Establishing and Maintaining Good Communications
As this discussion on working in a political context indicates, good evaluation work involves much more than knowing how to collect and analyze data. Our recom- mendations for working in a political environment often concern communicating with stakeholders. But, interpersonal skills and communication are important enough to merit a separate section here. In this section we want to consider how to develop and maintain good relationships with clients and other stakeholders while conducting an evaluation. After citing some of the dangers to evaluation from working with others in a political environment—“the hidden agendas, coop- tation of the evaluator, subversion of the evaluation question, sabotage of the design or the measurement scheme, and misuse of results”—Laura Leviton in her Presidential Address to the American Evaluation Association focused her remarks on the problems evaluators themselves present: “Often, evaluations are blindsided and the product is less than it could be because of our own lack of skill in dealing
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with people and organizations” (2001, p. 3). Noting that research shows there are many different types of intelligences and that the strength of evaluators is often in analytical skills, she added:
I think that sometimes evaluators are absolutely dumbfounded at the negative effects of their words and actions on other people. Yet it should be clear that the abil- ity to communicate well and relate well to others is fundamental to negotiating a better and more useful evaluation question, employing better methods with less resistance, and conveying the results more effectively to clients. In other words, our lack of interpersonal intelligence and “people skills” often make the negative syndromes of evaluation worse than they might otherwise be. Equally bad, our lack of people skills prevents us from optimizing our other talents and skills to produce high quality and useful evaluations. (Leviton, 2001, p. 6)
Now, we think that many evaluators do have interpersonal skills but may simply not think to use them in effective ways in conducting evaluations because they are too focused on methodological issues and their role as social scientists. Just as we discussed the evaluators’ obligation to learn about the political context of the program they are evaluating, we want to emphasize that communicating effectively with those involved in the evaluation is critical to the success of the evaluation. As Leviton suggests, evaluators must think about their language, learn about the perspectives of others, and involve them—and learn from them—as the evaluation is conducted.