Before implementing any 360 degree feedback initiative in your organisation, stop for a second, look around, and ask yourself and your colleagues … “why are we doing this?”. There are very good reasons to use 360 feedback, you just need to be clear about them.
Why the Whys are important
In the article The Evolution and Devolution of 360 Feedback (Bracken et al., 2016 – highly recommended!), the authors present a summary of what they consider is going well with 360 feedback and what could be done better. The first point in their ‘what-is-wrong’ list is “Skipping the purpose discussion”. We couldn’t agree more!
Having a clear purpose will help you get the most out of your 360 feedback initiatives, while also avoiding the following possible problems:
- Misusing the 360 tool
- Getting your communications wrong and confusing or concerning people
- Raising false expectations
- Disengaging participants and their reviewers
Let's have a look at some of the very common reasons Why
Individual assessment and development
These are probably the most common reasons. One would expect both to go together, but sometimes the objective is just to gain some insights about the person for decision making purposes and sometimes only to help to define personal development actions or plans. Regardless of using 360 feedback for single or combined individual purposes, there are key things that need to be considered:
- Delivering feedback on results: 360 feedback reports are always open to interpretation and shouldn’t be handed to people without a feedback session. It is not just about helping people navigate their reports and opening the conversation to meaningful insights, it’s also about using the tool responsibly and minimising the risk of misinterpretation.
- Combining it with other tools: 360 feedback is a great tool, but it also has its limitations, and the quality of its outcomes can depend on many factors. Thus, it is key that neither decisions nor development actions are based solely on it. 360 outcomes always need to be used in combination with other data points.
Improving your understanding of your talent landscape
Whilst some organisations stop at the individual level, others go further and combine individual data to understand collective strengths and development areas. Furthermore, when data is processed and displayed in dashboards, it allows us to understand group differences, for example, by cutting data by job function or region.
Combining collective 360 outcomes with other data points, like other kinds of assessments or performance data, will allow you to get a proper sense of what ‘talent’ looks like in your organisation. This can also help us define Organisational Development (OD) plans and actions; working on organisational areas of improvement while also capitalising on collective strengths.
Driving organisational change
Aside from individual level interventions, 360 feedback can also be used to drive organisational change initiatives. For example, 360 feedback can be used to communicate aspirations about culture change to the leadership team and then used to evaluate and develop leaders toward those strategically aligned goals.
360s can also be used for team- or department-level interventions, particularly when assessing teams rather than individuals. They can be applied in various settings, from supporting the formation of new teams to aiding the development of virtual teams or enhancing senior leadership teams.
Assessing the impact of your OD initiatives
Researchers in this field recommend a thorough evaluation of all organisational development or change initiatives, ideally one that compares pre and post. However, this isn’t easy to do in reality. 360 is often overlooked as a useful evaluation tool in these contexts. Using time comparison reports, you can easily track the impact of your OD or training initiatives.
Final words
As you can see, multiple 360 purposes can coexist and bring multiple benefits at different levels. Clarity on the Whys will help you start out on the right foot and will point you in the right direction to achieve the organisational goals you are aiming for.
Author: Sebastian Teijeiro
Note: I wrote this article with my former colleague Alanna Harrington while working at Talogy.
