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What’s the Big Deal About 360° Feedback?

1 April 2014

Allison attended a certification course in VOICES®, a 360° feedback instrument, and reflected on the importance of this kind of development experience for people who want to be more effective leaders.

Tags: allison read, leadership, management and supervision

Last week Allison Partners hosted a certification course in VOICES®, a 360° feedback instrument based on the Leadership Architect® Suite of 67 Competencies, 19 Career Stallers and Stoppers, and 7 Global Focus Areas identified as critical to success for leaders and managers across organizations. Developed by Lominger International, which joined with Korn/Ferry in 2006, this is one of the more prevalent competency frameworks we encounter. We use a variety of 360° assessments at Allison Partners, but since one of our clients uses VOICES®, we wanted to give our team members and possible subcontractors an opportunity to learn about the instrument.

I received my first 360° feedback report when I was a team leader at Accenture in 1997. I was fairly new to a supervisory role and probably had a few more consultants reporting to me than I was quite ready to manage. My 360° feedback was an important part of my early development as a leader and helped me close that “readiness” gap. I do my best to continue to build on the things I was good at back then and I do everything I can today to make sure I’m still addressing some of the difficult feedback I received. (I like to think I’ve made a lot of improvements in 17 years, but I also know that some of our blind spots never really go away. Hopefully, they become more visible to us and we continue to learn how to address them.)

Now you may be wondering, “What’s 360° feedback?” Here’s the short answer. A 360° feedback process gathers information on a person’s work performance from a holistic point of view. Supervisors, peers or co-workers, employees (direct reports), and, sometimes, customers are asked to provide ratings and comments which are presented to the report owner in a comprehensive document. The benefit of collecting data of this kind is that the person gets to see a panorama of perceptions rather than just self-perception, which affords a more complete picture. Confidentiality is essential when establishing the use of this type of feedback in an organization so that the focus is on self-development rather than a traditional performance evaluation. This means that the only people who will see the feedback are the person being evaluated and the coach who delivers the feedback. Other than the supervisor rating, each reviewer group should consist of at least three reviewers to protect anonymity.

We learned from our instructor last week that an August 30, 2007 Business Week survey revealed that, “Among a sample of 2,000 U.S. managers and executives, 90% believe they are in the top 10% of performers. This simple but profound result illustrates both a fundamental truth and the reason why 360° feedback is so beneficial for increasing self-awareness – we are innately poor at perceiving ourselves. Misperceptions can err in either direction. Sometimes we are unaware of strengths that others perceive in us. Of more concern are the blind spots in our awareness that keep us from seeing the flaws and weaknesses that others perceive.” (Learning about my blind spots in 1997 was certainly the most important part of the experience for me.)

People will often call us and ask if we can administer a 360° process as part of someone’s performance review and our answer is always, “No.” It’s certainly appropriate for a supervisor or a Board of Directors to solicit feedback from a variety of people in the organization as a part of a leader’s traditional performance evaluation. However, the true anonymity and confidentiality of a 360° assessment is only achieved if the person being reviewed is the only person in the organization who sees the report. We encourage the person being reviewed to share his or her feedback with others in the organization in summary format, but the full detail of the report should be kept private.

Since 1997, I’ve received a few other 360° instruments and I’ve helped hundreds of people interpret their own feedback. I’ve researched many of the assessments on the market and even went through a few years at Allison Partners where we customized our own tool because our clients had unique needs that weren’t met by some of the standardized tools available at the time.

Now I’m looking forward to introducing my clients to VOICES®. There’s a lot about the user interface that I like including the fact that I think it's much easier for reviewers to use than some of the other tools on the market. I’m especially excited about the option to customize the assessment for each client. While it's possible to include questions for all 67 Competencies, 19 Career Stallers and Stoppers, and 7 Global Focus Areas, my experience has been that my clients would prefer to narrow that list down to the items that are most important for their organizations. VOICES® provides that flexibility at a reasonable price point.

Additionally, VOICES® has a variety of resources to help people address the feedback they receive including:

• FYI: For Your Improvement (one of our seven all-time favorite books at Allison Partners and the topic of my blog post last week)
• Career Architect® Development Planner (an even deeper dive than FYI: For Your Improvement with all the goodness of FYI plus more research and in-depth performance improvement suggestions)
• Paths to Improvement: Navigating Your Way to Success (a short book with specific examples of 14 different ways to improve which is a lot more than the traditional “fixing weaknesses or augmenting strengths” approach to development)
• Development Tracker™ (a mini survey, administered six to nine months after 360° feedback to measure skill improvement, monitor individual development progress, or monitor the ROI on development initiatives)

I'm sending this blog post to the other coaches who attended training with me last week and will ask them to comment below with some of their most memorable 360° feedback experiences and takeaways from our class. Check back in a few days to see what they have to say and feel free to chime in with your own 360° stories. I've yet to meet anyone who didn't learn something in a 360° that forever changed his or her approach to leadership.

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