A favourite tool of many consulting firms is the dreaded 360° feedback survey that gets routinely pushed out, often just ahead of the equally dreaded performance review.
Leaders and managers are asked to get selected peers, direct reports and supervisors to answer them anonymously.
The surveys usually contain between about fifty to well over a hundred questions about the manager, covering every aspect of their role.
The surveys are very subjective and often cover areas the respondents haven’t experienced with that manager.
They take time to answer which most respondents don’t have.
The manager is then debriefed on the findings by a coach accredited in the tool, resulting in a diverse bunch of items for improvement.
I’ve had the experience of following up those debriefing sessions with the managers, as a separate executive coach.
Here’s my findings:
- The response variation is too great to warrant realistic coaching in the time frames budgeted for, and no, it’s not a matter of increasing the time frame.
- Too many answers are simply unhelpful ticks of the box – understandable when the questions are numerous and pernickety.
- The respondents aren’t necessarily knowledgeable enough to answer meaningfully.
- The questions aren’t open enough and there are too many to enable a considered response.
- The respondents aren’t necessarily objective enough in their intent, either unrealistically favouring or disfavouring the subject person.
- The subject person is too often left either overwhelmed or underwhelmed regarding a meaningful path for improvement.
Here’s what I say when I’m helping a client who has been asked to work with such cumbersome bureaucratic data:
“Go back to those same people and ask them to give you their answers to these four questions:
- What do you want me to keep doing and being, because it works well?
- What do you want me to keep doing and being, but differently?
- What do you want me to start doing and being, that I’m not yet doing or being?
- What do you want me to stop doing and being?”
Every single time without fail, we have arrived with a meaningful plan of action that delivers real, rapid and resilient improvement.
We are not in an academic theoretical environment trying to contemplate wide ranging subjective responses that are at best only indicative and at worst inaccurate.
We work in real time needing real results that are meaningful.
What do you think?
