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.

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. 

In this article in the Guardian, the writer lists the key areas that, for her, are critical to employee engagement.

1. Consultation - yes! This is critical for engagement. This includes any forum where employees can voice their views honestly and without fear,  including engagement surveys, 360 degree feedback, ideas and innovation groups, and even Ask the Boss forums!

2. I would add Line Manager skills:
To maintain engagement, especially in tough times, line managers must have the skills to manage their teams, give feedback, coach people as they work, delegate effectively, deal with poor
performance, and as much as possible, give people tasks that are going to hold their attention and make a difference.

While it may not always be possible to involve people in
special projects, a great manager,with some enthusiasm and basic managementskills, can make even the most menial task feel like it’s worth doing. 

In this article, the writer discusses the new relationship between employees and the organisations they work for, and how this is affecting employee engagement.

Transparency is really important, and not just in particular areas like senior pay and bonuses. Senior management needs to be honest about what’s going on and what they’re doing about it - employees are not stupid and they know when they’re being PR’d!

A great example is Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, who spent a year talking to staff around the world about the company’s problems, asked them what needed to change, and went on to publish his own 360 Degree Feedback on the company intranet!

Track critical engagement factors in your organisation with Climate Check from Track Surveys.

Track Surveys Empower 360

Great article on 360 Degree Feedback.

People need to feel confident that their feedback will be anonymous, and that their feedback will be listened to by their boss.  In fact, in my experience, someone who shows that they have listened to feedback and are doing something about it are rewarded with huge admiration and loyalty from their staff.

For more 360 Degree Feedback resources, go to http://www.tracksurveys.co.uk/360DegreeFeedback.aspx

In this article from BNET, the writer points to the importance of developing home-grown talent and skills to the health of the organisation.

It’s certainly true that that growing your talent is critical, but you need a starting point to understand the key strengths you already have, and any potential gaps, within your workforce.

Tools for doing this include customised 360 Degree Feedback and Staff Surveys.  360 measures individual strengths, particularly in leadership skills which are essential for growth, and Staff Surveys take the pulse of the organisation at any particular time.

More on how this works at 360 Degree Feedback.

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

In this article, the writer states that 360 Degree Feedback should never be anonymous.  I disagree!

Whilst, ideally, we should all be mature enough to accept feedback directly from our colleagues - active acceptance is a lovely idea but somewhat unrealistic. 

As a 360 Degree Feedback designer, practitioner and coach, I know that it takes at least a couple of years to build employees’ and managers’ confidence in their organisation’s feedback processes - as well as in the the broader culture of management, accountability, and whether people get help or get pulped when they make a mistake.

I fear the writer is missing the big point of 360 Degree Feedback here: the point of 360 is not to avoid feedback from your colleagues (although I admit that it’s sometimes used like this). 

The point about 360 Degree Feedback is that it collates trends and consistent messages that are coming from many people, not just one, and therefore can provide information that one person’s experience can’t.  While individual comments and scores are useful, we coach people to look at consistent messages from the 360, not outliers. 

Therefore anonymity does not reduce the value of the feedback, and actually encourages people who would not have given feedback to do so.

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?!

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