What to do if you’re disempowered after a 360-degree performance review 

 

Are you confused or overwhelmed after a 360-degree performance review? Your confidence shattered? You’re not alone. 

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Organisations put significant effort into the 360 process: designing questions, getting employees to participate, collating data and organising feedback sessions. Yet after their reviews so many people ask us, “What am I supposed to do now?” 

They tell us reviewing managers lack adequate time and training to help interpret the results in a useful way. Employees receive an overwhelming amount of information and recommendations (often automatically generated by the software) with no prioritisation. There’s too much emphasis on people’s weaknesses. And it’s hard to give specific feedback without losing anonymity and context. Some excellent expert articles on the problems with 360s are below. 1

“Instead of a 360 we could create a relaxed environment where employees are empowered to discuss their own and each other’s performance and strengths together in a forward-looking conversation.”

We’ve provided many ‘remedial’ mentoring sessions for clients after disempowering 360s and have some useful insights to share:

  • Consistently underrating yourself below colleagues’ assessments is often because you’re unaware of what you do well. Conversely consistently overrating yourself is often the result of confusion between what you think you should be good at versus what you’re actually good at. The best way to clear this up is through identifying your strengths. 2

  • Most of your development focus should be on getting even better at what you’re already good at rather than spending time fixing weaknesses.

  • Try to redesign your role to focus on projects and activities you do well and make the most impact. See if you can gather together people with complementary strengths.

  • People need better advice on career progression. For example, one of my clients was told he should improve his financial skills to be considered for his boss’s job. “But I’d hate my boss’s job,” he said. “I like the excitement of operations.” We went to work on how he could expand his scope of operational leadership in the company.

Instead of a 360 we could create a relaxed environment where employees are empowered to discuss their own and each other’s performance and strengths together in a forward-looking conversation, answering questions like: 

  1. What do you most admire and appreciate about your colleague and how they work?

  2. What are their two/three main strengths?

  3. What should they start doing, stop doing and continue doing to maximise their effectiveness in their areas of accountability?

This approach builds trust and orients the focus around the future, where all relevant action is going to take place. It allows specifics to be discussed in context. And it’s something that can be repeated monthly or quarterly. 

 
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We’d like to hear your stories about 360s, good and bad, and your questions and comments.

If you’d like to talk about your 360 get in touch with Miles or Deborah today.

 
Miles Protter