About 360 Degree Feedback

Stemming from the quality movement and allegedly first used in NASA (but it definitely is not rocket science!) 360 degree feedback has now become a well used and trusted means of providing people with on the job feedback.  Prior to the adoption of the 360 approach, most feedback was top down, incorporating the views of your manager (and if you were lucky their manager as well).   For a manager or leader this is neglecting some vitally important feedback (i.e. that of your colleagues and of the team that you manage).

360 degree feedback provides data from the perspective of your manager as well as your colleagues and from your team.  PSA Training and Development have taken this a stage further allowing other groups such as clients, suppliers or customers to also offer feedback to the subject.

360 degree feedback can be used as part of

• Formal development programme (see here for example) often at the outset to provide participants with a benchmark to base a personal development plan
• Individual self development to allow the subject to see most clearly how they are currently performing.

£60 degree feedback can also be harnessed "post development" to gauge how successful the development or training intervention has been.

 

So are all 360's the same?

Most emphatically no!  360 degree feedback does involve an inescapable element of subjectivity.  Rarely will there be a definitive scale against which the subject and other respondees can rate a persons performance.  Instead it requires judgements about how often, and how well, the responders perceive the subject of the 360 doing against various factors and questions.  How these questions are phrased and structured will be vital to the success of the instrument.  Questions which are vague, imprecise or require the responder to compare against an unknown standard can only provide vague, imprecise and very subjective results.  For example...

"This person manages their time well" - on the face of it a reasonable question to ask of a manager or leader.  However, what really constitutes "managing your time well?"  Ask ten people and you will get ten different answers; none of them wrong but each reflecting the personal viewpoint of the person answering.  Questions such as this within a 360 survey should be a cause for concern.  On the surface they seem viable and relevant it is only when the subject comes to act upon the resulting data do they realise the feedback (and the questionnaire as a whole) is flawed.   Another example...

"This person is confident in negotiations" - again a pretty reasonable question to ask.  However, unless I am actually the subject of the survey I can only guess how confident or not the person really is in negotiations.  My feedback can only be based upon my impressions of how confident they appear!  Immediately the value of the feedback provided has become highly subjective and hard for the subject of the feedback act upon

PSA have more than ten years experience of devising questions and surveys that are meaningful and that deliver constructive and actionable feedback as a result.
Before you invest in a 360 degree feedback system, check out how it stacks up against a tool produced by PSA.  We are more than happy for you to have a complete sample so that you can make a detailed comparison.