From an employee development perspective, rating narratives tend to provide more useful information than numerical ratings. Even when performance is rated against behavioral rating standards, the ratings themselves typically do not convey what the employee did or did not do in sufficient detail to be meaningful. Rating narratives, on the other hand, can be extremely rich, customized and useful sources of feedback because they tend to provide specific behavioral examples that can aid employees in understanding why they were evaluated in a particular way. Behavioral examples used in narrative descriptions also help managers calibrate their ratings by allowing them to discuss and compare more specific examples of performance that relate to the standards.