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

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

Rule junkies, 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 the best 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 at one point they were thought to be respiration). You don’t know their competition levels. As a result, the data in this normative data set, for example, could include people ranging from Mensa members to village idiots, from highly motivated and effective to catatonic and mentally withdrawn.

Focus on the behavior, not the score. Think back to your last discussion about standards. 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 wording of the element, the behavior? Did you over-analyze the importance of a .02 delta between scores or actual wording for that behavior? Did you identify the positive and negative consequence to resolve this potential area for development?

Purge your mind of sheet music! Focus on the behavior and the direction of the 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 or score happens to be. Your development efforts may include whether the individual or a group of individuals needs to do more of the behavior or do less to solve this behavior and what specifically needs to be done to solve this problem.

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

The real fun happens when they score below the norm, like below average. People attack the poll. Who created this evaluation? How relevant are the questions to what we actually do? Is this a valid survey? Is the data reliable? People tend to find excuses rather than expend energy to be more effective or more competitive or to be more influential with others. In the end, all this noise and fury is no more than sitting in a rocking chair: there is a semblance 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 the specific organizations within that normative database. If they do, it is an ethical breach of confidentiality.

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

Alternative to national standards. An alternative to general industry or national standards and scores is to create your own normative database on the people within your company. Create self-regulating data for your target populations. Compare data from your top performers to those who are less effective. Identify your own critical behaviors and practices for all employees and for specific functional units. For example, you can compare your group of newly appointed managers with, say, your most experienced managers. Compare the strengths and development needs of people working in different places, and so on.

These internal comparisons can enable you to develop more relevant training and development programs. They can help reinforce your core strengths while addressing your developmental needs. Self-directed action plans become more relevant to changing unproductive behaviors when you focus on the behavior, rather than the score.