360 Feedback Blog

There’s a new film out that looks great - Horrible Bosses - where one boss in particular seems to thoroughly enjoy tormenting his employees!

The writer of the article explains how, when he’s running a training course for managers, he sometimes has to …”tell them frankly how they come across to their employees. It can be a real turning point: I’ve seen aggressive bosses, confronted by this information, decide to change their ways completely”.

360 Degree Feedback can be a critical tool for helping managers who are unaware of how their behaviour is seen by their employees and their colleagues.  360 Degree Feedback gives them an opportunity to get some honest feedback, and to act on that feedback and make some changes in what they do. 

The learning from 360 Degree Feedback can be substantially increased by providing a coach or mentor to a manager, who can help him/her understand the feedback and how they can use it to improve.

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

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. 

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 short video clip from BBC Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, Helen Alexander, President of the CBI, explains that getting great people working in your organisation is critical to your success as a leader or senior partner.

To make sure that you do have those great people, and that they are continually improving and growing, it’s important to regularly assess and measure their skills through 360 Degree Feedback - especially in those skills that are important at senior levels: Leadership, Strategy, Communication and People Development.

In this article, the brilliant Marshall Goldsmith talks about an exercise he conducts in providing Feedforward, as well as feedback, to people who are looking to change their behaviours and improve their leadership skills.

For me the critical points are that:

1. This is an important supplement to feedback, including 360 Degree Feedback - we always recommend that colleagues provide Feedforward in some way….How Mary can manage team meetings more effectively, Things I would like to see Mary start doing,  or What I would like to see Mary continue doing…

2. There is a more positive response because the Feedforward can feel less judgemental than feedback

3. It’s critical that people receiving feedback are able to listen and take it on board - more on this in another blog - but Marshall Goldsmith is big on saying ‘Thanks for your feedback’ and then keeping quiet!

Recent research published in this Science Daily article shows that the timing of expected feedback impacts individuals’ performance, and that the sooner you give someone feedback, the more effect it has on her or his performance.

So the message from this study appears to confirm what managers and supervisors have known for a long time - that you should give feedback immediately and often to influence someone’s behaviours.  By doing this as a matter of course, individuals will come to expect quick feedback and therefore perform better. 

But how does this affect 360 Degree Feedback, which is usually given once or twice a year, and therefore must necessarily suffer from the time lag between the activity and the feedback?

360 feedback should never be just a repetition of particular episodes or events that have already been discussed (or should have been discussed) when they happened.  We often find that when these events are put into a 360 feedback they can skew the discussion away from the key messages on strengths and development needs.

So what should happen if I give you immediate feedback, like this, right after a meeting:
“I was upset that you didn’t give me an update before the client meeting.  I felt that you left me out.  I would appreciate if you could update me in good time before the next meeting”.

So what if I’m completing a 360 Degree Feedback on this colleague six months later?

Do I repeat this in the 360 free text boxes, and do I score my colleague as ’Hardly ever keeps me informed on important issues’?   Or do I just forget about it?

My advice would be to leave this out of the 360 feedback if the action or behaviour has been dealt with and changed by that person by the time the 360 comes around. 

There is no point in bringing it up again and making it a problem if it has ceased to be one.  What would be great would be to say ’X has really made an effort to provide me with information before client meetings and I really appreciate this’. 

If X is still doing the same thing, then a reference to it should be made, something like: ‘X is aware that I feel I am not kept updated with information before client meetings’.  There is no value in repeating lots of detail that has already been discussed, although the main point still needs to be made.