Handbook of Strategic 360 Feedback summary

360 Feedback is especially valuable when managing the future of your talent pool.

One company decided to implement 360 Feedback to analyze the potential between two of its employees, Robert and Amanda. Based on the top-down appraisal, Robert had far more management potential than Amanda. He’d been around longer, always performed well, and was reliable. Amanda had a good rating, but she was newer and had not yet proven herself as a leader. In fact, her manager credited her with growth potential, but didn’t see any future for her as a leader.

Because 360 Feedback can be very time-consuming, you want to make sure not to fatigue your raters. To prevent this, be very purposeful in how and why you’re using feedback for leadership development.

360 Feedback is most useful for leadership development in three specific situations.

Back in 2011, Whirlpool began experiencing reduced profit margins and falling stock prices as a result of international competition. In response, they realized they needed to create a high-performing team of executives who could become a powerful force for change and innovation.

To create this team, they implemented a 360 Feedback process that evaluated the individuals on the team as well as overall team performance. What they found was that the group wasn’t acting as a team. Individuals performed their functions independently of the overall goal. Problems that could be solved within the team were taken to the leader, slowing down that leader’s ability to move forward.

360 Feedback can help you drive change in your organization.

Essentially, feedback at the organizational level is still feedback at the individual level. Rather than trying to change the culture to shape the individuals, you focus on the individuals to change the culture.

The flaw in any system is the human element. 360 Feedback makes use of data from people, or raters, working in different roles around the person or situation being analyzed.

Rater performance can make or break your 360 feedback process. If you start receiving flawed data or information that seems inflated or lacking in variance, the problem may be ambiguity. Your raters may not understand the rating scale. They may not see the purpose in or understand what you’re measuring.

Trust is essential for the success of any feedback system. When it comes to 360 Feedback, gender bias can erode data, and confidentiality breaches can do large-scale damage to your organization. 

First, let’s talk about bias. Unfortunately, there is no proven framework for using 360 Feedback in a way that eliminates gender bias, so it’s the job of leadership to regularly assess their programs for flaws that could lead to biased data.

One of the previously mentioned pitfalls of qualitative data like verbatim comments from the rater is that they could expose the rater’s identity. With modern Natural Language Processing, you can have quotes and comments analyzed in a way that allows you to get the value from the qualitative data while retaining your rater’s anonymity.

Another new tool is linkage analytics. This framework makes use of 360 Feedback data to link employee sentiments with actual results to predict things like employee turnover and internal conflicts so you can prevent those things from occurring.

 If your organization is growth-minded and has a culture of cooperation over competition, 360 Feedback can be a useful tool to integrate throughout your systems. It can help you manage talent and teams, develop leadership, and grow your organization. Be sure to watch for pitfalls like ambiguity, bias, and confidentiality problems. And make use of tools like natural language processing to help you get the most value out of your feedback data.