360 Degree Feedback & Leadership Development
In order to be an effective leader, you not only need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, but also be aware of the impact your behaviour has on those around you.
360 degree feedback tools can help individuals and leaders advance through jobs, gain experience and learn new skills.
Individual Feedback Participants
An employee’s self-awareness is a huge part of their ability to be an effective leader, for instance, a lack of self-confidence would present a huge issue in a position of leadership.
The process of 360 degree feedback can help respondents find out how others perceive them and uncover development opportunities, skill gaps and leadership potential.
In some cases, they may be completely unaware of the impact of their behaviour, also known as ‘blind spots’. This feedback process can help individuals reinforce and build on their strengths and weaknesses.
Feedback allows individuals the space to learn and the independence to better manage their performance and career using quantifiable, reliable data.
Interdependent Teams
360 feedback is not only relevant for the individual, but the team as a whole. It allows individuals to become leaders and work more interdependently, rather than as separate entities.
The feedback process increases internal communication between team members and team leaders. This helps to build stronger interpersonal relationships as it normalises giving and receiving feedback in an informal setting – something that once upon a time, was not that common.
A team with higher levels of trust and better communication not only makes leadership roles more appealing but also easier to carry out, as causes of conflict can be identified and solved more easily. Online 360 feedback reports share information about applying feedback and how to best focus on goals.
Improved Organisational Culture
The overall impact of 360 feedback is endless; it can improve the culture of the company by linking the individual survey questions to leadership qualities and organisational values. By making these trains and leadership qualities more public, by reinforcing them through the completion of multiple 360 surveys across the business, it improves employee engagement and discretionary effort.
This culture and environment enables higher rates of career development and succession for employees leading to promotions from within. It builds an overall improvement in talent management generally.
When employees are promoted into management roles, feedback can also help identify where more structured development is needed. Providing first-time manager training can give new managers practical support with areas such as communication, delegation and managing people, helping them build on the leadership potential identified through the feedback process.
Make Competencies as Specific to the Job as Possible
When considering the types of questions to ask, ensure you make the competencies specific to leadership qualities, behaviours and values you feel are relevant to your organisation.
Being specific about the competencies that are needed for leadership roles allows you to see to what extent employees are building leadership skills as well as informing the employees on what strengths they need to build on and what weaknesses they need to weed out.
Use the Feedback for Personal Plans & Development
If people feel like they are at risk of losing their job, there may be less inclination to be honest about the skills and behaviours. Whereas, if you detach the 360 feedback process completely from the performance management/appraisal process, you give your employees the security of knowing that 360 is purely focused on development.
This not only gives you more honest responses, but gives space to build respondents into higher achieving leaders using the behavioural skill gaps and information that you’ve extracted from the 360 degree appraisals.
It is also important to continually revisit the data derived from the feedback process. Leaders aren’t just formed overnight and remain leaders, it is a continual process of learning and improving. As the organisation evolves, the business environment and team will also evolve; that’s why it’s critical to carry out 360 feedback as a regular process.
Skill Gaps for Leadership
Skill gaps refer to the performance deficiencies that an employee might have which lead them to not achieve the goals they had set for them: whether personal or targets relevant to the general goals of the organisation that they work for.
Particularly in leadership roles, behavioural skill gaps are crucial as they will have a large impact on the staff surrounding them and the company too. In industries where the company objectives change on a day to day basis, skill gaps can present an even bigger issue as it is difficult for employees to adapt so quickly. This can be due to lack of training or job development. Similarly, if there is poor management or leadership, this will lead to worsening skill gaps. The implementation of 360 degree appraisals for leadership and management development can be a long term solution for skill gaps as the feedback contains analysis on the behavioural skills which individuals in the organisation are lacking in.
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