You can benefit greatly from receiving personal feedback…..if you want to. The results from 360-degree feedback are often used by the person receiving the feedback for personal development. This may consist of specific training or professional development.
Getting the results from a 360-degree survey can be frightening. “What are people saying about me? What do they think about me? My work? My leadership?” The key to an effective 360 is keeping an open mind. Are you who you think you are? If you believe you are an effective communicator, does the 360 support this? If you feel you are productive, do your peers and direct reports share your beliefs? First, use the 360 to validate your strengths. A gap in your strengths relative to others in your organization is normally easy to fix. Once addressed, you are ready to go on to the tougher issue of addressing weak areas or opportunities to improve. If you want to improve my advice is don’t act on everything at once. I relate this to a good golf lesson. Good golf instructors know that they can’t fix years of poor scores by working with every club and changing 10 things at once. They go to the basics and build slowly upon them. If you want to improve, find a colleague or a coach. Ask them for help. Ask them for constructive, honest feedback. If you really want to “fix yourself” tell others what you are working on. Give them permission to give you feedback in the coming weeks. It will help you.
Above all else, it’s important that you want to improve. If you don’t want to improve or hear the brutal facts about you, the information obtained in the 360 will work against you. Some people focus on who said what. Although there is a natural tendency to want to know this remind yourself that you must focus on the issues, not the people.
The best use of the 360-degree feedback survey for personal development is:
1. Keep an open mind
2. Build on your strengths
3. Get a coach to help with areas of weakness or improvement
4. Let others know what you’re working on
5. Never use a 360 for making decisions on pay or promotion
Case study
A very talented manager went through the 360-degree feedback process only to receive an abundance of negative feedback. Nothing that couldn’t be improved upon if the manager wanted to take the time and respect the input. We discussed a coaching plan. The manager responded to the plan with the statement that “I’m not doing anything. I don’t care what people say about me or what they think about me. I’m not changing.”
I wonder how she is doing these days?