360 Feedback Blog

This is a great blog from the ever-refreshing Peter Honey in People Management yesterday.  It’s about the recent claim that every school needs an incompetent teacher so that kids can learn how to deal with incompetence in the future.

If you take Peter’s path to its logical conclustion, we would also need a certain level of incompetence in the workplace to give people new and useful learning experiences in how to deal with incompetent managers and colleagues.  This would then require us to assess for Incompetence in the annual appraisal, ensure that new recruits had a certain level of Incompetence and inlcude Incompetence in leadership and senior manager development programmes!  

I like this reverse thinking so much, I’m even thinking of developing a Incompetency 360 Degree Feedback - any ideas of what you might like to include?!

Here are some thoughts on giving feedback from our 360 Degree Feedback discussion group on UK Training Zone.

In this poll, reported in the US, 68%  of managers believe that looks have an impact on the way managers rate job perforamance.

If this survey is to be believed, Attractiveness comes only below Experience and Confidence in recruitment situations, and trumps Education and a sense of Humour - apparently known as the ‘Hottie’ effect!  The author advises those of us who are non-Hotties not to despair but to make the best of whatever assets we have…..

On a more serious note though, how can we overcome these biases which appear to be inbuilt in most of us and can make a big difference in how employees’ performance is judged?

The first answer is Awareness: once we’re aware of our biases, our assumptions and things like the Halo and Horns Effect, we can start to adjust our opinions of that person and inject some objectivity into our appraisal of their performance  (for more on Halo/Horns, go to 360 Degree Feedback and download our paper entitled What Not To Do When Giving Great Feedback ).

Second is judging people on what they have actually done, so setting SMART objectives is critical (Specific, Measurable, Action-based, Relevant and Timely).

Third is making sure that your own judgement is not the only one that counts….tools like 360 Degree Feedback are very important in ensuring that a number of different people have input into the appraisal, and that there is consistency in assessing performance, especially in hard to measure areas like management, leadership and team working.

This article talks about the negative effect that feedback, including 360 Degree Feedback, can have on the recipient when insensitively given.

In addition, we always advise people who are going to give face to face or anonymous feedback to:

- Say out loud what you think you’re going to say to the person; you will know pretty quickly whether it’s going to come across as negative and critical
- Ask yourself how you would feel if someone gave you the feedback you are going to give the recipient - put your own name in the sentences….
- Keep practicising until you find the right words, then use these in the feedback
- Be careful that you are not putting a halo around everything the person does, just because you like them, or because you think they’re a bit like you
- On the other hand, don’t have a downer on them because of one thing they did a long time ago, or because they disagreed with you

As this article says, being a leader, and staying there, is tough, and it’s getting tougher.

The author’s tips for surviving as a leader include:

• Know yourself
• Play to your strengths, and
• Avoid your derailers (that is, the behaviours that take you off-track and jeopardise your success)

That’s why it’s absolutely critical for all leaders, whether they’re just starting to lead a team, or they’re leading a big corporation, to use 360 Degree Feedback and coaching to get a really clear picture of their strengths and weaknesses, and how other people see them.

We love this concise business case for measuring and managing performance: in this clip from Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, Jacqueline de Rojas,  UK and Ireland vice-president of software company, McAfee, talks about the importance of ‘Inspecting what you expect’ - setting performance goals and regularly measuring against them.  

360 Degree Feedback, Appraisal and Performance Review are just as important for teams as they are for individual employees.

In this article, the brilliant Marshall Goldsmith talks about an exercise he conducts in providing Feedforward, as well as feedback, to people who are looking to change their behaviours and improve their leadership skills.

For me the critical points are that:

1. This is an important supplement to feedback, including 360 Degree Feedback - we always recommend that colleagues provide Feedforward in some way….How Mary can manage team meetings more effectively, Things I would like to see Mary start doing,  or What I would like to see Mary continue doing…

2. There is a more positive response because the Feedforward can feel less judgemental than feedback

3. It’s critical that people receiving feedback are able to listen and take it on board - more on this in another blog - but Marshall Goldsmith is big on saying ‘Thanks for your feedback’ and then keeping quiet!

In this video interview in today’s Guardian, the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some very interesting things to say about power, knowledge, beliefs and behaviours. 

From a workplace point of view, we see that people behave differently on their own, within their team, within the organisation, and then collectively, as an organisation, interacting with the outside world.   Collective beliefs and behaviours have a big influence on the individual, so when we’re looking to make individual or organisational change happen, we need to analyse and understand what those collective beliefs and behaviours are, and how they are skewing the behaviours of individuals. 

Maybe if we’d done that with the banking sector a few years ago, we could have avoided some of the consequences of the actions and groupthink that have led to the current economic problems.

360 Degree Feedback

This article in People Management describes a new ‘720 Degree Feedback’ being put in place at Cadbury’s, the confectionary manufacturer. 

Instead of getting 360 Degree Feedback from people you work with, the 720 Degree concept is about getting feedback from people outside work, friends, family, spouses, children. 

I would agree that there’s certainly a lot more to a person than their workplace behaviours, but I can’t help feeling that 720 degree feedback may be overspinning it, if that’s not labouring the metaphor!

Seriously though, as a tool for looking at emotional intelligence and relationship skills, 720 Degree- feedback from friends and family - may well have some value.  However, given the closeness of those relationships , I think that the feedback from friends and family may be either too complimentary, or a little bit too critical?  Is either of those something I would want to share with my manager? And what could it do to those personal relationships? 

I’d love to hear what you think.

This article in Management Today describes the results of research carried out by the Carnegie Institute,  suggesting that 85% of our success is due to emotional intelligence.

So how do you know if you’re doing the things listed in the article, communicating clearly, giving feedback and praise, building trust and strong relationships, resolving conflict, and making change happen?

Most of us tend to think we’re quite good at these things - but what do those around us think? And how often do they give us honest feedback? And how useful would some honest feedback be in helping us to build our self-awareness?

If you’d like to know how Emotionally Intelligent you really are, 360 Degree Feedback is a really effective tool for this.

For a free trial of our Emotional Intelligence 360 Degree Feedback, go to Empower 360 and click on Free Trial - we’ll set you up straight away.