360 Feedback Blog

In this article from Personnel Today, a recent survey shows that confidence in senior management has hit an all time low, as well as job satisfaction and, by default, engagement.

Senior managers need now, more than ever, to be able to engage with their teams and their organisations in a meaningful and effective way.

How effectively are your senior managers engaging with people?  As individuals and as teams, how good are they at keeping people informed, engaged and motivated? Or is it possible they are demotivating people through being unaware of some of their daily behaviours in the workplace?

A customised 360 Degree Feedback will provide you with the information you need to understand what’s happening with your senior teams, and how you can help them improve specific skills and behaviours.

The level of misuse, and misunderstanding around the use, of 360 Degree Feedback never fails to amaze me.  This article about the GoldmanSachs Appraisal process, describes how Goldmans has been using 360 Degree Feedback. Pretty much everything they did was totally wrong and worst possible practice…including:

•  Using 360 to rank people’s performance in appraisals
• Allowing raters to be chosen on a random basis, so people were chosen who would give only positive feedback
• Glowing self-assessments were taken into account as part of the appraisal (this is implied in the article)

And please ignore the advice of the article writer, which is…..if you want to ‘do well’ in a 360 appraisal, “cultivate lots of people who think you’re great”, and write a great self-appraisal!

To recap, 360 Degree Feedback can only be valid and useful where there is a balance of feedback givers, where the process is clear and fair, and where there is no direct (or sole) connection to pay or reward.   
 

We are often asked to brief people in our client organisations about the best way to give feedback in a 360 Degree Feedback exercise.

Here’s a link to a short video that explains the key areas and some hints and tips for giving great 360 feedback.

This is a great list for effective Objective-Setting.

A key part of objective setting is to ensure that people have the right skills to be able to achieve their objectives - 360 Degree Feedback is a great way to do this.