Hacking HR to Build an Adaptability Advantage
Many companies use 360° feedback to gather a wide range of input on the performance of individual managers. Despite its popularity, the usefulness of 360° feedback can be limited by a few factors:
- Feedback is typically gathered from people who are hierarchically close (peers or 1 level up or down the chain) to person being reviewed—and often the person being reviewed can nominate who should be part of the process. This reduces the diversity of perspectives being provided and increases the potential for “grade inflation.”
- Participation can be low—especially among direct reports of the person being reviewed, since there’s little upside in evaluating one’s boss
- Results are confidential—at most, the person who receives the feedback shares it with a few colleagues if he or she is so inclined. Participants don’t have an easy way to compare their feedback to those of other leaders. Confidentiality also reduces the pressure to act on the feedback.
The 360° degree feedback process can yield better insights and improve the accountability for personal development and change on the part of leaders by becoming more open and transparent. Specifically, it should be “hacked” to:
- Allow anyone who gave feedback to an individual to see the results of that individual’s 360°. By enabling review participants to view the report of the manager being assessed, they would feel empowered and would be more likely to participate.
- Open the feedback process to all the employees who are affected or influenced by the person being assessed. That is, employees would have the ability to evaluate any of the leaders they believed had an impact—whether positive or negative—on their ability to do their job.
To make sure this doesn’t devolve into a popularity contest, the feedback survey could ask specific questions aimed at getting specific, fact based input (e.g., how does this manager help you enhance the value you are delivering to the customer?). It could also be used for purely developmental purposes, and perhaps initially implemented with a few of the company’s top leaders willing to take the plunge.
An open 360° assessment process would seem like a flight of fancy, but it has actually been implemented with great success at HCL Technologies, an Indian IT Services company (HCL’s experience is a direct inspiration to this mini-hack). For more on HCL’s story, please watch the embedded video featuring HCL’s CEO Vineet Nayar, or read Vineet’s book—Employees First, Customers Second (the description of open 360° feedback comes at the 3-minute mark).
Hi Michele,
Love it! This mini-hack is so simple that it could be almost instantaneously applied. In addition, it has inspired me with another idea. Here’s my (still raw) build up:
Open 360° feedback + empathy maps = Open 360° Empathy Mapping
Empathy map (http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dschool/method-cards/empat...) is a tool that designers and entrepreneurs use to step into someone else’s shoes (i.e. a customer or an end user) in order to deliver a successful value proposition. Done properly, it helps uncover subject’s main feelings and emotional needs. But perhaps the most genuine value is obtained, nearly at the end of the exercise, when people begin to remove initial prejudices and start to realize how similar we are in reality. That’s when people stop referring to others as merely consumers, users, suppliers, or competitors; and that’s when a world of win-win innovative solutions arises.
Hence, pairing an open empathy mapping exercise with an open 360° feedback process, it could help remove this negative tendency of viewing, reviewing, and judging ourselves as bosses, subordinates, and rivals. It could also allow us to go beyond the performance scored (a fixed target) and comprehend (or just accept) why a sub-optimal or superior performance took place in the first place. All in all, it could help organizations get to know each other better and closely collaborate, just as Sam marvelously suggested above in the comments:
“… After reviewing our own, we partnered with a buddy (called our accountability partner), where we swapped our feedback and talked through it in some detail. Then, we each hold each other accountable for one or two focus areas where we want to improve…”
Salut Michele,
would you see sta(RH)s as a manifestation of your Open 360° Feedback idea?
http://www.mixhackathon.org/hackathon/contribution/starhs#comment-22656
saludos,
Heiko
Michele - glad your hack calls attention to the often broken approach to 360 feedback. Like the notion of greater transparency so givers of feedback can see results and create the possibility for wider inclusion. Not all, but many situations could benefit from those two ideas. I would like to suggest a third practice - which relates to the fact that these are all hacks for HR. What if HR put the person seeking the feedback in charge of their own process? Give them the tool, the guidelines for effective use and criteria for who to get feedback from. Then let them do the rest themselves - the timing, selecting the individuals, etc. Think of having an app that any manager can use at anytime. What HR evaluates managers on in this new world order is how well managers use feedback technologies as a way to improve and develop themselves vs. checking the box on if they did a feedback process or not. The massive HR feedback processes that are so fraught with issues would be a thing of the past. The organization Tilt365.com has a 360 feedback tool that does this around a specific set of leadership character dimensions, so the proof case is already there. Thanks Michele!
Great hack, Michele.
Sam pointed out focusing on just a few of the feedback results, and I agree. In fact, I believe the scores are not very important as such. It's finding the common understanding of the development points that really matters. Perry discusses the problem of rivalry, which often arises from overemphasizing the scores, or from the inability to go beyond the numbers.
A lot depends on the maturity of the organisation to give feedback. I have experienced that the culture improves if the 360s are based on the issues people are familiar with. A summary on the corporate level does not move people, but handling their own team feedback does. It makes more sense to develop a team related survey than to implement a corporate survey in all teams.
Thanks Michele, Sam and Matt here for your comments.
My comments come from severe disappointment from adminstering and participating in lots of rounds of 360 as target, reviewer, coach, adminstrator - no matter what anonymous layers or priming is done, they are entered into as a nuisance, with caution, game playing, dishonesty, fudged comments and / or a blandness that simply negates their purpose. So they've been ineffective and had more of a damaging effect than a cohesion building honesty element.
Fact: people aren't always honest to each other about behaviours or performance. Some through inability to feedback with considered impact; there may be positional rivalries; some self-delusion; intolerance etc. Some through being very considerate to people's feelings but letting them get away with things.
So how do you build something where there is useful feedback for people; appreciated by the recipient; easy to give for the reviewer and meaningful not tactical.
So I think Michele has it when it stops becoming an exercise. Because we don't treat human interactions necessarily as work, we make a programme of it so it becomes scheduled work. This is where it fails a lot. Allowing anyone to create some feedback, easily about the impact that person has to them is the way forward with this.
720 degree allows that to include all customers, clients, connections, contractors and collaborators.
Nice hack - like the thought of something more dynamic, regular and measured for reviewing people's performance and behavioural impact on others.
Regards
Perry
I think this is a great extension to the 360. The thing about the 360 is that it is very scary for the recipient and often people don't know how to interpret or, more importantly, act on and improve from the feedback. At Red Hat, we now do these as part of a management class (a week long cohort immersion of classes in leadership - with many ideas that come from the MIX!). As a recipient, this was great because we spent a lot of time learning about how to interpret the results and preparing for the experience of receiving them, as well as on strategies for how to use them. After reviewing our own, we partnered with a buddy (called our accountability partner), where we swapped our feedback and talked through it in some detail. Then, we each hold each other accountable for one or two focus areas where we want to improve. It's very easy to get overwhelmed with the feedback, so focusing action on one or two areas makes it more manageable.
I personally think it's important to look at this as a development tool, rather than as a report for others to make judgments by.
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