How to Succeed with 360 Reviews
by Rob Redmond - September 1, 2008
In the mid 1990’s, Joe was told for the first time that The Company would be giving him a 360 degree review. He had no idea what that meant, but he was pretty sure it involved heating an oven for ten minutes to 360 degrees and putting him inside. Little did he know how right he was.
A 360 is a review where four or five of your peers are identified and are given surveys about your performance. They answer questions, their identities are removed, and HR reviews the results with your boss as if this exercise was a scientific study which revealed certain facts about you.
360 degree reviews are the creation of an idealist who believed in a fantasy that does not exist. That person believed that everyone has everyone else’s best interests at heart. I don’t know who this idealist was, but I would love to force them to read some of the great works of political strategy and find out if they stopped seeing unicorns dancing through rainbows.
The idea of a 360 degree review looks great on paper. “Let’s ask Rob’s friends what sort of worker he is. They will give him gentle praise and gentle feedback on things that Rob has succeeded in hiding from management both good and bad.” Management believes that somehow these reviews are magically able to dig up facts that were unavailable to them otherwise. Managers who have these reviews performed on their folks think they are playing detective.
These reviews have become so popular and are accepted as standard operating procedure at so many companies that many people even go to management and request a 360 on themselves.
The believers of the results of 360 degree reviews are playing right into the hands of their employee’s political enemies and friends. The only thing that a 360 degree review reveals about you is which of your coworkers feels you are competition and which are your allies and are hoping you succeed. The problem? Your friends will not criticize you. They will give you good reviews and say nice things about you in excess of reality. Your competitors, those who see you as a threat, who do not like you, or who want your job ended because it somehow audits their work, will give a negative review.
Out there somewhere is someone reading this article who is thinking, “I don’t believe it. We have used them for years successfully.” No, you have not. You have used them for years. You have not used them successfully.
While the results of a 360 may appear useful at the management level above the person being reviewed, the guy being reviewed is being manipulated and so are you. Those who truly know best about him are hiding their criticisms in order to help him. Those who criticize him cannot be trusted - they want him out of the way.
No, your team is not somehow a special family that is exempt from this sort of political maneuvering. No, these reviews do not work wonderfully for you because you have a special circumstance. Worse yet, the criticisms are not useful for the person being reviewed even if they are motivated by contempt.
Criticism never is useful, and that is exactly what is produced by a 360 degree review. Rather than providing feedback, which is identifying a behavior and in real time calling it out and and either praising it or stating the consequences of it, 360 reviews provide mindless criticism. Taking a random sampling of coworker opinions always results in a batch of criticisms that cannot be acted upon:
* Makes me feel…
* Very good at…
* Unwilling to…
* Attitude is…
* Driven to…
* insert any adjective here
The problem with such commentary is that it does not identify a behavior and state why it effective or ineffective. When you receive these results, you cannot act upon them. All you can do is sit back and wonder who said these things about you, and which of the people around you is your enemy and which is your ally. Comments like these essentially hold the person being reviewed accountable for the feelings and opinions of the reviewers. Invariably, 360 reviews collect and document criticisms which cannot be acted upon because they are not behaviors - they are all in the imagination of the reviewers.
The results of these reviews will also inevitably be laced with corporate double-speak (aka “execu-talk”) which is both meaningless and yet sounds very powerful and important. Comments such as these below provide no benefit other than making the person writing the review sound like a vapid business leader saying very little with very much:
* Thinks outside of the box
* Partners well with others
* Tactical approach to strategic challenges
* Align goals with corporate objectives
None of this is useful.
There is another reason 360’s fail to provide usable results. The person being reviewed may have been ordered to deal with some of their coworkers harshly and against his better judgment. The person being reviewed may have harmed himself politically with others at management request, and the review may provide those people with opportunity for retaliation. What management ends up getting for results is basically a lot of political mud-slinging in such cases.
The bottom line is that the results of a 360 cannot be trusted due to the political realities of the modern workplace, and the results themselves are not actionable. 360 degree reviews do not provide useful results. They are instead merely a popularity contest.
What would be useful? These sorts of comments would be useful, because they would be focused on behavior:
* Raises his voice in meetings when debating a point
* Tells jokes when others are starting to appear frustrated
* Speaks quietly while presenting on conference calls and is difficult to hear
* Stands too close to people he is speaking with in-person
* Interrupts frequently during conversations
* Never interrupts when others are speaking even if appropriate
These are behaviors. Focus on behavior, and you focus on what people do, what they say, their facial expressions, how loud they speak, how they pitch their voice, and their body language. If you focus on those five things, you will have the raw material for feedback.
Putting all of this on paper and sitting down and dumping it in a big batch with an employee, no matter where it comes from, is not feedback. Feedback is a real-time communication about behavior - not an ambush along some mountain road upon an unsuspecting victim.
More about feedback:
http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/07/giving-effective-feedback/
http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/10/feedback-revisited/
http://www.manager-tools.com/2006/02/improve-your-feedback/
A manager who gives feedback to their directs on a daily and continual basis does not need to perform 360 degree reviews with them. In fact, a really good manager would probably view that as abdicating their own responsibility for giving feedback to others in order to avoid having difficult (or pleasant) daily conversations with their employees.
360 degree reviews are useful for one thing: When someone requests one, you know you have a management problem. The employee is not getting enough regular feedback, and their boss is not spending enough time with them to know what their performance is like. 360 degree reviews exist only because effective management is not there to fill the void.
When management does not do its job, HR steps in and creates a process, hires an outside company, or steps in themselves to do it for them.
How do you succeed with 360 degree reviews? Easy. Never do them.
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2 Responses to “How to Succeed with 360 Reviews”
Hi Stuggling Manager
Great article. I love it so much that I’ve tagged it and linked to it from my blog. It’s great (and I’m not being ironic) because it says everything that people say who don’t like 360 Degree Feedback, or who’ve had a bad experience with 360, or whose organisation does 360 very badly. All of which are valid points of view.
Can I ask you a couple of questions though…?
- Who told you that 360 is a scientific survey? Whoever they were, they lied! As a 360 practitioner I can tell you that 360 is a subjective, observational exercise, not a scientific measurement or a personality test.
The idea is that you get some observations, on the same behaviours, from a number of different people. If you start hearing the same message from a number of different people, it might be worth taking some notice…
- As you say later in your article, asking someone ‘what kind of a manager’ John is, is completely unhelpful. Of course you’re going to get unfocused generalisations and opinions based on people’s theories about personality. That’s why good 360 doesn’t ask you those kinds of questions.
- “Criticism never is useful”..Really?! Have you never heard something about yourself from a friend or family member that made you do something different?
- How much politicking have you seen around 360? OK, there could be some, but do people really have the time to manipulate feedback to such an extent as to make a difference? In my experience this is rare- of course if you use 360 to determine salaries and promotions that might be the case, but you really shouldn’t use it to do that - very dangerous.
- I so agree with you about jargon, ‘thinking out of the box’ and the rest of it. That’s why 360 questions have to be worded clearly, focus on actual, observable behaviours, and not woolly or managment-speak. As well as structured questions, a good 360 will also have a section that allows you to give some clear behavioural feedback, just like your great examples. We use, for example, things you would like your colleague to start, stop and continue doing.
- “360 degree reviews exist only because effective management is not there to fill the void”. What kind of managers have you had, Struggling Manager? Yes, managers should be giving you feedback, but what about all the other people you work with? Don’t you think that they
might be able to give you some helpful insights too, that they might prefer not to tell you face to face (e.g. tells jokes when others are starting to appear frustrated)?
You see I think when you say 360 feedback, you really mean bad 360 feedback. Am I right? Hope to hear from you!
Very best regards
Jo
Hi, Jo.
I intended to mean *all* 360 degree feedback. The 360 system is an idealistic model that discounts the innate politics in all adult human relationships - especially where money and employment are on the line.
I recommend all managers to never use this sort of tool for any purpose.
Instead, managers should not feel drawn to it (I am not) because they are practicing excellent management techniques - such as those espoused at manager-tools.com:
* Feedback
* Coaching
* Delegation
* One on one meetings
A manager who uses simple, cyclic tools to interact with their people daily does not need any sort of survey or tool used in order to obtain feedback or intel on his people’s behavior.
Surveying coworkers is, imo, inherently flawed, as they will not provide accurate results but instead will poison the well with either overly positive or overly negative data.
Yes, they do have time.
The 360 survey and other such tools purveyed by consultants and HR professionals exist because so many managers are not doing their jobs. They are not meeting with their people one on one regularly. They are not setting objectives. They are not measuring performance. They are not giving feedback multiple times to every report DAILY, they are not delegating their work and creating more opportunities to observe behavior, and they are not individually coaching each of their directs.
These tools exist to fill a gap that is better filled by us actually doing our jobs competently instead of ignoring our people because we are “busy.”
The tool fills the gap badly. Here’s what happens no matter how it is used and no matter how cleverly it is apparently designed:
1. The friends of the direct give good feedback
2. The enemies of the direct give negative feedback
3. The manager consumes the good and ignores it
4. The manager consumes the negative feedback
5. The manager tries to act on the negative feedback
6. The manager focuses in on the negative feedback
7. The manager eventually does nothing and loses focus due to “fire drills” and the direct goes through this experience of negativity because enemies cited their weaknesses which should have been known at hiring time and accepted as trade-offs for their innate strengths - as Drucker recommends all good managers do.
Forget the 360 and anything like it. Instead, focus on regular relationship building with all reports, focus on their strengths, patch their weaknesses minimally and lightly, and then continue to help them develop their strengths.
I’m sure the marketing brochures and advertising say otherwise.
-Rob