360° Feedback

When I think about 360° evaluations I am reminded of a classic body image exercise where you are told to stand naked in front of a mirror and make an honest assessment of yourself. It’s a frightening task to say the least. However, once you open your eyes and take an honest look, you can relatively easily scrutinize your front and sides; it’s the rear that takes some work!

The same is true for work performance – yours or your employees’. There are aspects of it that you can readily identify as needing work and others parts that you know are working really well. However, with normal performance reviews, you rarely see a full picture: Your judgment is necessarily clouded by your perspective and biases. With a 360° evaluation you get others to fill in the “rear view” and help you see what you couldn’t quite picture before.

With 360° feedback you gather information from the main people working with, or affected by, the person being evaluated (as well as his or her managers.) This is then amalgamated it into one full and complete image. One person can have a limited and sometimes biased view, whereas many people should provide a more accurate and more complete picture.

Not only foes this create a clearer picture of areas of improvement, it also encourages teamwork. After all, there’s no point in someone "sucking up to the boss" if everyone else is going to point out arrogance, unhelpfulness, and political behavior!

However it’s at about this point in the explanation of 360° feedback that many managers gasp and raise the following types of objections:

"You want my staff to evaluate me? I don’t think so!”
"It'll weaken discipline and compromise respect for authority."
"It'll crystallize feelings that are better left vague and undefined.”
"It'll cause problems where none exist."
"The bureaucracy created by the process of each team member rating each other team member is far too time consuming for the amount of extra benefit we’d get over the usual appraisal method.”
"People will rate their friends high and take the opportunity to criticize others they don’t like or get along with.”

Is 360° Feedback Really For You?
Arguably, therefore, 360° feedback is not for the faint of heart. It takes a very confident management group to implement it – one that is clear about the value in hearing the good and the bad from a whole bunch of different perspectives. The whole point of 360° feedback is to get the topic of performance out in the open.

In traditional workplaces performance is discussed in private, once a year (if you’re lucky!), and is simply one person’s assessment of how another is doing. However, think about how rich a performance review could be if the results were based on information received from everyone a person interacts with!