360 Degree Feedback Systems

For a manager wishing to improve his or her management skills, and the trusted mentor who is trying to help that manager to improve, one of the most valuable monitoring tools is a well-presented report showing the collected views of all those who interact with the manager at work. This is the output from a 360 Degree Feedback system (Multi-source feedback, or 360 Degree Appraisal system).

You ask individuals to report anonymously on their experience of the manager under a range of management skills headings. If you have a corporate Competencies Framework, the questionnaire can be based on its management competencies and the associated behaviours.

Because people respond anonymously, they can be more honest with their answers to a 360 Degree Feedback system than they might feel able to be if asked face to face. We can present results as a summary of all responses but you get more by comparing the views of different groups. A popular approach is to report separately the views of

• Team members (employees reporting to the manager)
• Peers (colleagues with whom the manager interacts, but with no reporting relationship with the manager)
• Team leader (or Boss - the manager or managers of the team of which the manager is a member)
• Self (the manager himself or herself)

And sometimes

• Clients / customers

Bespoke or off-the-shelf; web or paper-based

Most often, we work with a client to develop and then operate for them a 360 Degree Feedback system which precisely meets the client's unique needs. Often, this is to provide a 360 Degree Feedback system which reflects the client's competences framework, providing managers with feedback about how their behaviours are perceived to match up to the behaviours which have been identified as characteristic of the competencies desired in their role.

For quick deployment and minimum cost, however, we offer two off-the-shelf 360 Degree Feedback systems you could launch tomorrow. We have one (Senior Manager) which is aimed at managers whose teams comprise people who themselves manage others, and another (Front Line Manager) intended for managers whose direct reports do not themselves manage others. The questionnaire and reports are illustrated here, and the process is explained here.

To get in touch, please refer to our contact details or use our inquiry page.

All our 360° Feedback systems can be administerd on the web, with email invitations, or as paper questionnaires. We can even use the web for some participants and paper for others if that is what your system needs.

Examples

Our output examples include one management feedback report based on a single source - the team reporting to the manager, and another from a 360° Feedback system with all the sources mentioned above. We can also produce a summary report showing the average "ratings" for a group of participants.

Absolute or Relative?

If the report shows the percentage of favourable responses for each item, and managers can compare their results with others', some people will find that they have performed less well than most of the others they discuss their results with. We think this is more likely to discourage than encourage effort to improve, especially if the manager's results are poor in all or most aspects of the report.

To avoid the danger of discouraging less able managers, or giving more able ones the idea that they need not make any effort to improve, we recommend presenting the 360° Feedback results not in absolute terms as described above, but relative to the participating manager's own average. For each manager's report we work out the average for this manager of all the topics in the questionnaire and then report how much better or worse was each topic compared to the manager's own average. This way, every participating manager receives a 360° Feedback report setting out his or her relative strengths and weaknesses, and in any conversation where managers are comparing their respective results everyone is on equal terms because everyone has relative strengths and development needs.

Reporting a 360° Feedback system this way means everyone can be pleased about their relative strengths but is encouraged to see their relative weaknesses as development needs and to take steps to improve them. HR staff can still be provided with results expressed in absolute terms, if you choose, so they will know which are the stars and which are the managers most in need of development support.