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360° Feedback Process
Now, I’m going to give you the secret of self-awareness even though you might not like the answer. The truth is that when you get a 360° feedback process done for you, then it can be extremely helpful for you to understand better how you’re coming across to others. 360° feedback is simply this: where you get an understanding of all the people around you and how they see you, how they see your strengths, how they see your development opportunities, and what specific suggestions they have for you to help you be a better leader.
Now, what’s helpful about this? Here’s what’s helpful. You are the expert on your intention. Everybody around you is the expert on your impact. So when you can align your intention with your impact, that’s going to help you be a much better leader. You’re going to be more aligned in what you wanna do, and you’re also going to come across in a way that you really want to.
Now, the reason many people are concerned, are afraid, of 360 feedback is ‘cause it’s scary. It’s kind of like really difficult to kind of hear the real truth about what they think about you. But it’s so worth it because when you really see how you’re showing up for people. For example, I have a leader that I worked with, and what they said about him was he was he’s really smart, very strategic, and really cares about the company and the business overall, those are fantastic things. However, they also said about him, he could at times be moody, and they did not always communicate. So people were going off in all different kinds of directions.
Now the impact of that was that people were always checking to see what kind of mood is the boss in. Is it okay if I bring this up to him? And that meant that there was sort of a level of anxiety in the workplace, which is not really good for, not conducive to, work. It also meant that people did not always know what to do and what direction they were going in or how to work with each other because they didn’t kind of understand the grand vision.
So if you would know that as a leader, you might be uncomfortable, might make you really sort of upset for a little while, but it would give you something to do to improve your leadership, and that is the end result in what you really wanna be able to do.
360° Feedback Questions
So the kinds of questions that I ask people around my clients and the leaders that I work with are: What are they great at? What are their strongest strengths? Also, I ask what are their weaknesses, development opportunities, blind spots, or obstacles. It’s really important to get a handle on what those are. I also ask: How do they influence other people? What environments bring out their best, and what environments bring out their worst? I ask them how they give feedback, and what that style is to give feedback. And then I always end by asking: What specific behavioral suggestions do you have to make this person a better leader?
The Role of a Coach
The best way to get 360 feedback is to bring a coach in. So when I’m involved in these situations, the truth is that, first of all, I can go out and ask your people questions about you that you’d be uncomfortable asking. Not only that, but your people will tell me the truth in an unvarnished, unedited way. Not kind of the way they position it to you. Then I can debrief you on what exactly they said, and also importantly, what specific suggestions they have to help you be a better leader.
Now, when I debrief you on this process, what most people do is get upset or defensive. I don’t blame you. I do too, right? That’s the way it is to be human. However, once you get over that, you find it very very valuable to have all this information. And then also as a coach, I can help you really unpack it in a safe and comfortable way to figure out, what are the one or two things that you can do that will massive 10-times improvement in your overall style? What I find when I do is that it’s not like they have to change a million different things in themselves, they have to change one, or two, or maybe three things that will help them get the most impact out of any kind of improvement process.