7 Ways to make your 360 degree feedback work

360 degree feedback when done right could prove to be the rocket launcher which gives the right trajectory to put one’s career in the highest orbit. Ahem, your mileage and results may vary. Over the years, I’ve been part of lot of 360 degree feedbacks — some of them totally useless and others which helped me tremendously to become a better professional.

There were few common factors in all the good 360 degree programs. All of them followed the best principles and helped individuals get lot of insightful feedback without creating any animosity or rift between the team members.

Involve the right people
All the 360 degree feedback involve people. Of course, Dah! But, it’s the right people that matter. It’s alright to have a very small pool of reviewers but the feedback must be asked by a group of people who work extremely closely with the person being reviewed. If they haven’t worked closely together for months then there is hardly any point of asking for feedback as their observations would be prone to bias — positive or negative. Also, it is a good idea to not involve their really good work friends in the mix. They tend of lose objectivity when giving feedback and one ends up getting a skewed picture of their personality, which is mainly positive.

Define Competencies to evaluate
Some of the online 360 degree tools only have an ability to ask the same set of questions to everyone in the organization. This IMHO isn’t the right way to get good quality feedback about your team members. One must define the right competencies that do justice to their work profile. The relevant questions should then be derived from their core competencies. For example, among many other competencies, a sales executive must be given feedback on their ability to sell and a programmer must be given feedback on their technical chops.

Ask the right questions
One can’t get away with losey-gosey one-question-template-to-rule-them-all kind of feedback for the diverse group. One needs to ask the right questions, which are relevant to their core competency. Otherwise, how would we ever get to know about their performance in the respective area and develop it? The idea is to compare an organization’s performance benchmark and compare it with the feedback we get from their peers. Thus, for example, a leadership competence must have all the relevant leadership related questions and be only asked to people who have that kind of a role within the organization. The programming competence must have all the relevant programming related questions and must be asked only to programmers.

Encourage people to give context behind the ratings
What would one do with a 4 or 5 star rating if the context hasn’t been shared? The numbers or stars tend to be somewhat meaningless without the context. How would one know what they did right to get a high rating? Or, to that matter the reasoning behind the low rating? Shouldn’t the idea be to have one build on their good behavior and minimize the not-so-optimal ones? This way they can realize the factual reasons behind their positive or negative rating. Our online degree feedback system, FeedbackSocially, facilitates one to give the star rating and the context behind it.

Discuss the feedback in person
Once the feedback cycle has been completed, the immediate manager needs to sit down and analyze the ratings deeply. It gives both of them the chance to reflect on the positive and the improvement areas and chalk out a well defined plan. One thing that I’ve seen work really well is when managers share the ratings and its related comments they gave in the feedback process. This builds the trust and helps the team member know where they stand in the eyes of their immediate manager. It also gives manager one more chance to share their feedback objectively. All in all this transparent exercise helps create a solid roadmap for development.

Put a development plan
Getting a 360 degree without putting a development plan is like having a cone without an ice-cream.It’’s incomplete. It loses its relevance. The whole idea of a 360 degree feedback is to get holistic feedback, internalize it and put a development plan in place. IMHO, the 360 degree feedback is completely useless without the right development plan. The development plan must build on one’s strengths and try to minimize the irritants that are turning out to be impediments in growing further. One could pick up a goal per competency and put a development plan in place to get even better. The goal could also describe a reading and/or training before one actually starts walking down the path of becoming proficient in the desired competency.

Have 1:1s to gauge progress
It doesn’t stop at setting the development plan. It needs to be monitored. It needs to be discussed. One of the agenda items in the 1:1s should really be discussing what’s going great or could be going better in working through the development plan. If this doesn’t happen then the plan would just gather dust. Thus, it’s the responsibility of both the manager and the team member to keep an eye on the progress of the development plan and making sure that it’s helping in the growth.

Following these simple 7 steps would make sure that all the employees get an unbiased and high quality objective feedback which aids in their professional development.