Fixing The Instrument

What percentage of employees who receive feedback from multirater (360-degree) instruments actually change their on-the-job behavior? I've posed this question to thousands of workforce development managers and executives during speeches and workshops I've conducted. The answer is always the same: only about 10 percent. Is it any wonder that executives vote to kill multirater applications because they believe the payoff to be too low?

Granted, my informal surveys are unscientific. Still, even if the number of people who take action is closer to 25 percent than 10, both experts and practitioners agree that multirater feedback is far from perfect in motivating recipients to take meaningful development action. And not much has been done to improve the usefulness of the process.

Frustrated, I've studied ways in which multiple-perspective feedback can have a greater impact on behavior change and have identified four problems with multirater instruments.

1. Subjects don't understand what's important.