Does 360 degree feedback actually work ?

Personally, I am a fan of the 360 degree feedback process. It is a wonderful way to keep pulse on the team ecosystem and to ensure that individual behaviors that hamper objective progress are adjusted along the way. However, there are factors that make this amazing process meaningless. Here are a few...

1. Open and Trusted participation of individuals undergoing 360 is absolutely critical. Most 360 processes fail because of passive conduct from participants. Feedback receivers start building defense shields (with managers, peers and reports) as soon as this process is initiated. Feedback providers see absolutely no value in providing useful feedback and hence resort to filling the blanks as a checklist

2. Absolute trust and understanding between feeback receiver and manager is paramount. There could be some comment(s) (from reports or peers) that criticize certain action or behavior without full knowledge of the circumstance/situation that the individual faced. In these cases, manager and employee are the only ones who can fully understand the background and evaluate the comment appropriately. This assumes there is a good relationship and understanding apriori, a precondition that fails most often.

3. Process (not content, ofcourse !!!) needs to be transparent to the participating group. Feedback receivers and their managers must have a choice of selecting providers. The questionnaire should be unambiguous and allow for free-form provision of supporting data. This process can be run semi-annually to gather feedback and measure corrections

4. Finally, there should be substantial period (2 to 3 cycles) of consistency in teams and reporting relationships to get correct and actionable data.