How to Choose the Right Raters

Minimum requirements for report generation

These are completion minimums, not nomination minimums. Participants can nominate up to 10 peers and 10 direct reports. The more nominations, the more resilient the assessment is if some raters don't complete. Nominate generously.

The manager's role in Interval 360 is distinct from every other rater. Rather than participating in the conversational feedback exchange, the manager provides the Results Score: a calibrated rating of the participant's performance against their OKRs, weighted by the importance of each objective. This score forms the “What” dimension of the assessment.

There is only one manager per assessment. The right person is whoever has primary accountability for evaluating the participant's performance: the person who owns the OKR conversation and can speak to what was delivered, not just observed.

In most cases this is the participant's direct manager. But if the participant has recently changed roles, or if their day-to-day work is primarily accountable to a different leader than their org-chart manager, use judgment. A manager who does not have genuine visibility into the participant's OKRs will not be able to rate them credibly, which degrades the Results Score.

One thing to avoid

Do not assign a manager who is too senior to have direct knowledge of the participant's work. A skip-level manager who has not been closely involved in setting or evaluating the participant's objectives will produce a Results Score that reflects second-hand impressions, not calibrated performance data. That number will look precise in the report but will not actually mean anything.

Peers are one of the most important sources of “How” signal. They see the participant in the contexts that matter most for leadership experience: cross-functional collaboration, influence without authority, how the participant shows up in shared work, how they handle disagreement, and whether they make the people around them more or less effective.

The goal is not to find people who will say nice things. The goal is to find people who have genuine, recent, firsthand experience of the participant as a leader, and who have enough psychological safety and professional confidence to be honest.

Nominate the maximum you can. Ten peer nominations does not mean ten conversations you are obligated to host. It means ten people who have been invited to contribute voluntarily. Even if four or five decline or don't complete, you still have enough for a meaningful signal. Nominating exactly three peers is a single non-completion away from a report that cannot run.

When reviewing nominations as the HR stakeholder, look at the list as a whole. Does it represent different functions? Different tenures? People who have both benefited from and been challenged by this leader? If the list reads like a collection of the participant's closest allies, that is a signal worth acting on.

Direct report feedback is often the most revealing and the most sensitive. People who report to the participant experience their leadership in the most direct way: how they set expectations, how they develop their team, how they handle performance conversations, and whether they create conditions where people can do their best work.

Direct reports also face the highest psychological stakes in any feedback process. They are being asked to evaluate someone who has influence over their career. Interval 360's conversational format is designed to make this feel less like a formal assessment and more like an honest conversation, but that does not eliminate the underlying dynamic. The rater list needs to be constructed with that reality in mind.

Direct reports are often the rater group most concerned about being identified. It is worth understanding how Interval 360 handles this. The platform does not include raw quotes or individually attributed responses in the reports. Instead, conversational input is synthesized across all raters in a category and surfaced as themes, patterns, and aggregate signals. Nothing in the output points back to a specific individual or a specific exchange.

Before the assessment runs, it helps to briefly explain this to the direct reports who will be participating. People who understand that their response feeds into a synthesis rather than appearing verbatim in a report are more likely to engage honestly. That honesty is exactly what makes direct report feedback valuable.

When the participant submits their nominations, the HR stakeholder or team leader reviews the list before any invitations go out. This is not a formality. It is one of the most important quality-control moments in the entire process.

You have two levers: you can remove a nominee you do not believe will provide objective or useful input, and you can add raters the participant did not nominate whose perspective you think belongs in the data.

Remove someone if you have genuine reason to believe their input will not be objective. Not because they are unlikely to say flattering things, but because their relationship to the participant (or a current situation between them) would compromise the quality of their response. An active conflict, a performance issue involving the person, or a personal relationship that is too close to produce honest professional feedback are all legitimate grounds.

Be careful not to remove nominees simply because you anticipate they will give critical feedback. Critical feedback, delivered honestly and based on real experience, is exactly what a 360 is designed to surface. Removing people to protect a participant from uncomfortable data defeats the purpose of the assessment.

Add a rater when there is a perspective missing from the list that you believe is important: a key cross-functional partner the participant overlooked, a longer-tenured direct report who was not nominated, or someone who has had a particularly revealing working relationship with the participant that the nominations do not capture.

If you add raters the participant did not nominate, a brief conversation with the participant about why is worth the two minutes it takes. Surprises in the rater list can create anxiety that spills into the collection window. Transparency here is usually better than efficiency.

Beyond individual nominees, look at the list as a system. Does it represent a genuine cross-section of how this person leads, or a curated version of their best relationships? Does the peer list include people from outside the participant's immediate circle? Does the direct report list include people at different levels and tenures?

A list that is technically compliant with the minimums but composed entirely of the participant's most favorable relationships will produce data that is technically valid but practically useless. The job of the approval step is to catch that before invitations go out.

A useful frame

Ask yourself: if the report comes back with a very high “How” score, will you trust it? If the answer is “not really, because the rater list was too friendly,” the list needs work. A 360 only has value if the people running it are willing to act on what it surfaces. That starts with constructing a rater list that makes the data worth acting on.