How to Discuss 360 Feedback

By Julie Cooper

Giving 360 feedback can be daunting. How will the person respond to it? How can you make it the positive, developmental experience it should be? If you are involved in developing people, it's likely that sooner or later you'll need to have a conversation about a 360 report. This book will show you how to get the best out of that meeting.
It will take you through what you are aiming to achieve and help you review the skills you need to succeed.
Filled with practical tips, it shows you what you need to do before, during and after the meeting. Troubleshooting is covered too; you will find answers to many challenges thrown up by a 360 feedback report. What do you do if the feedback is negative? How do you handle it if the person has a higher - or lower - opinion of himself than everyone else has? What if there are no promotion prospects? Or if everything is just average? You'll find strategies for dealing with many potentially difficult situations.
Whether you are new to giving 360 feedback, or you want to reflect on your practice, this user friendly guide is for you.
Julie Cooper is an experienced trainer and the author of the highly acclaimed people management guide 'Face to Face in the Workplace.' She also co-authored 'The One to One Toolkit' which has been used to help train advisers and coaches since 2008.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Careertrain
• Release date: Apr 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9780992758738

Julie Cooper

Hello. I'm a trainer, coach and author specialising in one to one skills. I understand that busy people want accessible, practical information. They rarely have time or inclination to read complicated tomes, which is why my books are packed with instantly usable techniques and tips. I also coach other professionals to help them turn their ideas into a book. As well as looking after Careertrain I have Spring Development,which offers training and development to organisations and individuals that want to flourish and get the best out of their working lives. I recently moved to Banbury in Oxfordshire, UK after many years in The Fens, working in and around Cambridgeshire. Outside of work, I enjoy looking after my newly inherited amazingly beautiful garden, exploring The Cotswolds, and seeking out live music, arts and crafts.

Book preview

TOPI – The Other Person Involved

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Throughout this book,  I refer to The Other Person Involved as Topi, which is much easier than saying feedback receiver, employee, coachee or any other not-quite-right word. You are you, the person you are talking to is Topi. Sometimes Tope is male, sometimes female.

Introduction

This book is for you if you have been asked to run one to one 360 feedback meetings. You may work in HR, learning and development, or be a coach or trainer. If you are new to the task or want to review your practice, pull up a chair.

Helping another person come to terms with their 360 feedback is a task that needs considerable skill, understanding and experience. Many people approach it with trepidation, and quite rightly so – it’s an important job; it can be demanding and has the potential to go pear shaped.

On the other hand, done well, it is incredibly rewarding. You have the opportunity to support a fellow human come to terms with valuable information about themselves and plan how to reach their potential. For me, it doesn’t get much better than that. Having said that, I do remember what it is like to dread the feedback meeting. What if Topi (Topi is an -acronym, meaning The Other Person Involved) gets angry? What if I can’t help? What if they’re in denial? What if neither of us can think of one single action point?

If you are new to 360 feedback, you may have a list of fears longer than that. The purpose of this book is to give you the tools and knowledge to approach the job with confidence. Hopefully your concerns will be addressed and you’ll feel equipped to handle the discussion – or you might have identified your own skills gaps.

This is a practical guide, not an academic paper. You will need to look elsewhere if you want to study the science behind the tool. Also, this book won’t tell you how to plan and implement 360 feedback within your organisation – that is another topic, and approaches vary considerably depending on what else is in place.

If you want a pragmatic approach to discussing 360 feedback that will tell you what good practice looks like with tips, hints and some troubleshooting of common concerns, you are in the right place.

1. What is 360 Feedback?

I’m 99% sure that you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t know, but just in case....

360 feedback is a mechanism for an individual to get feedback on their performance at work from a range of colleagues, typically their line manager, a few team mates, subordinates, possibly customers or people from other parts of the organisation. The ‘360’ comes from the number of degrees in a full circle – the aim is to get feedback from all around the person.

Everyone involved is asked the same set of questions, and must score the individual accordingly. The questions may have been derived from your own competency framework (if you have one), or may have been bought off the shelf – there are some excellent products available, which match common job roles e.g. sales person, business leader, manager etc. Obviously it is important that the questions are relevant to the individuals’ job role, or the resulting report will be meaningless.

Questionnaires are almost always completed online, although occasionally I do hear about some poor soul collating shedloads of info onto a spreadsheet manually (which really can’t save money!). If your organisation is doing this, please do look at some of the online options available.

There are three key factors that should be considered when choosing an online 360 provider:

Ease of use. There is no excuse for software that is clunky, inflexible, slow or hard to understand.

Quality of reports. It should give you sufficient information to be incredibly useful, without drowning you in minutiae that will lead to overwhelm.

Robustness. All software has blips occasionally. You need to know that the infrastructure is secure and well maintained, and that any issues or queries will be dealt with promptly and courteously.

The report presents all the information gained. Usually this is a combination of numbers, visual aids (e.g. bar charts or spider graphs) plus some free text, which are questions where the respondent can write a sentence rather than give a score. The free text answers are usually at the end of the report, and are along the lines of What should this person stop/start/continue doing?, or What does this person do well? What could they do differently?  Often clues to why the scores are as they are lie here.

Make no mistake:  a good, user friendly report will make the feedback meeting easier, but the quality of the meeting and the outcomes achieved rely far more on the skill of the facilitator – that’s you!

2. Before You Say Yes

If you’ve been asked to take part in feedback meetings, it will help you enormously to understand the big picture in your organisation, rather than working on assumptions about why your company is going through the 360 feedback process. Topi may well ask questions around this to help him see things in context.

2.1 Why are we doing it?

Check your understanding with the person responsible for running the 360 project. It’s likely that you’ll discover that one or more of the following are true:

The organisation wants to add more value