Net Supporter Score®
Net Supporter Score® and toolset is a leadership assessment and improvement method that can be used to gauge the quality of an organization’s employee/manager/leader relationships – which include relationships between managers or leaders and people reporting to them as well as to peers and co-workers.
The Net Supporter Score concept is offered by TMIT as an employee leadership support measurement tool that was initially developed for the healthcare industry, where the perception of the quality of leadership by employees and peers can play a major role in performance improvement, patient safety, and high performance through trust and better communication.
The scoring model uses a similar metric approach to the Net Promoter Score, which is a management tool that is used to gauge the loyalty of a organization’s customer relationships. Net Promoter is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “The One Number You Need to Grow.”[1] The most important benefit of the Net Promoter Score method is that it simplifies and communicates the objective of creating more “Promoters” and fewer “Detractors” among customers – a concept claimed to be far simpler for employees to understand and act on than more complicated, obscure, or hard-to-understand satisfaction metrics or indices.
The Net Supporter Score is obtained by asking co-workers, managers, or employees a single question on a 0-to-10 rating scale, where 10 is “extremely likely” and 0 is “not at all likely”: “How likely is it that you would recommend being led by or working with this person to a colleague?” Based on their responses, respondents are categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Supporter Score (NSS). NSS can be as low as -100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter).
The Net Supporter Score may be applied to an organizational relationship map and used to assess peer-to-peer relationships, leader-follower relationships, and organizational leadership support.
Organizations are encouraged to follow this question with an open-ended request for elaboration, soliciting the reasons for the rating of that person. These reasons can then be provided to the person being evaluated and to employee relation teams for follow-up action – such as training programs to improve relationships.
In order to promote and support use of the Net Supporter Score, TMIT will provide a website where the Net Supporter Score for an employee or manager can be calculated from the information submitted by the employee’s co-workers, peers, managers, and employees. If the score is lower than the specified goal, intervention and training programs can be implemented to help the employee gain the trust and respect he needs from his co-workers to be a more effective person in the organization.
1. Reichheld, Frederick F. “The One Number You Need to Grow.” Harvard Business Review 1 December 2003. Available at: http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=R0312C&referral=2340.