Senior managers and directors live in a strange middle. They sit too high in the org chart for first-line management training to fit, and too far from the C-suite for executive coaching frameworks to apply cleanly. They have to plan for the future and run the quarter. They have to maximize the talent under them and absorb pressure from above. A 360 assessment built for this middle tier has to measure both halves of the job, and many do not.

That is part of why our Advanced Management Practices 360 assessment, built on the Task Cycle® framework, was the multi-rater tool our clients requested most last year. The structure was designed around what the role actually requires, and the feedback maps that whole picture in observable behaviors rather than vague trait ratings.

Here is a closer look at what this 360 assessment measures, how the structure works, and who it fits.

Why this tier needs a different 360 assessment

The competencies that define a strong director are not a smaller version of executive competencies, and they are not a bigger version of supervisor competencies. The senior manager has to do both at once.

A first-line manager’s 360 assessment (like our Management Practices survey) centers on the operational core: clarifying goals, planning the work, coaching the team, reinforcing performance. That is the right scope for someone with five to ten direct reports and one functional area of responsibility.

An executive 360 assessment (our Executive Leadership survey) leans into broader judgment: setting direction, customer focus across markets, organizational savvy, delivering results across business units.

The senior manager and director live in the overlap. They are still close enough to the work to coach and develop their teams. They are also far enough out to be expected to set vision, read the market, and drive a strategic agenda. A 360 assessment designed for either neighbor misses something important about the role they actually have.

AMP was built specifically for that overlap.

What the Advanced Management Practices 360 assessment measures

AMP is structured around the Task Cycle® framework, the universal model of work developed by organizational psychologist Clark Wilson in the early 1970s and used as the structural backbone of every TruScore assessment. The framework breaks any complete unit of work into six phases. AMP asks raters to evaluate the senior manager’s behavior across all six.

• Phase 1: Entrepreneurial Vision. Envisioning opportunities, establishing goals, taking informed risks, and championing innovation. The work of setting direction.
• Phase 2: Planning for the Future. Market insight, business acumen, collaborative planning, customer focus, clarity of communications. The work of translating vision into a workable plan.
• Phase 3: Maximizing Talent. Cross-team collaboration, empowering employees, building a team environment, coaching for performance, and managing conflict. The work of getting the right effort out of the people under and around the manager.
• Phase 4: Feedback. Openness to feedback. A single competency, by design. At this level, the expectation is that the manager actively seeks input and integrates it.
• Phase 5: Driving Towards Success. Standards of performance, persuasiveness, and goal pressure. The work of holding the line and pulling the organization toward the result.
• Phase 6: Recognition. Recognizing and rewarding the contributions of others. The work of reinforcing what should continue.

Each phase contains competencies measured by specific, behaviorally anchored items. Raters do not score abstract traits like “is strategic.” They rate observable behaviors: how often the manager builds consensus around long-term goals, how often they coach a direct report through a setback, how often they communicate market changes clearly. The full assessment is 67 scale items plus three open-ended responses, gathered from Self, Manager, Peers, and Direct Reports. A separate outcomes section measures the climate those behaviors produce: Trust, Tension, and Effectiveness.

Why the structure works for this role

The shape of AMP tells you something about the senior manager role itself.

Maximizing Talent carries the most weight. Five competencies sit under this phase, more than any other. That ratio reflects something our team sees over and over in the field: at this level, the highest-impact work is not strategy or execution in isolation, it is the manager’s ability to multiply effort through the people they lead.

Feedback is one competency. Not because it is unimportant, but because at this level you are expected to be a receiver of feedback rather than a developer of feedback-giving skill in others. The behavior measured is openness: whether the manager invites input and acts on it.

Driving and Vision sit on opposite ends of the cycle. A senior manager who is strong at one and weak at the other almost always shows up in the data as a development priority. The instrument is designed to surface that imbalance, not paper over it.

The outcomes section closes the loop. Trust, Tension, and Effectiveness are not behaviors the manager controls directly. They are the climate the manager’s behaviors produce. Comparing the behavior scores against the outcome scores tells a development conversation what to focus on first.

Who this 360 assessment is for, and who it is not

AMP fits when the population you are developing has director-level scope: budget responsibility, cross-functional coordination, accountability for a meaningful slice of strategy. Functional VPs, senior directors, and people promoted into expanded leadership roles all read AMP results as relevant to what they actually do.

AMP is not the right tool for a CEO or executive team (use Executive Leadership or Leadership EQ instead) or a first-line supervisor (use Management Practices or Leadership Competencies for Managers instead). If you are not sure where your population sits, our team will help you map it. And if your competency model does not match any of the off-the-shelf 360 assessments cleanly, AMP’s underlying library can be customized to fit, without compromising the norm-tested reliability of the items.

If you want to see the full AMP profile, sample reports, or talk through whether AMP is the right fit for your population, start a conversation with our team and we’ll walk you through it. More on the broader assessment lineup: truscore.com/360-degree-assessments/.