Feeback 360 and its many flavors

One of the most important concepts of Agile and Lean is continuous Improvement. It doesn’t matter how good we think we are, there is always room for improvement and to became better at what we do.

Retrospective meetings is one of the best tools for teams to understand what they can improve and define goals and actions to become better. Similarly, the best tool to help an individual to understand where he or she is going and what can be improved, in my opinion, is to receive feedback from other people.

Feedback 360º is a very famous tool used by many teams and companies. Sometimes it is used by managers to evaluate people and reward (or punish) them based on results. Sometimes, it is used just as a tool to help people understand how others view their work. I believe that the second approach is more effective.

Basically, the feedback 360º tool is where everybody gives feedback to everybody and for themselves and it comes in many different forms.

Let’s take a look at two of them:

Anonymous

Everybody gives feedback to everybody, but only the person receiving the feedback will read it. The result will not be available to the manager nor for the other team members.

This is how it works:

1. Arrange people in a circle.

2. Give each team member an empty envelope and ask them to write their names on it.

3. Provide blank white cards for everybody.

4. Everybody should give their envelopes to the person to their right (and receive another from the person on their left).

5. Now everybody writes on the card what the person named on the envelope can do to improve what he or she is doing well. After writing, put the card inside the envelope.

6. When everybody finishes writing, they pass the envelope to the person on their right again, and repeat the process until everybody gets the envelopes with their own names back.

7. Now, everybody goes home with their feedback and nobody else will know whats written there but themselves.

Face-to-face

This is one of my favorites approaches to feedback 360. It is more effective for teams that have been working for sometime together and are comfortable with the idea of receiving feedback from other team members in public.

This is how it works: invite your team members to a restaurant or a meeting room and sit everybody around the same table, or in a circle so that everybody can see everybody. Find a volunteer who wants to be the first to receive feedback from others. Now, the person on the left of the volunteer should give feedback to him/her out loud, speaking about the things that could be improved and also about everything that is praise-worthy. Repeat the process until everybody gives feedback and then change. Get another volunteer until everybody receives feeback from others.

What’s very important in this approach is to create a safe environment, where everybody’s goal should be to help others to improve, not blame or diminish others. I recommend the facilitator to set the stage, by talking a little bit about this, and also asking people not to justify their mistakes or explain things, but instead to listen and think. They don’t need to agree with everything that is said, but they can use it to improve or to change their behavior to be better perceived by others.

Follow Up

There are infinite combinations of this technique. Some teams like to make a 360º evaluation of competence. Others like to play cards (see Jurgen Appelo’s 360 Poker). Others like to use specialised software to help to collect the data and to generate visual results. No matter what you, do not neglect the fact that feedback is one of the best ways to understand how other people view each other’s work and behavior and also what we can do to always make it better.