guest article by David Sawtelle, ORCHA

A 360 Assessment is simply receiving feedback about agreed upon performance, behaviors, or actions from your boss, your self, your peers and your direct reports.Typical questions that arise when thinking about assessing the skills of our leadership and management teams are, “what do we need to assess? How should we assess it? Is there
any way to measure it? How do we improve it?” Use of a 360 Assessment provides a way to assess, measure, and improve leadership skills effectively using best practice approaches.

Companies that choose to do a 360 Assessment of their senior leadership team for the first time find that the feedback is better, more actionable, more specific, and easier to complete than they expected. 80% of companies who complete a 360 Assessment for individuals on the senior leadership team conduct a follow up assessment 3-5 times during the next 15 months. 60% of those companies roll the 360 process down to the lowest level of management/supervision. The main reason is that it is the most reliable method of obtaining valuable and actionable information about the leadership skills of managers – and executing development that translates to bottom line results. Results, however, can be as powerful or meaningless as the criteria that you have agreed to assess. In addition, the power of receiving feedback about yourself from people who are around you everyday is huge. Knowing your rating is an excellent way to check your gut feeling about your effectiveness. It can be a nice reinforcement of your own suspicions, an eye
opener, or a wake-up call. For a CEO, or other senior manager, comparing high-level numbers across a team can be very revealing and explains some frustrations and challenges. As always, without a plan to do something with the results, the information just stays at the interesting stage.

There are an infinite number of criteria about which one could receive 360 feedback. Strict productivity data could be one set of criteria, but is typically not assessed in a 360 Assessment because it is very objective and easily measured. For instance, if your job is to supervise a team with the objective of ensuring that the team builds a minimum of 40 widgets a day – your team either made 40 widgets a day or it didn’t. However, if , given the 40 widgets a day requirement, you train your team in quality principles, give clear expectations, motivate to succeed, coach to improve performance over time, and manage productivity so that the team produces 60 widgets a day, then we have sets of criteria to assess other than strict productivity. These criteria – management and leadership skills – are more subjective, but still essential to the bottom line. How you manage performance is as important, but sometimes harder to assess, than simple performance data often reveals.

Management and leadership criteria are identified as competencies. The Change Management competency could be defined as the use or implementation of skills such as Leading Change, or Driving Change. The skill of Leading Change could be defined as consistently and purposely exhibiting change leadership behaviors. Behaviors include being open and positive about change, thoroughly communicating change and the reasons for it to employees, and involving employees in the process of implementing change. Effective 360 Assessments reveal how a manager/leader’s competencies are perceived by how well his skills are deployed through the behaviors he consistently exhibits. The labels are less important than what actually gets assessed and what actionable results you can obtain from it.

360 Assessments deal with perceptions, especially related to peer and direct report input. Perception is important. A manager may have the skill to communicate and does so very well with his boss or customers – but fails to apply his skills with peers or direct reports. He might communicate respectfully and thoroughly to his boss, but believes that direct reports need to be handled in a more authoritarian or parental way. If perceptions from direct reports reveal that the manager’s approach to them is perceived as mostly negative or dismissive, it can have a performance dampening effect over time, and even incite turnover. While ‘communication sometimes seems highly subjective (because it is), poor communication has a very specific bottom line impact.

Perceptions of strength are just as important as perceptions of weakness. When there is across the board agreement between peers, direct reports, boss, and ‘self’ related to leadership competencies for a group of managers, then development plans for that group do not need to include those ‘strong’ competencies. Results of a 360 Assessment process for a level of leadership in your company will allow development of very specific types of programs specifically tied to improving essential skills that are perceived as weaknesses. The 360 then becomes not just a picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your leadership team, but also an individual and team road map for development.

Best practices for delivery of 360 Assessments include obtaining feedback from no more than 12-15 participants, and no less than 5-7 participants. Additionally, 2-3 individual coaching sessions for each person being assessed increases individual development by immediately focusing on their results and discussing why the perceptions might exist and
what goals they can set to improve the perceptions. Goals set with a qualified coach become strong accountability paths that encourage growth and improvement. Those individuals being assessed quickly realize that, though they may disagree with one person’s assessment, it is hard to dismiss perceptions of different groups of participants
who agree on that individual’s strengths or weaknesses.

One best practice that stands out in relation to which 360 Assessment is most effective is the ability to customize the tool to reflect the competencies, values, and business practices that a company defines as most essential to its growth and bottom line health. A 360 Assessment, therefore, should reflect a person’s effect on the bottom line. While generic leadership 360s do much good, customizing the tool is far more effective.

The first 360 Assessment for the individuals on a leadership team sets the baseline measurement. Follow up 360s within 9-12 months measure improvement over time. These improvements should also begin to reflect bottom line improvement measures. The biggest reluctance to undertake organized leadership development (which 75% of
senior executives believe is crucial to company improvement, but agree is rarely or poorly executed) is that the results of leadership development are often too hard to measure against cost effectiveness. The 360 Assessment process is an effective antidote to this reluctance. And the results can be used in strategic planning for leadership
development.