“We're going to turn this
team around 360 degrees.” (1)
-Jason Kidd, basketball player and coach
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It happens from time-to-time, during
performance evaluation time, or when a new “360 feedback” event kicks off. You
start receiving any number of requests for feedback about your peers,
subordinates, or bosses.
360-degree feedback (aka multi-rater
feedback) is a potentially powerful tool, gathering balanced information about
employees for development planning or performance appraisals. While the
intentions are noble, it shares many of the characteristics of other heavyweight,
centralized, time-wasting, stress-inducing, HR-driven processes. If misused,
and it often is, 360 feedback adds up to one gigantic antipattern.
For most people, you will have more immediate
success working within the system than you will complaining or trying to change
it. Here are some suggestions:
Apply radical transparency
The process calls for you to fill out a form or
answer questions and deliver your feedback (now called ‘data’) it into some
anonymous machine, which delivers the feedback to the employee anonymously or
via the manager. It’s scary, especially if some of your colleagues are inclined
to weaponize the anonymity of such a process.
Before you feed the system, apply radical
transparency. Have a discussion with that person, and simply put your notes
from that conversation into the tool. Share the written submission with the
person, by copy/paste from the tool or copying your email response. Hopefully this radical transparency will
improve the working relationship you have with the subject of the feedback.
Subvert the performance appraisal aspect
Sometimes companies or functions use 360
feedback to differentiate performance, feeding data to the annual forced
distribution, norm-referenced performance management machine that is so
demotivating. Don’t conflate performance with feedback. Approach the activity
with the mindset that you would any other feedback, being helpful, encouraging
and non-judgmental. If you are forced to give numbers, use grade inflation: Only
4s and 5s (on a 5-point scale) to give some differentiation within the
categories without any lower marks. If you give feedback to multiple people,
make the numbers add up the same for each person.
Create a teachable moment
If you’re in an environment that is grumbling
about the feedback process, explore it openly and figure out ways to make it
better. Ask: What is it about this process that is so infuriating, stressful,
unfair, time-consuming, or <whatever other emotion>? What can we do to
alleviate that? What do we hope to get out of such a process? What can WE do to
make it work better for us?
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For those organizations ready to change, what
you land on is this: Eliminate the event-driven feedback process, and create an
environment where feedback is ubiquitous, helpful, and welcomed. Make your workplace
one where everyone can help everyone to get better, and everyone can win.
Footnote
(1) Quote is possibly apocryphal, but too delicious not to include. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/7mkoi1/did_jason_kidd_really_say_were_going_to_turn_this/
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