The Personal 360-Degree Survey: A Simple Tool for Seeing Yourself as Others See You
If you gave the people who know you best a chance to provide anonymous feedback, what would they say?
About once every three years, Human Resources gives my colleagues a chance to provide anonymous feedback on everything from my attitude to my actions. Responses to these “360-degree surveys” go into a report designed to help me see myself from other perspectives.
As part of an ongoing self-improvement program, I decided to conduct a personal 360-degree survey. I developed an online questionnaire, sent it to a small selection of friends and family, and learned a lot about myself from their responses.
Ready to see yourself as others see you? Then here’s how you can create a personal 360-degree survey of your very own.
Creating the Survey
Create an account at SurveyMonkey.com.
SurveyMonkey.com makes creating online surveys quick and easy. If your survey has ten questions or fewer and is going to fewer than 100 people, it’s free.
The SurveyMonkey free account limitations work in your favor, forcing you to think about what you really want to know (and preventing you from wearing people out with more questions than they have time or interest in answering).
Come up with the questions.
First, I came up with open-ended questions, like these:
- What’s something Mark does very well (or better than most people?)
- What’s something Mark needs to improve or change?
- If you could give Mark anonymous advice concerning any area of his life, what would that advice be?
Because of work I’ve been doing on a personal strategic plan for the year, I also have special interest in the themes of integrity and compassion. To make answering the poll as quick and easy as possible, I gave questions like “How honest is Mark?” multiple choice answers: (such as, “Very honest, mostly honest, I don’t know, mostly dishonest, very dishonest”). But because I wanted taking the survey to be a little more fun than a marketing poll about dish detergent preferences, I gave my multiple-choice answers a little attitude:
- Mark always, always tells the truth, perhaps to the point of being blunt.
- Mark softens the truth with tact or choose careful phrasing.
- I’m not sure whether Mark is honest or not.
- Mark sometimes tells little white lies or distorts the truth.
- Mark is a dirty, filthy liar.
Choose the recipients.
Resist the temptation to send the survey to everyone in your address book. While the survey should go to people who know you well enough to respond with honesty and insight, you also have to remember that your life is far less interesting to other people than it is to you.
I decided to send the survey to the twenty people who spend the most time with me, know me best, or embody qualities I admire. My list included five family members, three co-workers, two former mentors, and ten good friends.
Send out the survey.
I wanted the invitation to come directly from me — not from SurveyMonkey. So I wrote a short note explaining what I was doing, assuring recipients that their answers were totally anonymous, and asking if they would take just five minutes to help me.
At the end of that five-sentence email, I included a link to the SurveyMonkey form.
Getting Results
Get notified.
When people answer your survey, SurveyMonkey will send you an email notification— the following day! That’s fine, but I wanted to know the minute a survey was completed (without having to obsessively check the SurveyMokey app for updates).
So I want over to IFTTT.com (a site that lets you create recipes that trigger one event when another event happens — you know, “If this happens, then do that”), connected my SurveyMonkey account and my email account, and created a simple recipe: “If someone completes my SurveyMonkey survey, send me an email.”
It worked like a charm. My first response came in fifteen minutes. Most came within 48 hours. The last one came two weeks after I’d sent out the survey.
Don’t expect 100% participation.
Ten of the twenty people I contacted completed a survey.
At first, that disappointed me, because I’d selected people I thought might really care enough to fill a survey out. But later, a friend who does surveys for a living said a 50% response rate was phenomenal.
I also found out that some email systems route any email contining a SurveyMonkey link to the junk mail folder. As a result, some of my carefully-seleted recipients never even saw my invitation, even though it came from my personal account.
To avoid having your request being overlooked, I recommend you send an initial email announcing your intentions, asking people to watch for an invitation arriving soon, and noting that their invitation may be sent to the junk mail folder. Then, send a second email contining a link to your survey to the survey in a seperate email.
Resist the urge to identify responders.
As soon as the first response came in, my first impulse was to wonder, “Now, who said that?”
As I read the open-ended feedback, I imagined hearing it in the voices of several different friends and family members. Ultimately, I realized that uncomfortable feedback was easier to dismiss when “heard” in certain voices. Since the whole point of this exercise is to hear feedback (and especially difficult feedback!), I stopped trying to associate any one response with any one responder.
And while it’s true that the survey responses are anonymous, SurveyMonkey captures the I.P. address of the responder’s computer and includes that address with each result. On one hand, this is a good thing, because if one person filled out your survey multiple times, you’d see one IP address (or a series of very similar IP addresses) associated with multiple surveys.
On the other hand, I.P. reporting does compromise the anonymity of the responders a bit. Just as an experiment (and, honestly, because I gave into temptation), I typed one of these I.P. address into a special search engine. I immediately regretted it, as the results pinpointed the city where the responder lived. I felt badly about this, so I stopped doing it.
Interpreting the Results
In the spirit of this exercise, you take whatever feedback comes your way. That said: I did come up with an approach to analyzing my feedback that might be useful to you, should you decide to create a survey of your own.
Start with the obvious.
SurveyMonkey’s free reporting and analysis tools automatically chart answers to multiple choice questions. At a glance, then, I could see my truthfulness and compassion scores were where I’d hoped they would be (and my dependability score was actually higher than I’d expected).
Look for themes.
Evaluating free-form comments can be trickier. SurveyMonkey offers paid plans that include analysis of text comments, but for small surveys, this would be overkill. You can do you own basic analysis by looking for themes.
Themes arise when several responders make very similar comments. For example, for the question, “What is one of my strengths?” I counted the times responders used certain key words, producing a chart like this:
- Communication/Writing/Speaking — 11 times
- Empathy — 10 times
- Intelligence — 5 times
- Efficiency/Organization — 2 times
- Humor — 1
- Truthfulness — 1
It’s nice to hear all of these things, but the multiple responses addressing communication and empathy tell me most of my associates see these as my strong suits. (Good thing I work in communications, I guess!)
Another theme arose in the question, “What anonymous advice would you offer me?” Three responders said — almost word for word — “Become actively involved in the Christian church again.” Another suggested I “spend more time alone in nature” and yet another said, “Go back to your meditation practice.”
The specifics of these suggestions — recommending one type of spiritual expression over the other — say more about the responders and their practices than anything else. But the fact that five out of ten responders made comments suggesting some kind of structured spiritual practice tells me this is something I should consider.
I also received a number of outlier comments: “one-offs,” or unique observations offered by only one person. All of these were worth considering (“You judge yourself too harshly,” for example), but I didn’t assign these the same weight I assigned to observations that grew into themes.
The Big Lessons
See yourself as others see you.
A short, personal 360-degree survey is a quick and easy way to see yourself from a radically different perspective. I learned a lot, and plan to send one out every five years or so going forward.
Keep an open mind.
There’s no point in completing an exercise like this one if you’re going to dismiss or deflect the feedback. Try every comment on for size and think about what you’ve done that might have prompted that perception.
Be less attached to your story.
Everyone has a story about you. Even you have a story about you, like “I should be more dependable,” or “I’m too blunt with people.” Survey feedback is a great way to explore the differences between your story and The Truth.
Condense feedback into something memorable and actionable.
After working with my own feedback a bit, I boiled down the themes into two sentences: “Mark is truthful but tactful, a skilled writer, a dependable friend, and excellent communicator. He tends to judge himself too harshly, though, and should consider the value of a more structured spiritual practice.”
Inspired to do a survey of your own? Please click the little heart to let me know you liked this article. Thanks!
