for consensus between workers and management.
Finally, when an entire organization is involved in an assessment, those who have participated "own" the assessment results. Having been part of the analysis, they feel responsible for becoming part of the solution. This provides significant momentum for change.