360 Feedback Blog

In this article, the writer thinks teams could give fun feedback to each other as a way of starting conversations and improving relationships.

Whilst we think it’s a fun idea, we think it would be even better if the team were able to give some written thoughts, in a structured way, about what it’s like to work in that team - not specifying any individuals, but how it feels, if it’s generally a positive experience, how the team deals with problems, conflicts and team members who don’t pull their weight.

An added dimension would be to include external feedback from the team’s colleagues and clients - it would be very useful for the team to understand how it’s viewed from the outside.

 Team Works from Track Surveys is a pre-designed 360 Degree Feedback that can be delivered online and customised for each team or organisation’s profile.

I agree completely with this article- no-one can be great at everything, and a great leader brings out the best in other people. A really great people leader also asks for
feedback and listens to that feedback when it’s given.  This is a link to an article about the CEO of HCL Technologies, who publishes his 360 Degree Feedback
on the company intranet for everyone to see.

In this article the writer talks about recent research into team working, and suggests that teams need to be more emotionally intelligent if they want to improve their performance.

Whilst I agree with this, I would also add that helping the team to understand its own strengths and weaknesses, getting those out into the open, and regularly reviewing team interactions, is critical.

The team leader needs to facilitate the analysis (we provide online team assessment and 360 Degree Feedback tools to do this), the discussions and the follow up.

As with individual performance, improving team performance has to start with an understanding and awareness of where we are right now.

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 by Scott Berkun talks about how to manage smart people.

Go to the UK Training Zone 360 Degree Feedback Discussion group for more on this.

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

If you’re having difficulty persuading teams that they need to regularly review their performance, get feebdack, and learn from their mistakes,  here’s a short video clip from the BBC’s The Bottom Line.  Robin Wight, president of The Engine Group communications agency, says that learning from our mistakes, and allowing people to learn from them, is the key to success.

In any team-related 360 Degree Feedback, performance review or activity, it’s really critical to include a section that measures how regularly and how well the team reviews and learns together.  Questions like “we give each other honest and constructive feedback”, “we spend time as a team reflecting on what we have learned” and “we are encouraged to learn from our mistakes” are a good start to the discussion.

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.

In this poll, reported in the US, 68%  of managers believe that looks have an impact on the way managers rate job perforamance.

If this survey is to be believed, Attractiveness comes only below Experience and Confidence in recruitment situations, and trumps Education and a sense of Humour - apparently known as the ‘Hottie’ effect!  The author advises those of us who are non-Hotties not to despair but to make the best of whatever assets we have…..

On a more serious note though, how can we overcome these biases which appear to be inbuilt in most of us and can make a big difference in how employees’ performance is judged?

The first answer is Awareness: once we’re aware of our biases, our assumptions and things like the Halo and Horns Effect, we can start to adjust our opinions of that person and inject some objectivity into our appraisal of their performance  (for more on Halo/Horns, go to 360 Degree Feedback and download our paper entitled What Not To Do When Giving Great Feedback ).

Second is judging people on what they have actually done, so setting SMART objectives is critical (Specific, Measurable, Action-based, Relevant and Timely).

Third is making sure that your own judgement is not the only one that counts….tools like 360 Degree Feedback are very important in ensuring that a number of different people have input into the appraisal, and that there is consistency in assessing performance, especially in hard to measure areas like management, leadership and team working.

We love this concise business case for measuring and managing performance: in this clip from Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, Jacqueline de Rojas,  UK and Ireland vice-president of software company, McAfee, talks about the importance of ‘Inspecting what you expect’ - setting performance goals and regularly measuring against them.  

360 Degree Feedback, Appraisal and Performance Review are just as important for teams as they are for individual employees.