360° Feedback is a valuable resource for educating employees about their strengths and weakness; and providing them with a professional developmental plan to help them improve on their weaknesses and further increase their strengths.
Done incorrectly, 360° Feedback can lead to distrust, bad feelings and frustration within your organization.
Here’s a look at the three most common 360° Feedback mistakes organizations tend to make.
1. The process doesn’t stay confidential.
Done correctly, 360° Feedback should build trust and stronger working relationships within teams, because the learner has a better understanding of how their skills and behaviors affect the entire team. The key word is TEAM, with reports that are aggregated and anonymized so that individuals don’t know who said what. If individual contributions are known, the process can become corrupted with bias and negative feelings.
inQ takes the guesswork out of this. It automatically anonymizes and organizes the data from raters, and even better, automatically nudges people to respond – which helps to keep the process efficient while protecting everyone’s responses.
2. They focus on employees’ weaknesses.
Good 360° Feedback addresses both weak and strong competencies. To learn to be good leaders, employees must be aware of how to leverage their strengths while improving on their weaknesses.
Many great leaders are strong in a few areas, understand how to use their strengths to their advantage, and then work around their weaknesses by surrounding themselves with great people who are strong in those areas. The inQ 360° Feedback and Development Planning process understands that you need to develop the whole person, not just laser-focus on weaknesses.
3. They don’t create Individual Development Plans.
For any 360° Feedback process to be successful, you need a plan for moving forward. The goal of 360° Feedback is to give someone valuable data on their strengths, opportunities for development, and a clear pathway for action.
Most organizations can benefit from a streamlined, intuitive, and customizable tool to make 360° Feedback assessments easy and consistent across teams. Contact the inQ team today so we can help you get started.
inQ is a customizable and responsive suite of tools for assessing talent, building development plans, tracking high-potentials, and managing your full pipeline – including succession planning. Using inQ will result in a team of more resilient and agile leaders, ready to take on challenges in a volatile and complex business environment.
