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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

The level of misuse, and misunderstanding around the use, of 360 Degree Feedback never fails to amaze me.  This article about the GoldmanSachs Appraisal process, describes how Goldmans has been using 360 Degree Feedback. Pretty much everything they did was totally wrong and worst possible practice…including:

•  Using 360 to rank people’s performance in appraisals
• Allowing raters to be chosen on a random basis, so people were chosen who would give only positive feedback
• Glowing self-assessments were taken into account as part of the appraisal (this is implied in the article)

And please ignore the advice of the article writer, which is…..if you want to ‘do well’ in a 360 appraisal, “cultivate lots of people who think you’re great”, and write a great self-appraisal!

To recap, 360 Degree Feedback can only be valid and useful where there is a balance of feedback givers, where the process is clear and fair, and where there is no direct (or sole) connection to pay or reward.   
 

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 explains how using a psychometric tool can help the individual to better understand and use the information they receive from their 360 Degree Feedback.

Although a psychometric tool is not essential for the 360 Degree Feedback process to be successful, it can be a useful addition to the individual’s ’self-awareness toolkit’.  The pyschometric tool functions as a guide to the individual’s ‘internal’ life, whilst the 360 feedback is a useful indicator of how that person is percieved by others.