• June 20, 2021

Norms, 360-degree feedback, and behavior change

What are the standards? A norm is the average score of all the people who have taken a specific 360-degree assessment (or any other assessment survey for that matter). It can also represent the mean score for a specific normative group or target population. A normative group is a target population, say managerial staff, stored in a database (yours or the provider’s). If you can access this group of rules, you can compare your people to the people in the group of rules.

Normative data is mistakenly viewed as the paradigm or standard to strive for. Some see scoring as a best practice or a goal. It is an average score. Think back to that C from your college days. C = excellence? There is no quintessential deans list here! Well, the element, behavior, may be a best practice and something to include in your change efforts, but scoring is not a best practice by any stretch of the imagination. Represents mediocrity. Do you want your people to live for mediocrity?

Addicted to the rules, beware! Yes, you can compare and compare your middle managers by gender, title, years of service with other middle managers who share those demographics from your SIC (Standard Industry Classification) code. That’s the easy part. What you don’t know is whether the people in the database represent top employees, average employees, or just those employees who fit the demographic (for example, who have worked with the organization for two or three years and that in a at the time they were thought to be respiration). You don’t know your proficiency levels. As a result, the data in this normative dataset, for example, could include people ranging from Mensa members to village idiots, from highly motivated and effective to catatonic and mentally retired.

Focus on the behavior, not the score. Think about your last discussion about the rules. Did the discussion focus on an item that had a score of 3.4 or 3.6? Or did you focus instead on the actual writing of the article, the behavior? Did you over-analyze the significance of a .02 delta between scores or the actual wording of that behavior? Did you identify the positive and negative consequences of solving this potential development area?

Purge your mind of scores! Focus on the behavior and direction of change.

If your results indicate a weakness in, say, “Challenging current thinking about how we’ve always done things,” then that’s a potential area of ​​development for a specific individual or a subset of your target population, regardless of what the norm is. or the score becomes. Your development efforts may include whether the individual or a group of individuals must do more or less the behavior to resolve this behavior and what needs to be done specifically to resolve this problem.

Postponement of behavior change. Focusing on standards can be a very convenient way to avoid implementing the necessary changes. One benefit of 360-degree feedback is that it can act as a catalyst to implement the necessary change. However, when you compare your comments to a national standard, people do funny things. If their score is above the norm, they feel that a change is not necessary. We are better than everyone else (by the norm). We do what others do.

The real fun happens when they score below the norm, such as below average. People attack the poll. Who created this evaluation? How relevant are the questions to what we really do? Is this a valid survey? Is the data reliable? People tend to look for excuses rather than wasting energy to be more effective or more competitive or to be more influential with others. In the end, all this sound and fury amounts to nothing more than sitting in a rocking chair: there is an appearance of movement, but no progress.

We are unique. Why do you think you need to compare your employees with those of other organizations? National or industry standards provide demographic comparisons, but do not identify specific organizations within that normative database. If they do, it is an ethical violation of confidentiality.

If you think your organization is unique, why would you want to compare your unique organization to organizations that are not? And if you think the normative database is full of unique organizations, what is special about your organization? The discussion becomes a bit circular. Many organizations that are number one or two in their markets tend not to use national standards for comparative purposes. What would be the point?

Alternative to national standards An alternative to national or industry standards and scores is to create your own normative database of the people within your company. Create data that is autonomous for your target populations. Compare the data of your best performing employees with those who are less effective. Identify your own critical practices and behaviors for all employees and for specific functional units. For example, you can compare your pool of newly appointed managers to, say, your most experienced managers. Compare the strengths and development needs of people who work in different places, etc.

These internal comparisons can allow you to develop more relevant training and development programs. They can help reinforce your core strengths while meeting your developmental needs. Self-directed action plans become more relevant to changing non-productive behaviors when you focus on behavior, rather than scoring.

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