360 Feedback Blog

Posted on Training Zone today 28 September 2009.

This article in today’s Guardian appears to show evidence that people work better in teams.

However, in an article in Harvard Business Review called ‘Why Teams Don’t Work, the authors debunk the myth that teams are the answer to every performance issue, and that teams always perform better than individuals working on their own.  They question the whole idea of ‘team dynamic’ as an absolute, consistently positive force.

Common misconceptions about teams include:

Teams that work harmoniously together are better and more productive than teams that don’t: there is more evidence that teams who are more productive, and are recognised as a team for it,  get on better together because of their good performance, not the other way around.

Teams work better because the work is shared out, and the bigger the team, the more effective: unfortunately this is cancelled out by the difficulty of keeping the right people informed as the team gets bigger, so big teams are not necessarily a good idea.

Teams should be renewed constantly to encourage creativity: again, this is not proven by evidence. In fact the more productive teams were those who had been together for a number of years and understood each other deeply.  Many teams are never given enough time to settle in and learn to work together.

In a research paper called ‘The Romance of Teams’, (Allen and Hecht, 2004), the authors conclude that the reasons people like working in teams are mainly because of the social interaction, because

1. team members feel good being part of a successful team
2. people also feel somewhat ’sheltered’ in a team, and
3. they can blame someone else on the team if something goes wrong!

To ask a question or share ideas about team performance and how you can measure it, go to
http://tracksurveys.co.uk/AskTrack.aspx

 For more information, articles and resources on teams and team performance measurement, contact me on jo.ayoubi@tracksurveys.co.uk
or go to:
www.tracksurveys.co.uk , scroll down and click on Team Performance Dynamics in the right hand panel.

In this blog, you can find my thoughts on an article by a leading coach on how 360 Degree Feedback should be made more effective.

In this interview with the CEO of a high tech corporation in the states, she makes a number of interesting observations about her development as a leader.  In summary, the key messages are:

- She has learned not to try to do everything herself
- She listened to feedback and learned to modify the way she dealt with certain issues
- She realised from her 360 reviews that sometimes you don’t realise the messages you’re giving to people in the organisation and that those messages might not be what you intended.
-Sometimes strengths can be overdone and become weaknesses, so she has learned to be aware of that and act accordingly.

Follow the discussion here and on UK Training Zone.

In this great blog, Deus Ex Macchiato tells us that we’re wasting our time appraising, feeding back or even trying to work out who does a great job in an organisation.   Here’s my response:

Loved your blog about HRbots and was intrigued that you assumed Catbert (my favourite Dilbert character) was female…I always thought Catbert was a boy…!

But moving on to your specific points:

1. Appraisals and 360 Degree Feedback: these are systems that provide some consistency over how people’s performance and activities are measured and rated .  The results of their work need to be checked from time to time, as does their capability of working with others, customers, etc. 

And without some kind of consistency (and feedback from multiple sources), how can you, indeed, overcome individual managers’ prejudices…?

A good appraisal or 360 Degree Feedback should be very clearly linked to the individual’s job performance…

2. I disagree entirely with your second point: people tend to behave and respond in fairly consistent ways over time.   I have never seen someone who sits around suddenly become a start performer - it just doesn’t happen.  They sit around because of a combination of personality, motivation and skills.  You can’t change the first two, only the last one, and only if you know what skills are required…thus measurement is important.

3. I tend to agree with your point about ’star’ performers. Have to say though, aside from the stars, a company still needs everyone else performing at their best. Not sure average is something we should be aiming for…!

And finally, if not meritocracy, then what?

Thanks for giving me something to get my thinking going on a Friday afternoon!

Jo
jo.ayoubi@tracksurveys.co.uk
www.tracksurveys.co.uk

On my Training Zone blog I talk about the reasons why 360 Degree Feedback is an ideal tool to support feedback, irrespective of individual styles or preferences.

In this article in Training Zone the author discusses the way technology is changing the way individuals learn, develop and manage their careers.

Individual learning and development does indeed translate into ubiquitous performance support, and e-learning and other online forms of learning are brilliant for doing this.

Whilst the individual is certainly responsible for building their personal brand and their skill set, organisations that employ individuals need (now more than ever) to link the performance support they provide to the skills and performance that the organisation needs to succeed.

For the organisation to provide the right performance support, it needs to:

1. Identify the critical skills the organisation needs in order to achieve its strategic goals
2. Identify who the key people are who are going to deliver those goals - These are not necessarily the top
teams - a study by a global courier company found that the key people for them were their delivery drivers
3. Measure the strengths of those critical skills in the key people or group
4. Concentrate on filling the critical skills or competence gaps in the key groups (using both development activities and on the job experience)
5. Consistently and regularly measure the results and refine the training and refine development activities based on those results.

For more information on online tools and support for talent management, visit
www.tracksurveys.co.uk

In this interesting blog, the author asks some fundamental questions about the soundness of 360 Degree Feedback, whether people are honest when giving 360 Feedback, and how to deal with potential manipulation of the results by mutual back-scratching.

Here’s my response:

These are great questions, and ones our clients often ask us. 

As a starting point, your questions assume that 360 Degree Feedback:
- is given face to face
- consists of unstructured comments
made by colleages
- shows who has made what comments
- and that there is no guidance or control over the process.

However, key attributes of successful and properly run 360 Degree Feedback are:

- It is completed in confidence,securely and online by the person giving the feedback. The individual also self assesses and gets to compare this with feedback received
- The person receiving the feedback is scored on a set of consistent criteria - the scores are collated to give a picture of their areas of strength and weaknesses, not to show scores from individual colleagues
- Comments can also be included, but these are anonymous (although they
can be identified if they relate to a specific situtation)
- Is carefully communicated and managed, not left up to people to use (or misuse) in an unstructured way.

So in answer to your questions, and assuming that your 360 is set up and managed
correctly, as I’ve outlined:

1. Yes, the scores should be an honest reflection because they cannot be traced back to the feedback-giver.

2. The subordinate will not be the only person giving their boss feedback, and the
feedback will be grouped with that of other people, so their generosity (or lack of it)will not be identified!

3. By obtaining feedback from all levels (not just friends, but also senior colleagues, team workers and the people who report to you - hence 360 Degrees), the manipulation of the system in the way you have described cannot work. 
And if it does get past  the monitoring system, a feedbackreport that only includes friends’ feedback would be instantly recognisable as invalid and could not be used for any purpose. (In any event 360 should never be used as the sole contributor to the annual salary review).

4. As an HR manager you should be in the forefront of using feedback to improve your performance and get better at your job.  Again, if you only receive low scores from one client, and the rest are high, there may be a relatoinship issue with that client (rather
than a performance issue) which you need to address. Thus the 360 can pick up other issues that need to be dealt with.

5. Other methods include: face to face feedback on a day to day basis
(’how am I doing?’ ‘what can I do better?’), clear, goals and targets, scorecards,
team meetings…

For documents on giving great feedback, things to avoid when giving feedback, and helpingpeople through difficult feedback, go to
www.tracksurveys.co.uk and download.

We’ve just set up Ask Track - a great online site that allows you to ask and share questions about 360 Degree Feedback, Appraisal and Performance management. Our expert team will email you the answer to your question, and publish the question and answer online (without publishing your name or organisation details).  You’ll also be able to view questions that other people have asked, together with our answers.

You can even give us your answers if you think they’re better than ours!  Just go to: Ask Track and type in your question.

People Management 14 August 09

I don’t know about you out there, but I would love to understand exactly what these guys are going to learn, watching theatre people do things that really don’t relate to the banking environment whatsoever. Ok so the general concept of risk is the same, but surely the context
is completely different?

Without a strong awareness of their own behaviours and responses, and their effect on the people around them, in the context of the work they actually do, I really can’t see how this programme is going to achieve any real results or changed  behaviours for the participants.  I also wonder how the results are going to be measured?

It is ‘hoped’ that they will learn to ‘pick up’ on ways of giving feedback…..I should think this is the minimum requirement! Call me old-fashioned, but that doesn’t sound like a solid learning objective to me.

There’s a great quote from John Adair that comes to mind in the context of this article: ““You learn by doing and experience, and by developing an awareness and understanding. It’s simple but not easy”. Here’s the linking article.