How to Turbo Charge Your Next 360 Review Cycle
Illuminate blind spots for your team and yourself
The 360 review is a great methodology for getting honest, crucial feedback to your team, yourself, and your leadership. If you’re considering adding a 360 feedback loop to your team’s growth plan, keep reading for some tips on how to incorporate a 360 feedback plan into your team’s development road map so you and your team can reach new heights!
What is the 360 Feedback Process?
The 360 process is a regular review process that collects feedback from an employee’s peers, leaders, and direct reports (if they’re a manager) and surfaces that feedback to the employee and manager. This is done to get a high fidelity picture of an employee’s performance and interactions with team members. As a leader, you can use this feedback to help an employee see how they’re perceived by the organization at large and offer richer feedback on how they can be their best selves. You’ll also get a sense of how others see you in the organization, giving you a holistic picture of the effects you have on others and where you can improve.
There’s a lot of great literature on how to conduct a 360 review and the actual mechanics largely depend on your organization and culture. Therefore I won’t deep dive here. In case you’re unfamiliar, the broad strokes go like this:
- 3 months out, have a kickoff and send surveys.
- Each employee, including yourself, will have the opportunity to provide feedback on their peers, direct managers, and direct reports if applicable.
- Surveys are made available to managers about 2 weeks prior to the mid point of the annual performance review cycle.
- Managers conduct 1:1s to discuss the feedback.
Considerations for Leaders
To 360 or not to 360?
As a leader, you should consider a few things before arbitrarily launching a 360 review campaign. 360 reviews are most effective in cultures of transparency, respect, and continuous growth. If you still use stack ranking or something as inane as culling the bottom 10% a 360 review will only cause more discord and reduce productivity.
Should results be anonymous?
Short answer — sort of. People will give more candid feedback if you remove the fear of retaliation. However when a manager is given their pile of 360 surveys to analyze, it is helpful for them to know who works well together and who might benefit from separation or coaching. During the actual feedback session, the manager should use their judgement as to whether or not to release the source of a feedback point.
Is this a replacement for the annual performance review?
No! In order to maintain the integrity and candor of the critical feedback, which arguably is the whole point of this exercise and tying it to something that influences pay, promotion, or other benefits will make the 360 a complete waste of time. People typically don’t like to be critical on paper about others when they know there could be a negative outcome for them, which unnecessarily softens critical feedback. Tying 360 feedback to pay & title also makes it possible for friends to write ruinously empathetic feedback for friends, perpetuating the Peter Principle. Removing the incentive entirely provides no benefit to gaming the system, leaving you with more objective feedback where the only incentive is increasing the output & performance of everyone involved in the team.
When’s the right time for a 360 review?
I suggest concluding the 360 review cycle at the 6 month mark in your annual review cycle. This enables you to coach your team on the critical feedback with enough lead time for them to course correct before the annual review, which puts an incentive in place to drive actual progress. If your team members improve, they have more talking points for their promotion paperwork. If not, they don’t lose hope and feel desperate based on critical feedback, which enables them to focus on solving the problem rather than the negative outcome. Make it clear that full course correction is not required for a glowing annual review, but some amount of progress is expected.
Who should be involved?
When the 360 review was designed, it was targeted to traditional hierarchical org structures, with the intent for everyone to get feedback from their same level in the tree, one level up, and one level down. You might consider expanding this out from people in the org chart to informal networks as well. Consider extending who’s included to be a list of 3–5 people a contributor worked with directly in the last 6 months, even if they’re outside of the department.
Closing the 360 Loop
Hopefully you come away from this article with some ideas around how to get the most out of the 360 review process. I encourage you to work with your HR business partners to ensure the 360 process is thoughtfully incorporated with the big picture & incentives in mind. 360 reviews should be a fun, engaging, and enlightening process that isn’t yet another HR paperwork slog or a high-pressured performance evaluation. As leaders we’re responsible for the output of our team, and growing the next generation of senior contributors and leaders. A 360 review cycle that everyone takes seriously and without ulterior motives is a powerful tool for improving team chemistry, illuminating growth areas for contributors, and boosting the output of your team.
