360 Feedback Blog

For an individual, receiving feedback from a number of different people and levels in the organisation is fairer than being subject to just one person’s judgement. 

Therefore 360 Degree Feedback: 

•  Provides a formal structure for the natural observation process
• Helps to ensure that everyone involved is being judged on the same criteria
• Encourages and supports open discussion between employees, their managers and their colleagues
• Identifies areas of strength, and areas for growth and development
• Increases self-awareness and insight
• Develops people’s observation and feedback skills
• Counterbalances pure results based performance – it helps with the discussion around what gets done, but also how it gets done
• Encourages a culture where giving and receiving feedback is the norm

Next time: when, and when not, to use 360 Degree Feedback

We have just heard that, together with our client Plan and other partner organisations, Track has been nominated as a finalist for the National Training Awards 2008.
Track provided its Empower 360 Degree Feedback tool to enable Plan managers around the world to assess their own management skills and obtain feedback from their colleagues, helping them to build on their strengths and understand their development needs. 
More information follows!

This month I thought I would go back to some basic information about 360 Degree Feedback, what it does, how it works, when to use it (and when not to!).  Here goes!

• 360 Degree Feedback, also known as multi-level or multi-source feedback, is a process whereby feedback on an individual’s behaviour and effectiveness is obtained, in a structured way, from a number of colleagues with whom that individual has worked, and with whom they have different working relationships.  The people providing feedback to an individual can include:
• direct reports (people who report directly to that person, still called ’subordinates’ in some organisations)
• peers (people at the same level in the organisation to the person receiving the feedback, or who have similar roles)
• managers (people to whom the individual reports, formally or otherwise, still referred to as a ‘boss’ in some organisations
• customers
• suppliers
• coaches/mentors

Feedback is provided on a consistent set of criteria through responding to a set of statements or questions, generally using a rating scale, for example:“Person displays this behaviour”

• Always
• Frequently
• Sometimes
• Never

There is also an opportunity to provide free-style comments and examples to support the ratings given. Normally, the individual also completes a Self-review which allows them to reflect on, and assess, their own performance by responding to the same statements or questions as the people giving them feedback. Statements or questions are normally related to key behaviours and skills which are valued in the organisation.   360 Degree Feedback is not an opinion survey – it should be based on observable behaviours and concrete examples and as such can be a valuable tool. However, ultimately it is still a subjective exercise and needs to be used accordingly.  It is not a psychometric test. 

Next in this series: The benefits of 360 Degree Feedback

In this article on Training Zone, David Cooper of Lumus sets out how 360 Degree Feedback can be used in different ways to help teams work together and perform better.  I would add:

1. Tailoring of the standard question sets is critical - I’m very much in agreement with that.
2. There are other team performance models that can be used to construct a feedback framework for teams; for example, leadership, team process, culture and relationships.
3. Finally, our TeamWorks survey is able to separate out the team leader’s scores from those of the rest of the team - this is important as an indication of how well the team leader’s perceptions are aligned with those of the rest of the team.

If you’ve been asked to give your colleague some 360 Degree Feedback, you may be wondering how to go about it.  Here are a couple of guidelines:

• Think carefully about what you’re saying and how you say it - your job is to give your colleague feedback that’s going to help them perform better.  Always ask yourself how you would feel if you got the rating or comment that you’re going to give your colleague.

• Give examples - it’s a lot easier to help your colleague change something specific and observed, than to act on a general comment.

• Don’t focus just on very recent events: think back to evidence throughout the whole period of the review

• Don’t focus just on negative events: give as much attention to positive actions and behaviours

• Watch the ‘halo/horns’ effect (thinking that because a person is great in some areas, they are great in all areas (halo) ; horns of course, relates to negative behaviours)

• Avoid stereotyping: don’t generalise about an individual because they appear to belong to a certain group or are in a particular department, or because they may appear to be similar to someone else you know.

For our complete Guide for the Reluctant 360 Feedback-Giver, please email me at jo.ayoubi@tracksurveys.co.uk; we’ll send one to you straight away.

And if you have any examples of great ways to give feedback (or terrible ones!), we’d love to hear from you.  We’ll put the best examples (anonymised, if you prefer) on our website and on this blog. 

In this article in the Times, Testing Doctors is No Magic Cure for Anything , the writer questions the wisdom of using 360 appraisal for doctors.

Box ticking is of itself not going to help root out incompetent or dodgy doctors, or any other professionals. And just because the 360 process is badly managed - and in my experience, the questions are often far too long and numerous - doesn’t mean that it is without value.

Of course there is always the possiblity of cranks or liers using the system for their own nefarious ends, but the point of well-run 360 is that you look at consistency and common themes running through the feedback, and you make sure that enough people have given feedback for it to represent a reasonable cross-section of respondents. 

Perhaps if there had been a formal structure for allowing patients with genuine complaints to give anonymous feedback, there might have been some hope for the many women who suffered at the hands of the dodgy gyneacologist who got moved from one NHS trust to another over a period of 15 years? (just one example..)

360 Degree Feedback, if done properly, can be a huge help for any professional to understand how they’re perceived by their colleagues and clients. Keep it simple, look for consistent messages, positive as well as negative, and yes, don’t just send someone on a refresher course after their feedback - agree a couple of real things that they can actually do differently in their job, help them to change and keep measuring their progress. 

A recent article in Harvard Business Review (July-August 2000/Nohria, Groysberg and Lee) on Employee Motivation identifies 4 basic emotional drives that motivate human beings. 

Here’s a summary of that article:

The key drives that motivate people are:

The drive to acquire: this includes status and reputation, as well as pay and benefits
The drive to bond: i.e. people derive satisfaction and motivation from forming relationships with other
The drive to comprehend, that is, to make sense of what’s happening around them and to learn
The drive to defend; this is about protecting ourselves and people or things we value against external threat

The authors’ research shows that that organisations which were able to meet one of the four drives showed an increase in employee motivation of 5%, but those that enhanced performance on all four drives effectively showed an increase of 21% in motivation (and by implication, engagement and therefore performance).

So what kinds of specific actions can organisations take to help employees fulfil those key emotional needs? Here are some examples from the article:

Acquire = rewards = clear differentiation between good, average and poor performance 
Bond = culture = building a culture that really promotes teamwork and openness
Comprehend = job design = designing job roles that are clear and meaningful
Defend = performance management and work allocation practices = making processes more transparent so people feel they are being treated fairly

How can we do more with our current skillsets and tools to increase motivation as described in this model?

Do you have any ideas to share about how we could increase motivation using this model?

How do you think this model will be affected by the current climate of uncertainty and change in the workplace?  

Powerful performance with Track’s Talent Management Toolkit

In this article, Why Do We Feel Better if the Wording is Changed?, the writer discusses ways of making 360 Degree Feedback more positive and acceptable to those receiving the feedback (and, I daresay, to those giving it).

I agree that small changes in wording can make a big difference to givers and receivers of 360 Feedback. Words are incredibly powerful and, as he/she has pointed out, can make us feel different on an emotional level, even if we know what the message is really saying.

At Track we’ve found that asking respondents to state

• Things you’d like your colleague to Start Doing
• Things you’d like your colleague to Stop Doing, and
• Things you’d like your colleague to Continue Doing

is a great way to help respondents to focus on specific behaviours, ensure they balance the negative with positive (Stop and Continue), and also provide signposts or suggestions for change (Start).

In her article Getting Along on a Diverse Team, Karen Nelson summarises an article in Harvard Business Review.  The article, in the July/August 2008 issue, looks at how 360 Degree Feedback can be a powerful tool for building trust among team members, identifying the fit between team members’ skills and styles, and increasing the team’s performance through better collaboration and communication.

In addition to Karen’s summary, the key points that stood out for me in the article, and the case study, were:

• The Team leader openly discussed the feedback that he himself had been given, with his team.  This created trust within the team and led to team members opening up and discussing what they themselves could do differently
• The Team leader also made some simple, but critical, changes in the way he managed the team (e.g. asking them to come directly to him to discuss budget issues).  By listening to the feedback and visibly changing his behaviour based on that feedback, the Team leader demostrated his willingness to learn and change, thus encouraging his team to do the same.
• Because potentially difficult discussions had begun to open up, members also began talking directly to one another, and to look at how they could increase performance proactively.

Track’s Team Works is a tool that’s been specially developed to allow Team leaders and their teams to gather feedback and to review their own performance as a team, giving them a powerful tool for discussion and action planning.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
Charles Darwin

Reading this set me thinking about people and organisations, as it applies equally to both.

Individuals who have a degree of self-awareness, and who are willing to change what they do, will be able to adapt better to the constant changes that the workplace demands.

And in changing and uncertain times, organisations who are quick to grasp the changes they need to make to succeed, and who put those changes in place, are likely to do better than organisations who fear change and try to avoid the inevitable.

Links:
Human capital measurement
Performance management
360 Degree Feedback
Skills assessment