360 Degree Feedback: A Welcome Punch in the Gut for Leaders

08/24/23 • 48 min

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A 360 Degree Feedback may be the most powerful leadership development tool you will ever use — if you use it correctly.
Feedback holds the key to successful leadership development. Despite our well-intentioned endeavours, our actions may not always align with our intentions in the eyes of others. The most successful leaders understand how they are perceived by others and adjust their actions and manage perception accordingly.
Receiving candid feedback is not always pleasant, but it invariably provides you with an opportunity to improve and develop as a leader.
A 360 Degree Feedback is a multi-rater assessment that weaves together insights from diverse vantage points. These vantage points, ranging from superiors and peers to subordinates and self-assessment, converge to provide a well-rounded picture of how others see you in comparison to how you see yourself.
This powerful tool, however, often falls short of its potential due to oversight in key aspects. A successful 360 journey commences with meticulous pre-process preparation, continues with accurate result interpretation, and ultimately requires taking the right actions to help you grow as a leader and create the desired impact.
Before Embarking on the 360 Degree Feedback Journey:

Define Your Purpose: Articulate why you are pursuing the 360 Degree Feedback and be clear on the context.
Curate Your Raters: Enlist a diverse and representative array of raters, not just your best friends.
Personal Invitations: Extend personalised invitations to your raters, and encourage them to provide ample text answers rather than mere ratings.

Receiving Your 360 Degree Feedback Results:

Guided Interpretation: Ensure you have a debriefing session with an executive coach certified in the 360 Degree Feedback tool you are using. A professional coach can help you navigate through a complex report and put things into perspective, enabling you to interpret the results correctly and gain the most from your 360 for effective leadership development.
Attitude is Key: Embrace an open mindset and resist the instinct to be defensive when confronting critiques. Approach feedback as a snapshot of external perception at a particular point in time.
Explore Alignment an Discrepancies: Explore hidden strengths recognised by others and blind spots wehre your self-assessment overshoots. Look for consistencies and inconsistencies in the ratings and comments. Scrutinise congruences and divergences within and between rater groups.

Take Effective Actions for Your Personal Growth:

Seek More Feedback: Paradoxically, often the 360 Degree Feedback is only the start for receiving more feedback: engage with selected raters, sharing insights from your report. Seek further clarification and request specific suggestions for improvement.
Holistic Growth: Development involves more than overcoming weaknesses. Capitalising on your strengths while bridging gaps is the pathway toward exceptional leadership.
A Coach's Guiding Hand: Collaborating with an executive coach can truly propel your personal growth. For most people, changing behavioural patters and unproductive habits is more difficult and time-consuming than they think. Busy executives tend to focus on their projects and day-to-day work, often neglecting their own development. “A coach really, really helps”, as Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, famously noted.

Get in touch with us:
web: secondcrackleadership.com
email: [email protected]

Define Your Purpose: Articulate why you are pursuing the 360 Degree Feedback and be clear on the context.
Curate Your Raters: Enlist a diverse and representative array of raters, not just your best friends.
Personal Invitations: Extend personalised invitations to your raters, and encourage them to provide ample text answers rather than mere ratings.

Receiving Your 360 Degree Feedback Results:

Guided Interpretation: Ensure you have a debriefing session with an executive coach certified in the 360 Degree Feedback tool you are using. A professional coach can help you navigate through a complex report and put things into perspective, enabling you to interpret the results correctly and gain the most from your 360 for effective leadership development.
Attitude is Key: Embrace an open mindset and resist the instinct to be defensive when confronting critiques. Approach feedback as a snapshot of external perception at a particular point in time.
Explore Alignment an Discrepancies: Explore hidden strengths recognised by others and blind spots wehre your self-assessment overshoots. Look for consistencies and inconsistencies in the ratings and comments. Scrutinise congruences and divergences within and between rater groups.

Take Effective Actions for Your Personal Growth:

Seek More Feedback: Paradoxically, often the 360 Degree Feedback is only the start for receiving more feedback: engage with selected raters, sharing insights from your report. Seek further clarification and request specific suggestions for improvement.
Holistic Growth: Development involves more than overcoming weaknesses. Capitalising on your strengths while bridging gaps is the pathway toward exceptional leadership.
A Coach's Guiding Hand: Collaborating with an executive coach can truly propel your personal growth. For most people, changing behavioural patters and unproductive habits is more difficult and time-consuming than they think. Busy executives tend to focus on their projects and day-to-day work, often neglecting their own development. “A coach really, really helps”, as Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, famously noted.

Get in touch with us:
web: secondcrackleadership.com
email: [email protected]

Previous Episode

Leadership in Complex Times — with Anu Rathninde, APAC President, Johnson Controls

Join our conversation with Anu Rathninde, the APAC President of Johnson Controls, and take-away an easy-to-remember guide for how to tackle complexity as a leader. Apply the steps in the “SIILA”-model and directly understand what you need to address, and create positive transformation in your organization.

As a leader, you are expected to deliver predictable results and you are held accountable. It might be tempting to base your decision-making on control and assumed certainty. Yet, an organisation, with its people and stakeholders, is a complex adaptive system that doesn’t operate like a machine, outcomes really can’t be controlled. This is where the steps in the SIILA-model becomes an important guide.

Anu Rathninde is the APAC President of Johnson Controls. With 30,000 employees across more than 20 sites in Asia, and previously many years as an executive also in North America and Europe, Anu truly combines the best of both Western and Eastern leadership styles.

Key moments

05:30Introducing the 5-step SIILA model (= Systems thinking, Internalise, Interact, Learn, Adapt).

09:14 Step 1: Systems thinking helps leaders to understand and consider the inter-connectedness inside and outside the organisation, and that change emerges with or without a leader trying to control things.

17:44 Step 2: Internalise. The hardest step in being an effective leader is to personally internalise the purpose and values of the organisation as well as what drives you as a leader, bringing the right mindset and motivation to change.

22:26 Step 3: Interact reminds leaders to interact with everyone in the organisation to gain a true understanding of what is actually going on. Input for decision-making and the trust to implement decisions, can’t be created in the boardroom.

32:13 Step 4: Learn and Step: 5 Adapt are the ‘easy’ ones if you have done steps 1-3, but of course not less important to drive change and results in a complex environment.

33:39 Reflection questions

Reflection Questions

How do I use my time as a leader to truly understand the system, align with my values, my mindset, and interact with the right people to understand what's actually happening, before making decisions?
How valuable is it for me to spend that extra effort and make the right decision versus making a quick decision?
Where might I not understand the system well enough? Where might I oversimplify and what might I overlook in the interactions that people are having, which then impacts outcomes?
To help yourself with Step 2 internalise, you can ask yourself from 3 perspectives:
1) Where am I today? What am I doing? Why? How am I doing?
2) From where I started: How did I get to where I am today? What did I do? Why?
3) Based on where I want to be in the future: Why do I want to be there? How am I going there? What am I going to do there?

About Anu and his book “Tackling Complexity”

Find more information about Anu and his book on LinkedIn: Anu Rathninde

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More info about us and our work is on our website secondcrackleadership.com
To explore how we can help you to drive results in your organisations, contact us at [email protected]
To connect on LinkedIn:
Gerrit Pelzer
Martin Aldergård

Next Episode

How Transparency Makes a Difference in Leadership - with Adam Horne

In this episode we keep exploring the topic of trust in leadership, today from the perspective of openness and transparency. We are joined by Adam Horne, the co-founder of OpenOrg, a company on a mission to rebuild trust by bringing transparency to the world of work.

We know that being open and transparent as a leader is key to build trust. An article in Harvard Business Review reports 76% higher employee engagement, and Gallup statistics shows 21% higher profit margin, compared to the average transparent company. So what can you do as a leader and what are the dilemmas or questions you are going to face?
Key moments

04:33 Transparency, what does it actually mean? Obviously, different things to different people and organisations. Adam shares his take on what it means and we discuss different areas that could be considered.

10:55 The benefits of openness and transparency is explored, and the link between transparency and performance.

15:51 The dilemmas of transparency and what might block leaders from being more open and transparent, both from the perspective of an individual leader, and from the organisation perspective.

17:28 We discuss where to start when building a more transparent leadership style

24:55 Exploring the balance between ‘being strictly professional’ at work, and ‘being human and personal’ as a leader

31:26 Potential ethical dilemmas around transparency - Adam retells his experience of sharing tough information with his team

39:04 Reflection questions

Reflection Questions

As a leader, what don't I share with my team at the moment that I potentially could, and what are the consequences of that? Look not only at “what could go wrong” but also at “what could go right” by sharing.
As an organisation and leadership team, ask where do we want to be more transparent, and where not? And make this a conscious decision. Also think of how this can help bring clarity, establish trust, and drive motivation in the organisation.
Go back and look at some of the employee feedback that you are receiving. Think of how might this be related to how I/we build trust? And how might being more transparent and open, help address this feedback? What is it then specifically that I/we can work on as leaders?

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Information about Adam Horne and OpenOrg

Adam is the co-founder of OpenOrg and on a mission to help organisations rebuild trust by bringing transparency to the world of work. Find out more at OpenOrg.fyi and connect on LinkedIn Adam Horne
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More info about us and our work is on our website secondcrackleadership.com
Do you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions for us? Would you like to explore how we can help you to drive results in your organisations through a company-wide initiative or individual executive coaching? Then email us at [email protected]
To connect on LinkedIn:
Gerrit Pelzer
Martin Aldergård

Second Crack — The Leadership Podcast - 360 Degree Feedback: A Welcome Punch in the Gut for Leaders

Transcript

Second Crack – The Leadership Podcast
Episode 24

This transcript is AI-generated and may contain typos and errors.
[00:00:47] A warm welcome to Second Crack, the Leadership Podcast. In this show, we explore everyday leadership dilemmas and paradoxes, and we invite you as our listener to self reflect. I am Gerrit Pelzer, I work as an executive coach, and I bring to my coaching a combination of Western science and Asian wisdom. I'm joined today as usual by