Good measurement is crucial to your change initiatives. You need to know where you stand at the start and when you finish. Otherwise, you have no accountability. To do this, your assessments must meet two basic criteria:

They must yield operational relevance. The dimensions must make sense to all participants and executives concerned. They must also demonstrate practical validity, meaning that scores on the instruments must relate to performance.

Otherwise, if the instruments have face validity only - acceptable because they look right - but have not been shown to relate to measured performance, then you have a problem justifying investments in your programs. If you do not have good assessments of performance, you should use instruments whose validity can be demonstrated on comparable jobs.

They must be sufficiently reliable over time to assess any change resulting from your programs. If the measures are less reliable than necessary, any change can be mistakenly interpreted. Change may appear to take place when in fact, it does not; or conversely, good change programs may be evaluated negatively because real differences are unreliably measured.