What Does a Successful 360 Feedback Program Include?

To maximize your investment,  Beacon Leadership will help you implement a program that produces results.  Consider these important factors before executing a 360 degree assessment:

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Communication and Change Management

Preparing your population for the 360 feedback process is extremely important to ensure the feedback is accurate and acted upon. The goals of the program, the process, what the participant is accountable for — Beacon Leadership will help you  address these in a communication plan.
 

Development, Not appraisal

An organization should make sure that it is doing 360 degree feedback for the right reasons. It is strongly recommended to only use 360 feedback for developmental and not appraisal purposes. The two purposes are incompatible.

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All Questions Are Not Created Equal

Assessment questions should be clearly focused and specific around a particular set of skills, competencies, or behaviors that are trainable. And it’s crucial to measure behaviors that are relevant to the role and observable. Why waste everyone’s time asking a bunch of poorly worded, double-barreled questions that aren’t role-specific and under the control of the person to change?  Beacon Leadership will help you select the correct assessment or customize your assessment to meet your needs.

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Confidentiality and Anonymity

Imagine having a supervisor who is always demeaning and threatens to fire you when you challenge their ideas. Then you get an invitation to take a survey about your supervisor’s leadership skills. If you have little confidence your feedback will be confidential, then would you be honest? Probably not. This is one example of why anonymity and confidentiality are vital components of the 360 feedback process. Raters need to know that when they provide honest ratings — no matter how good or bad they may be — their job is not at stake. And, for the individual being rated, receiving negative feedback that is not accurate will focus development efforts on the wrong skills, effectively derailing the development process.  The TruScore 360 will protect the privacy of all of the raters, only the responses of the supervisor and self-rater are identifiable...even to the coach who will conduct the debrief.

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Reliable and Valid

In psychometrics, reliability is the overall consistency of a measure. A measure is said to have high reliability if it produces similar results under consistent conditions. Validity means the 360 feedback should measure what it was designed to measure. For an instrument to be valid, it needs to be compared to another measure.
 

In some cases, the other measure is internal performance within the organization. If there is consistently a high correlation between an assessment measure and the performance measures internally, then the instrument is valid. There are different types of validation, including face, content, and construct validity. 

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Norms

Comparing individual results with those in a similar role is a great way to see how competitive they are. Rather than relying completely on raw scores when analyzing feedback, a combination of norms and percentiles is often recommended.
 

Norms can be thought of as performance benchmarks to help interpret the results of the feedback more effectively. Viewing the feedback in the context of a larger population of managers or leaders is essential for a full understanding of the data.

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Coaching, Mentoring, and Training

Let’s face it, having a bunch of people share what they think of you and your leadership skills is intimidating enough. But to go through the results without any interpretation guidance can be extremely overwhelming and may trigger negative emotional responses. This, in turn, can derail the entire process.
 

A Beacon Leadership ICF Certified Coach can help defuse those emotional responses, putting the feedback in the context of their role and environment. The coach can also be a competent sounding board to help organize key priorities and brainstorm next steps to navigate the challenges the individual is facing. 

 

Ultimately, this leads the individual down the road of behavioral improvement. The bottom line is that 360 degree feedback without some form of coaching or training is seldom, if ever, successful.

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Development or Action Plan

Accountability! Beacon Leadership will help participants build an action plan that can be shared with direct managers.  This is where the rubber meets the road. What knowledge has the individual being rated taken away from this process and what are they going to do with it? Without this important step, there’s no accountability, no personal commitment, no teeth.  After all, 360 degree feedback is a development tool but it's only effective if a plan is created and acted on based on the feedback received.

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Reassessment

An individual’s first time through 360 feedback can provide invaluable insights into their strengths and weaknesses. But the real fun (yes, you read that correctly) comes with tracking your year-over-year progress. So, consider that first assessment a solid baseline.
 

However, comparing scores over time, knowing that continuous improvement requires ongoing measurement, gives the participants the knowledge to adjust their development plan on a regular basis.