360 Feedback Blog

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.

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.

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.

Continuing on the theme of what makes a Boss great or really bad, this is a post by Robert Sutton at HBR, talking about how self-delusion, heedlessness to subordinates and being insulated from reality can make a Boss really terrible.  He calls it ‘Living in a Fool’s Paradise’. 

I remember working for someone many years ago who would aske us for our opinions and then either dismissed those opinions instantly (’no, we’re not going to do that’), or nodded and then did nothing. 

He ignored feedback on key areas such as customer responses, the changing market and how employees were feeling.   I used to dread talking to him and eventually I dreaded going into work. 

Consequently good employees didn’t hang around long and the business closed down, having lagged behind its competitors both commercially and operationally. 

My best boss, on the other hand, made me feel that my contributions were valuable, listened to me, allowed me to make some mistakes, and most importantly, backed me up when I did make a mistake.  I always knew I was supported.  She wasn’t perfect, but she made a huge difference to my professional confidence.

If you’ve got examples of great and terrible bosses, we’d love to hear about them.

360 Degree Feedback

This blog by Robert Sutton describes the mindset of a great boss. 

What stuck me was No 1 on the list: “I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it’s like to work for me”.  What Robert Sutton is saying is that, as a great boss, you will already know that your view of yourself and your skills is not accurate.

The next step is then getting some evidence that gives you a better picture of how your colleagues rate you, especially the people who work for you.  The best evidence-based tool for doing this is 360 Degree Feedback, as it allows your colleagues to give structured feedback anonymously and honestly.  Because it’s structured, it means you’re getting feedback on the same things, so you can compare the feedback from different people and compare like with like.

At the same time, you can also get examples that people provide in free text, which will help to put the scores into context and give you specific advice on what you can do better. 

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!

In this short video clip from BBC Radio 4’s The Bottom Line, Helen Alexander, President of the CBI, explains that getting great people working in your organisation is critical to your success as a leader or senior partner.

To make sure that you do have those great people, and that they are continually improving and growing, it’s important to regularly assess and measure their skills through 360 Degree Feedback - especially in those skills that are important at senior levels: Leadership, Strategy, Communication and People Development.

This is a great list for effective Objective-Setting.

A key part of objective setting is to ensure that people have the right skills to be able to achieve their objectives - 360 Degree Feedback is a great way to do this.

This is a great blog from the ever-refreshing Peter Honey in People Management yesterday.  It’s about the recent claim that every school needs an incompetent teacher so that kids can learn how to deal with incompetence in the future.

If you take Peter’s path to its logical conclustion, we would also need a certain level of incompetence in the workplace to give people new and useful learning experiences in how to deal with incompetent managers and colleagues.  This would then require us to assess for Incompetence in the annual appraisal, ensure that new recruits had a certain level of Incompetence and inlcude Incompetence in leadership and senior manager development programmes!  

I like this reverse thinking so much, I’m even thinking of developing a Incompetency 360 Degree Feedback - any ideas of what you might like to include?!