Benchmarking
Benchmarking builds a rubric of observable behaviours from your best performers at each skill level, so development stops being vague feedback and starts being a measurable gap to close.
Top performers' behaviours get written down first, turned into a rubric, then measured against everyone else's gap.
Reach for this when…
- Feedback keeps landing as 'be more strategic' with no way to practise it.
- One person is clearly excellent at something and nobody can say exactly why.
- You need a shared standard before rolling out development at scale.
How to run it
- Define the specific competency to be benchmarked.
- Identify the best practitioners of that competency.
- Observe or interview them to capture behaviours at different skill levels.
- Build a rubric with observable criteria at each level, for example one to five.
- Use the rubric to measure current state in a session or role-play.
- Design targeted development activities to close the gap.
A worked example
Situation. Aigerim Bekova ran a customer service floor for a BPO in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where de-escalation skills appeared on every review but nobody could describe what a five-out-of-five call actually sounded like.
Applied. She recorded and broke down her three best agents' toughest calls, building a rubric: name the emotion in the first fifteen seconds, ask one clarifying question before any solution, give a specific next step by the end of the call.
Result. New hires role-played against the rubric in week one instead of shadowing calls for a month. Escalation rates on their calls dropped noticeably within the quarter.
The catch
Benchmarking against your best internal performer can just standardise a local ceiling - if nobody in the building is actually excellent at the thing, the rubric bakes in mediocrity. It also takes real observation time to build properly; a rushed rubric is just a checklist wearing a better name.
A rubric written from watching one great performer describes their style as much as the skill itself.
Origin: David McClelland; developed further by Richard Boyatzis and Lyle & Signe Spencer
This tool also appears in the Strategy Catalog (WESC): Benchmarking