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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!