If I was to find 10 of your friends and ask them to fill out a survey on aspects your personality, would it be accurate? How about 10 acquaintances, people you have met, but don't see too often? What if I was to ask friends of your friends that you don't personally know? Would their impression of you be accurate? Of course not, it's laughable!
Surveys based on perception are a quick and dirty way to get a benchmark of performance. Quick for the contributors because they are asked only a handful of questions that they can complete, without referring to data, while drinking a coffee. Quick for the benchmarking analyst because they only need to format the result. Dirty because: at best, the people answering the survey have observed your performance, but not measured it; at worst, and far more likely, it's a gut feel based off what they have heard from customers or the trade press. These surveys are about as useful as a high-school popularity contest in determining performance and worthless for driving improvement.
When it comes to performance-improvement, perception is not useful, you need real data. Data that is consistent in definition, has been handled with discipline, and had standard metrics applied. This is real work. No pain, no gain !
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