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?!

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.

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 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

In this article in the New York Times, Vineet Nayar, chief executive HCL Technologies, talks about how his 360 Degree Feedback results are available for everyone in the company to see, all 50,000 of them!  And 3800 managers also get 360 Degree Feedback, and that’s published on the internal web.  He believes this is critical for building transparency, trust and reverse accountability in his organisation.

In this article in Business Week, the brilliant coach Marshall Goldsmith sets out the 5 key steps that anyone can use to become a more effective leader.  The first of these is to obtain 360 Degree Feedback.

After that it’s critical to listen to the feedback, make a clear decision about what you’re going to do differently and keep getting feedback as you go.

I would add that the more visible and up front you are about the feedback you have had, and how you are actively using that feedback, the more people are going to see your commitment to your own development as a leader.

I found this great summary of questions people often ask about 360 Degree Feedback, and some of the criticisms that can be levelled against the process.

Here’s our response (we’ve repeated the comments/questions at the beginning of each paragraph):

It’s right that 360 focuses on managers and above; this is because 360 is most effective when measuring management, communication and leadership skills, and it’s at manager level that those skills become important.

There are indeed some key things that need to be in place for 360 Degree Feedback to be effective and valuable.

1) giving appraisals is a difficult task.
Yes appraisal can be difficult, but managers need to be trained in giving appraisals.  360 Degree Feedback is an additional tool to help with appraisal, because it gets feedback from multiple perspectives; it is one form of appraisal, not the only one.

2)there may be a gap between an organization’s business objectives and what 360-degree feedback programs measure.
I so agree with you - it is critical that the 360 Degree Feedback measures the behaviours that are needed for the organisation’s business objectives.  This is normally the first thing we do when designing 360 Degree Feedback.

3)time and cost associated with 360-degree feedback also are stumbling blocks
Yes, there is time and cost involved in doing any people development work.  However good communication and positioning of the 360, and careful planning, can reduce the impact of the activity. And a tool that helps employees, their managers and the organisation to understand skills gaps and strengths, is critical to the organisation’s success.

4) Reviewers and those being reviewed fail to follow up after feedback.
Follow up is essential - as with any people development tool, using it and then forgetting about it is a waste of time and money, and creates negative attitudes in the organisation.  The 360 should be integral within the people processes of the organisation, should be meaningful, and should be aligned with other activities like appraisal, training needs analysis and management and leadership development.

For a free guide on 360 Degree Feedback Best Practice, go to our website Track Surveys and download the document.

Link to my blog on UK Training Zone to read this blog.

To many employees, managers and business owners, performance and 360 appraisals are a bureaucratic and time-consuming chore.  As people professionals we often find ourselves having to argue the case for Appraisal and its benefits.   An appraisal process of some kind is essential where you have people whose performance is going to be assessed for any reason – even in the smallest company, a consistent, clear appraisal is necessary.  This is because:

1. People need a clear understanding of their role, what they are expected to do as their key tasks (i.e. their goals), and the scope of their responsibilities

2. People then need to understand clearly how their performance is going to be assessed - how their training, pay and promotion is going to be affected by their performance

3. A consistent, transparent appraisal process ensures that as far as possible, people are being assessed on a consistent basis, on the things that they have agreed to be assessed on, and have a fair chance to put their case forward in a two-way discussion with their employing organisation.

 

There is in addition a strong business case for getting a good, customised appraisal in place.  

 

1. Although time needs to be spent in running the appraisal process, this will be less than the chaos of not having any guidance in place, where managers judge their people entirely on their personal preferences and assumptions.  A fair appraisal system makes people feel that they are being treated fairly and consistently – a key indicator of employee engagement, which is critical to good employee performance

2. Having a good appraisal system in place ensures the business has an audit of the ongoing interactions with employees around performance problems, and can be an important factor in the employer’s favour if any cases are ever brought against the employer for unfair dismissal etc.

3. Appraisal need not be a long painful process: keeping your appraisal process simple, straightforward and directly linked to the company’s business objectives will ensure that people use it and that managers rate it.

 For more information on the key steps in creating a customised Appraisal for your organisation, contact us at info@tracksurveys.co.uk or on 020 7206 7279.    

Posted on Training Zone today 28 September 2009.