360 Feedback Blog

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.

Marshall Goldsmith, who’s a fantastic writer on coaching and personal and professional development, talks in this article about how we define ourselves and how we can change our behaviours and skills by defining ourselves positively - he says that it’s just as bad to stereotype yourself negatively as it is to stereotype others.

 While I agree with this, I would add a couple of key things:

1. Whilst we should, of course, focus on our strengths and not our weaknesses, it’s important to get 360 Degree Feedback from others too. We don’t always see our own behaviours the way others see them, and we don’t always understand the effect we can have on the people around us.  We all have a ‘blind spot’ and it’s important not to forget about that.

2. What Marshall doesn’t mention is the importance of the will to change: even if you are clear and honest about your skills and behaviours, you can only change these if you really want to change them.  So if you keep going back to the same behaviours, or if you’re a coach with a client who isn’t improving, then you need to go back to the basic question: “do I (or does my client) really want to change?”

This is a great article summarising 10 Strategies for focusing on What’s Strong, rather than What’s Wrong, in counselling and therapy.

The Strategies could equally apply to making your 360 Degree Feedback, and the coaching and development that support it, positive and empowering for managers and employees.

You can do this by:

• Defining what great performance looks like, and building your 360 Degree Feedback around the actions that indicate great performance
• Focusing only on less strong behaviours if those behaviours are critical for the individual in doing their job and achieving their objectives.
• Discussing with individuals how they can practically put their strengths to best effect when doing their job
• Using strength based questions to solve problems, such as ‘How can you use this area of strength to bring about the results you want’?

Looking for some tips on how to give your Boss feedback without getting fired?
Here are some thoughts, including how 360 Degree Feedback can help.

In this article, the writer gives an example of an executive who was able to understand the negative 360 Degree Feedback he received through discussing his values with the 360 Coach.

“During a coaching session a derailed executive said: “I want my kids to be proud of me.” After reporting any negative behavior I would ask, “Would your kids be proud of you if they knew you were doing this?” When the answer was “no” he thought twice about acting in a negative manner. The result was a decrease in those actions that were derailing his career”.

It’s really important to discuss your 360 Degree Feedback with someone you trust, whether it’s your manager, coach, mentor, or just a good friend.  Talking to someone else about the positive and the negative feedback can help you get perspective and much more value from the feedback.

A survey just out talks about how 5000 employees described the management style of the people they work for.

“The survey found that the three most common leadership styles in the UK were authoritarian (according to 21%), bureaucratic (16%) or secretive (12.5%) - which sounds more Politburo than progressive. Only 10% described their bosses as accessible, and just 7% as empowering”.

This leaves me wanting to know more:

What management style did employees think was the most effective?  Surely the best management style is the one that’s right for the particular situation you’re trying to resolve.

And I’d love to know what how the managers and leaders of these employees see their own management style, and what scores they would get in a 360 Degree Feedback!  You can bet your life they wouldn’t say they were authoritarian, beaurocratic or secretive…they’d say they were assertive, organised and discreet!

In this article John Herlihey of Google explains the company’s view of the importance of performance reviews and 360 Degree Feedback:

“We measure people every 90 days. We get 360-degree feedback on people every 180 days and that feedback is published to the whole company. People want reality. Ninety per cent of the rewards end up going to 10pc of the people”.

3 monthly reviews and 6 monthly 360 Feedback is certainly tough and takes a lot of effort and commitment from the company the staff. 

Critically, What it does do is keep people really focused on what the key things they need to do, on what they learn and how to put that learning into practice.

Google’s focus on constant review, feedback and action is probably one of the reasons for its success.

In this article in the New York Times, Vineet Nayar, chief executive HCL Technologies, talks about how his 360 Degree Feedback results are available for everyone in the company to see, all 50,000 of them!  And 3800 managers also get 360 Degree Feedback, and that’s published on the internal web.  He believes this is critical for building transparency, trust and reverse accountability in his organisation.

A word of warning and an illuminating discussion thread about bosses, employees and 360 Degree Feedback in today’s Guardian.

In this article from the Guardian, the writer recommends trying understand colleagues’ motives as a way to better working relationships.

Here’s my response:  It is all about perception, which is why it’s so hard to have these conversations, and why it’s so important to try to see oursleves the way others see us. If you’ve got a really damaged relationship already, it is difficult to sort out, but there are a lot of things you can do on a day to day basis to keep your working relationships good.

Ask for feedback, ask for it often, and make it specific. That way you, and your colleague, can think about real life examples and put it in the context of ‘in that situation, I would have preferred if you had done X’, rather than ‘you are such a control freak, I can’t bear to work with you another day’ (or words to that effect).

And if people are reluctant to give you face to face feedback (and there may be a good reason for that!), get some anonymous 360 Degree Feedback. There may be some useful messages in there!

Here’s a link through to an article about what happens when someone doesn’t want to hear the feedback they’re getting…which happens a lot too!

http://www.track360feedback.com/2009/10/07/changing-abrasive-behaviour-with-feedback/