360 Feedback Blog

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 summary of some research that’s been done on how people feel at different levels of
hierarchy, how it affects their behaviour, and how they can make a change.

- How changing your posture can stimulate or reduce the hormones that make you feel powerful
or powerless
This was something we learned many years ago with NLP but now it’s proven to be physiological.

- How we judge the people we work with: there’s a balance between how much we like them
(warmth) and how well they do their job.  The article emphasises the importance of the relationship; the danger is that too much warmth can cloud our judgement of someone’s performance, i.e. the halo effect, or too little empathy and the horns effect.

- “WhatPeople often are more influenced by how they feel about you than by what you’re saying.
It’s not about the content of the message, but how you’re communicating it”.

So our emotions can hijack us and this can affect how we judge our colleagues.  Building our emotional awareness and getting feedback on our behaviours, using tools such as 360 Degree Feedback, is essential.

This article from UK Training Zone talks about the mistakes we can make when trying to judge potential for future leadership.

I especially recognise the ‘I can judge potential by having a coffee with them’ as we all think we are better judges of potential (and other things) than we really are!

It’s especially important if we are going to treat people fairly and equitably that we have some very clear definitions of  what we want the ‘potential’ to be - I have been in situations where ‘potential’ is a handy way of promoting someone whose face fits, and who is liked by the boss, rather than someone who will be able to step up to a new role in the future. 

Therefore some systematic definition of skills (job description, 360 Degree Feedback) is important - testing, feedback and profiling are certainly not going to guarantee a perfect candidate, but  they will help to inform and support decisions that have to be made.  After all, what gets measured, gets managed!

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.

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?!

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.

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.