360 Feedback Blog

This article from Personnel Today talks about a dilemma we’re seeing with many of our clients: they want to be able to have a clear picture of the skills and capabilities of their people so that they can make sure the right people are in the right job, at the right time.  To analyse the skills gaps in your organisation, you need to ask the following questions:

1. What current and future skills do we need to achieve our goals?
2. Who’s got those skills, and where are they in the organisation?
3. Who’s not got those skills, and where are they?
4. What are the training and development gaps, and where
   are they?
5. Where are the areas of strength, and where do they
   lie?

As described in the article, this is such a critical area now because it’s vital to be able to keep the people
with the key skills we need, train and fill the gaps, and deal with underperformance clearly and
unambiguously.

We recommend the use of online tools such as 360 Degree Feedback and Performance Appraisal as a very effective and efficient way of measuring the skills gaps in your organisation.  Ensuring that the 360 Degree Feedback and Appraisal are aligned with the organisation’s capabilities, you should be able to easily measure and report on training needs at individual, group and organisation level.

This article describes the effect of bad appraiser skills combined with poor 360 Degree Feedback design.

One of the key messages for using 360 correctly is that statements such as
“You’re not liked in this organisation”are not useful or practical kinds  of feedback! 

Also, although the article talks about 360 Feedback, it appears that the pain described is coming from the appraising manager’s lack of skills in giving feedback,
not the 360 feedback itself, which should be a reflection of key consistent messages
coming from all the raters, not the opinion of just one person.

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. 

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.

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

This article describes a Face to Face 360 Degree Feedback process that she experienced with her best ever boss.

Face to face feedback like this can be a very effective tool for managers and teams
to use both at appraisal time and  regularly throughout the year.

Of course, the managers that need the feedback the most are the ones that are least likely to volunteer for it!

So while it’s good to give managers a choice, if you really want to give managers an
awareness of their blind-spots (and their strengths too), and you want to build a consistent level of skills in the manager group, the feedback needs to:

1. Be based on the same questions for each manager and each person giving the feedback
2. Have an element of anonymity so that the feedback from those reluctant to give face-to-face feedback, is also recorded.
3. Be reportable in a format that is easy to read and understand

 After all, even smart people need 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 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.