Newsletter – What Are the Two Things You Need to Make 360 Feedback Successful?

We have seen a number of 360 reviews done incorrectly: questioning of the reviews that is confrontational, for example, or poor training and scrutiny of the reviewers, leading to useless or damaging results. How do you avoid these fates?

Two essentials: 1) make sure that the recipients gather the courage to receive the reviews in the correct spirit; and 2) utilize a variety of modalities in order to assure the most accurate results.

What Should You Do?

• Courage. Recognize that receiving 360 reviews takes courage. While such assessments can be useful, leaders may receive news that is hard to hear, vague or confusing. Be prepared.
• Use a variety of methods. We try to convince our clients to conduct 360 reviews with several different modalities. Ideally, we would start with confidential and anonymous written surveys. Some people can provide their thoughts more effectively this way and may also trust confidentiality more fully. After the written surveys, we then use either focus groups or individual interviews. Sometimes, your staff may feel more comfortable being honest if they are in a group. Others may feel safer with confidential individual sessions.
• Use an outside expert to review the results. We do not provide the raw data to our coaching clients. We tabulate the results and sanitize any individual comments in an attempt to keep the feedback anonymous and confidential. Feedback on specific behavior is useful; feedback that focuses on individual personality conflicts is not. We do our best to screen out any comments that appear to be an attempt to sabotage an individual leader or that is just employee griping without any useable information. Giving someone the unfiltered data can damage a leader and engender potential retaliation against the staff member who provided the feedback.