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!