Getting the Most From 360 Feedback by Bill Hawkins
Over the last 18 years, I’ve personally debriefed 360 feedback for approximately 2,000 leaders, and I was involved in research tracking 86,000 leaders who received feedback and then put together a development plan to work on it for a period of a year. And I am going to share those results with you.
But let’s say you’ve just received your 360 feedback. What can you do to get the most out of it? I’ve got some ideas. I want to talk to you about what to avoid, what to do, and how to plan to put it together.
So let’s start with what to avoid. Avoid overreacting. In most cases, nobody is going to see this feedback but you. Whether you got the best feedback or the worst in the entire organization, nobody is going to see it. If you got great feedback, it won’t do you any good to think, “Well, I just got my feedback and apparently I have nothing I need to improve.” And even if you got terrible feedback, acting like a hurt puppy isn’t going to inspire anybody.
Avoid going back and trying to determine who said what. I can’t tell you how many hundreds and thousands of these I’ve done, sometimes you think you know who said what; you may be right, you may not be. But that’s not the purpose of this.
Don’t make excuses. Don’t defend or explain yourself. And don’t over-commit. You’re better off to pick one or two things and actually make some progress on them rather than trying to select seven or eight things and being all over the board. And finally, avoid talking about them. This feedback is about you, not others on the team.
So what should you do? First, keep it positive. Second, keep it simple. Select one area, at the most two, that you want to improve, develop a plan of action, and then do something. You don’t have to do a lot, but the research shows you do have to do something, and the key is to involve others and then follow up.
So the first thing you want to do is put together an action plan. This can be a great time to start looking at some of your goals for the future. What do you think you’d like to be doing two, three, four years from now? And put that into the context of the feedback that you just received, remembering that it wasn’t a performance review. Now some of you may get such high scores you wished it was a performance review, but it’s not. It simply tells you how you’re showing up at work. So what were your strengths? This isn’t just about finding out what areas you need to improve. What strengths, what competencies, what talents or traits surfaced that you can leverage for the future? And were there some areas where maybe it’s an overused strength or a weakness that you could work on for future success?
Develop an action plan, and then involve others. Who do you need to involve? I have no idea—but you should. It should be your key stakeholders. And your key stakeholders are those people whom your work impacts and whose work impacts you over the course of six months to a year. Your boss, direct reports, team members, peers; for some of you it’s customers, family, community. But one of the things we found is that you need to involve other people if you’re going to get traction on improvement in your 360 feedback.
So if you do this, what results can you expect? Well, actually, we did research involving eight major Fortune 500 companies and 86,000 leaders. They all received 360 feedback. They all picked one to two areas for development, had a discussion with their coworkers, and had an ongoing follow-up. What does follow-up sound like? “It’s been a couple of months. Remember I told you I wanted to become a better listener? How have I done at listening over the last couple of months? Any suggestions?” “It’s been four months.” “It’s been six months. How have I done?”
And then we did a mini-survey at the end to track results. That mini-survey was on a -3 to +3 scale. “How much change have you observed in this person over the following months?” And what we found was, of the people who followed this process, 96% of them improved. Those that didn’t follow a normal bell-curve distribution.
As Warren Bennis says, “What happens next is entirely up to you. If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got, which may be less than you want or deserve.”