There are some things your best friend should tell you, so we’ll politely challenge a news release from Cambria Consulting, a firm we’ve admired for years. We wished they had asked for some outside feedback before launching their latest instrument.
The release tells us there is a new way to administer 360-degree feedback without all the bother of an objective facilitator. The product’s main benefit is time savings and a kind of batch processing that allows entire teams to be rated at one time, like “mountains of Julianne fries,” just that easy, just that quick.
From the Business Wire release:
“Using Comparative Rating, managers can evaluate their direct reports together instead of one at a time. This ability to visually compare everyone against the same performance factors not only requires 50 to 70 percent less time, it also provides more accurate assessments. Entire teams and organizations can be assessed simultaneously, with higher completion rates and without rater fatigue. This is a significant benefit to today’s busy managers who would otherwise be burdened by the cumbersome single-rater process.”
The new Cambria360 is, no doubt, a spiffy user-friendly tool. Cambria makes great products. But we wonder if the promotional message obfuscates some of the problems inherent in evaluating such large groups at once. Where is the one-on-one evaluation? As coaches and facilitators, we feel left out.
It certainly is ideally suited for the strength-based leadership movement, with its emphasis on fast results.
Speaking of strengths, the Centre for Confidence and Well-Being in Glasgow, Scotland joins us in challenging the notion of ignoring weaknesses with a review of The Perils of Accentuating the Positive. Thanks, Carol!
Thanks for posting this one and yes, there is good cause for concern.
Like the “send us your resume in 100-words-or-less in MS Word” movement, this one has some similar problems.
Indeed, the idea of “speed” and comparative analysis is good for grabbing a snapshot at a moment in time. However, I’ve done three of these in the past 6 months and tallied the data in the same way that Cambria has designed, albeit by spreadsheet. Here’s what we found:
1. The idea of a comparative glance is useful to managers.
2. It was useful to the extent that they could see gross extremes that prompted them to explore further–through conversation.
3. Although the items were all labeled the same, they didn’t mean the same thing to all of the “raters”. One person had respondents who viewed “Leadership” as collegiality, because the person being rated was a research manager; another saw “Leadership” as something very directive and high energy and rated accordingly. Why? Because some of the person’s raters were in sales and marketing.
I haven’t met a responsible client yet at any level–all the way to CEO–who doesn’t ask for guidance from a professional in doing an initial “What could all of this mean?”, then having solid conversations to find out the Why behind the What. And each understands the importance of one-on-ones as well as coaching the recipients to sit down and discuss the results with their own teams.
I like what Cambria has made possible. Without professional guidance it could end up doing more harm than good, even with the best of intentions.
Posted by Steve Roesler on March 20th, 2009.