360-Degree Feedback: You Are Doing It Wrong
The 360-degree feedback culture is broken and I tell you five reasons why!
Let’s assume we know how to give and take feedback.
The 360-degree feedback is a method that makes you able to collect from all peers around you. The peers can be your colleagues in the same team, the people reporting you, the people you report to, or any other person, such as clients and customers.
I have thought about the 360-degree feedback framework and have some thoughts about it. I’d like to present five of them here:
1. The Focus On Weaknesses
Human memories tend to pull up and stick to the negative aspects of life and their memories. This is also why we are harsh on ourselves and judgemental with everyone else. Rarely you find a person who is uplifting other people. But that’s ok because this keeps us away from danger.
What we do in a 360-degree feedback is to look into a peer’s negativity and project it to the person who received the 360-degree feedback. Which results in plenty of disappointment. Of course, you expected the person to be great, but suddenly the person is not so great anymore. You are probably analyzing the feedback wrong.
2. No Healthy Error Culture
This also leads to having no error culture. So as soon as the feedback is out, many managers tend to discipline the outcome of it, leading to the result that the person who has received the 360-degree feedback is not in charge of this situation. He is being held responsible for it, but not accountable.
Often it leads to firing, without a chance to change the situation and also often without help. If you were to create an employer branding, this would lead to the thought, the employer is alone in the company and the team spirit in the company is low. Leaving your company with a low rate of employee happiness and rating on online company evaluation. As an employer, you are part of the team as well. You are the leader and you have the possibility to guide the person in the right direction. This is why we separate the meaning of leadership and management.
Humans can learn from their own mistakes, or from other people’s mistakes. This is how evolution improves and this is how we learn the fastest. This is an experience and an experience lived through will stay deeply as memories.
3. No Neutral Person Involved In The Evaluation
How to make a person feel threatened? For example by evaluating the outcome of the feedback while holding the power of disciplinary actions. This is wrong! Here is why:
Feedback is a gift. We are giving and taking feedback for the potential of growth. Whenever a person has received negative feedback, it is a potential for growth. But all too often I have seen people with the power of disciplinary actions filter those out who can grow the most and are left with people who agree with each other the most, creating a rather homogeneous non-innovative environment.
Environments were more relaxed where people have gotten evaluation from neutral peers and coaching. This adds to create an environment for humans and avoids people setting up a mask.
4. Your Assumption Can Be Proven Wrong
I know many people rely on what other people have written and told them. It is their point of view and that’s ok. But only to a specific point. As a leader, you probably know, that you have to be careful with the information you get.
They can be wrong. And as a leader, you want to make the right decisions based on the information you get. Which means you have to question the information. You have to collect the information from the peers and the information from the person receiving the feedback. Be extremely careful because even a collective opinion about a person receiving the feedback can be proven wrong.
It is critical that you don’t add, leave out or change information as well when you convey a message from one person to another. This can falsify the information and can be proven wrong as well.
5. One-Way Feedback
…Because taking feedback is difficult for you as well!
The 360-degree feedback is built in such a way, that the receiver takes feedback only. Meaning, that the person has no possibility to enlighten the situation with his point of view. This results in you having only half the clue about what is going on. With respect to the previous point, this leads you, as the leader, in a fuzzy fog, which makes it not possible for you to take the right actions.
Often there is no possibility to question the feedback or to discuss it and when the person receiving the 360-degree feedback does question the feedback, often people are too fast in saying, that the person can not take feedback.
How do you evaluate it?
I evaluate like this: Taking feedback is a thought process. It is about working on oneself and accepting the mistake is a process too. We often expect too much in a too short amount of time. Our impatience often leads to the expectation: Once I talked with the person, the person will have changed. But this is not how the human brain works. The person has to adjust to a new situation, change habits and behavior and this is a process that needs time.
In fact, as a leader, you must be the role model in taking feedback. All information is valuable for you to improve yourself.
One Last Thought
Think about feedback as a gift for growth and less of a measurement for your company and try to establish a human environment.
