360 Feedback Blog

This article in Personnel Today reports the results of a recent survey showing how poor management skills can affect employee morale and have a direct effect on peformance.

It’s critical to have a system in place to understand the skills gaps in your manager group.  Using 360 Degree Feedback and evaluation, and a robust system for collating individual and group data, you can measure how effective managers are in:

• Helping people to make decisions
• Dealing reasonably with people when they make a mistake, and helping them to learn from a mistake
• Offering training and support to people to help them do a better job

I’ve been following the current Apprentice series on BBC TV, and last night’s episode was a corker - here’s the Guardian blog, which gives you the sequence of events plus some witty commentary.  Of particular interest to me was how Jim, who escaped being fired, suddenly plummeted in popularity with the candidates and Lord Sugar. I was intrigued as to how someone who had been universally popular with the team and with Lord Sugar, could fall so quickly from grace.  It has clearly been a case of Halo Effect.

The Halo Effect happens when someone does one or more high-visibility, successful actions or tasks.  They may be very specific, in Jim’s case, it was a very effective negotiation a number of weeks back. This one action or task creates an impression of high performance in all areas, which is also reinforced by group concensus, hence a ‘Halo’.   

In Jim’s case, because of the negotiation, he gained a reputation as a ’strong candidate’, and one of the fired candidates, Vincent, had been only too happy to seek Jim’s opinion and advice throughout.   In the end, Jim proved to be vindictive, unwilling to take responsibility and ineffective in the task, and both the remaining candidates and Lord S were visibly shocked at this ‘change’ in their perception of Jim.

The Halo Effect can be a serious problem for you if you have to assess or grade someone’s performance, or if you are asked give 360 Degree Feedback, or particularly if you are assessing ‘potential’ for talent and leadership pools. 

It’s difficult to avoid the Halo Effect - after all, our brains are designed to create short cuts to speed up decision making - and its sister, the Horns Effect.  But just being aware of the biases in our thinking, and also how easy it is to be swayed by ‘group think’, helps in balancing our understanding of someone’s strengths and weaknesses.

With all the excitement of the Royal Wedding we’ve been thinking about relationships, and in particular working relationships. 

Successful working relationships are a key to employee engagement and productivity - and the main reason people leave organisations is because they’re unhappy with their boss.  That’s why it’s critical for employees and their managers to understand better how they interact, communicate and solve problems together.  360 Degree Feedback is a great tool for allowing people to review their own behaviours and how they think they relate to their colleagues (through the Self-assessment process), and to get valuable insights into how their colleagues experience working with them.  By using the information from the 360s, both employees and managers can make specific and fast changes in their everyday activities.

360 not just a ‘nice-to-have’.  It’s a critical tool for improving working relationships and increasing productivity. 

This article by Scott Berkun talks about how to manage smart people.

Go to the UK Training Zone 360 Degree Feedback Discussion group for more on this.

360 Degree Feedback

In this article the author makes the point that 360 Degree Feedback is a good starting point for new managers, but that workplace learning is the best way for them to acquire their new skills.

I would also add that 360 Degree Feedback is a great tool for re-measuring how managers are progressing in those areas that are, by their nature, difficult to measure; managing people, delegating, influencing and leading - all those things that most people were never taught before they became a manager!

In this blog the author ponders on Why Desperate Dan Got Fired, concluding that it was “the astonishing lack of self awareness of his hectoring, bullying style of management which done for desperate Dan”.

Like John I watched the first episode of this year’s The Apprentice with the usual mixture of shock, horror and deja-vu.
Dan was the losing project manager. It’s  fascinating to see, over and over again, how lack of self-awareness +
apparently limitless self-confidence + pressure = disasterous leadership. Having said
that, self-confidence and decisiveness are equally characteristics of great leaders.

It seems that many people (if the Apprentice candidates are in any way representative) have never been given any feedback about their styles of working and how they engage their co-workers and employees.

I pondered on whether consistent 360 Degree Feedback to Dan, given early in his career (”You don’t listen, you don’t respect your colleagues, you do not win your colleagues’ trust) might have made a big difference to his Apprentice performance, built on his strengths in the right way, and even made him a potential winner…?!

Jo

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!