You are required to feed back the results of a 360° Analysis to a 'Target' individual (the 'focus' of the 360 process). It is likely that you are their coach, line manager or a member of Human Resources. In any case, receiving performance feedback can be a challenging experience and needs to be handled with some sensitivity – if a positive outcome is to be achieved.

Giving Challenging Feedback

For many of us, being 'in the spotlight' of the 360 process can create feelings of vulnerability and some individuals will feel threatened and anxious – anticipating negative and critical responses. In some cases individuals will focus disproportionately on even minor criticisms and may fail to recognise positive responses, even when they are in the majority. For such individuals support is required to prevent the process being undermining to self-esteem and to emphasise and focus on strengths – in order to keep responses in proportion. Individual strengths may provide the key to addressing areas of development need – eg: good communication skills can be used to improve organisational effectiveness, and so on.

At the other extreme are individuals who fail to recognise or accept critical or challenging responses and see these as being misperceptions on the part of the Assessors, or will explain them as being based on exceptional circumstances, or maybe even malicious intent. The challenge is to facilitate recognition of how such 'blind-spots' may operate and how this process may impact on performance, regardless of the specific competences to which they may relate. The 360 process is, at bottom, a 'reality check' and can be seen ideally as clear 'evidence' of how an individual's behaviour is experienced by others – regardless of the individual's underlying ability or intentions. It may be helpful to pay particular emphasis on the 'Personal Style' section, at the back of the report, to explore how competent performance may be modified according to the style through which it is manifested. For example, an individual who is highly assertive and inflexible may fail to see how their decisions, which may often be good ones, can be interpreted as 'dominating and demanding' and engender resistance in others. Such an individual may attribute lack of success to a lack of responsiveness in others, rather than a reaction to their own personal style. Some challenge may be required to enable the 'Target' to recognise and accept the impact of their approach on others and how effectiveness may be increased through greater empathy and adaptation.

The feedback report is fairly self-explanatory but it is advisable to refer to the underlying Psychological Model which provides a theoretical basis for the 360 process and subsequent development approaches. Competences within each of the main areas of the model are structured according to their emphasis on active, reactive and interactive behaviours. Individual preferences in this respect are represented in the Personal Style section of the report. From a development perspective, greatest effectiveness is seen as arising from an appropriate balance between these extremes – as manifested in collaborative, interactive approaches. From a feedback perspective, this is established through using an appropriate combination of support and challenge in feedback style.

Interpreting Scores

In most cases, results in the report are shown in graphic format as bar charts, using a 'standard scale of ten' (sten) - rather than raw scores of 1-7 as used in the survey itself. Standardised scores are based on the normal distribution, of each particular characteristic, and compared to what is 'normal' for a particular comparison population – such as 'all managers', 'managers in the service sector' and so on. Most characteristics, in any population, occur in frequencies which follow a normal distribution – usually represented as a 'bell shaped curve'. For example, fully grown male adults in the UK average 5'10” in height. Most adult males will have a height which is distributed fairly closely either side of this average. However, normal variance predicts that increasingly smaller numbers will have heights increasingly taller, or shorter, than this. Those few at either extreme are exceptional, in this case termed 'giants' or 'dwarves'. On a standard sten scale of 1-10 the former will score at the upper end (9-10) and the latter at the lower end (1-2), while the majority will be within a few scale points of the average (4-6). It is usually more meaningful to compare individual scores to the normal distribution for their comparison group, rather than considering the raw scores alone.

Following our example, the average height of a basketball player is likely to be considerably higher than that of a 'normal' person. Therefore a more appropriate predictor of potential success, for basketball trainees, would be their height in comparison to a sample of basketball players, rather than the general population. Therefore it follows that it makes more sense to compare the effectiveness of a manager against the normal performance distribution of other managers, rather than presenting raw survey scores alone. You would expect a manager to be an effective organiser, for example, as this is probably why they were offered the job in the first place. What will distinguish them as exceptional is how much more effective they may be than the average for their comparison group (average in sten scales is always 5.5). Bar charts in the report are shown against a shaded background which represents the normal distribution for the comparison group which was chosen at project set-up. The dark area in the centre represents the normal range, and most scores would be expected to occur within this range, for competences central to the role in question. Scores which are above or below this central range represent exceptionally effective, or ineffective, assessments of performance – in relation to the comparison group chosen.

More detail about interpreting the report and feeding back in a coaching context can be found at Coaching Considerations

It is recommended that feedback is related to a clear Personal Development Plan, which may be used to review progress, within appraisals or coaching sessions, across a period of time.