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Welcome to this episode of the Chief Psychology Officer with Dr. Amanda Potter, Chartered Psychologist and CEO of Zircon. And hello, I'm Caitlin. I'm a senior consultant at Zircon and I'm delighted to be hosting the podcast today.
Hi, Caitlin. Thank you so much. I'm super excited to have you here today.
Great. Well, today we're going to be talking about 360. 360 feedback has been present in organizations since the 1980s. However, it's not often loved by managers, employees, or even by HR. It can be at Administration heavy and difficult to manage. So why do we bother? In this episode, we will take a look at the benefit of 360 feedback, the difference it can make if it's done well, best practice in the delivery, and some examples of where clients have made tangible change as a result of feedback.
Well, that sounds fabulous. I think this is going to be a great podcast because 360s are core to our business and they're core to our clients' success and their effectiveness. But like you said, Caitlin, very often managers find them a little bit tedious. Employees worry about them and worry about what people are going to say. So I'm absolutely delighted that firstly, you've agreed to be my host today. Thank you very much.
And secondly, we're focusing your first ever podcast on a topic that you I think are a real expert in so I've got lots of insights that I'd like to share but I think you've got even more insights that I'm going to hopefully gather from you during this session today.
Well thank you for having me and I'm just as excited to be here as you are and get involved really and as you said I do enjoy the topic of 360s it's one that I personally find interesting and I've actually used quite a lot over the last few years and being at Zircon and and actually what I have found with 360s is they're loved by so but actually perhaps not so loved by others. Why did you decide to select the topic today?
So, as I mentioned, 360 feedback is a core part of our business offering because our clients recognise the importance of their people getting clear, targeted and direct feedback on a regular basis. And very often, multirater or 360 feedback is the vehicle for delivering very strong and very targeted messages for their employees.
I agree. I think research shows time and time again that feedback when it's given the right way and in the right time can really have a huge influence on performance.
It can can't it I mean it can be the most motivating energizing fabulous thing if it's done well even if the message and the feedback is uncomfortable or difficult to hear initially you think goodness I really wish I was in a different place when I'm listening to this but actually if it's done incredibly well it can be quite career and life-changing and also it's a great opportunity to get that positive feedback which is sometimes validating for some when they may see themselves through quite
critical lens or critical eyes.
So I mentioned that there's some people who are perhaps not so much a fan of it. Why do you think people steer away from I guess 360 feedback or any type of feedback for that matter?
I think from my side most people have had an experience at some point in their career once they've been through the mill a bit of having some pretty horrid feedback and having quite a torrid experience of that feedback. That's because it hasn't been high quality. It's been quite judgmental. It might have been very much oversimplified so that it's not really truly understandable and it feels therefore quite unfair or quite unkind.
And so that experience hasn't necessarily been great because of the way it's been handled or the way it's been delivered. As a result, you think about it, we go into that fight or flight tendency wherein we're hypervigilant. We think, well, I'm going to avoid any future feedback at all counts. I know I've not been great with feedback because of exactly that and it's taken me a long time to be welcoming of feedback.
So are there ways of giving feedback that can overcome some of the issues that you just mentioned?
Well I think the main thing to answer your question Caitlin is that the key is around the quality of the feedback rather than the quantity of the feedback. It's not about the volume, it's not about how many messages can we get over to the individual, it's about making sure that the feedback that we give is high quality, it's objective, it's fair, it's non It's unjudgmental, it's transparent, it's inclusive.
So really, it's about using a process like a 360, whether qualitative or quantitative, to give all of that, that fairness, that objectivity, the lack of judgment, and the sense of robustness to the individual.
You touched upon qualitative and quantitative 360 there. But before we perhaps dive into the differences between the two, because I think that'd be quite interesting to cover, could you please explain for anyone listening, listening who's perhaps less familiar with the whole concept of 360s in general, what are they exactly?
So very simply, a 360 is a comprehensive and confidential way of collecting information from a number of raters or employees against a set of criteria on an individual's performance or maybe their potential or maybe their strengths. This multi-rater or 360 approach often includes people giving both So there are a number of different raters, isn't there, on the 360? So who are the different type of raters
that employee could choose?
So it's good for the employee to choose their raters so that they buy into the process. So that's a really good point that you've made, Caitlin. But those raters can be multifaceted. So and that's the whole point of a 360. So we'll start with probably the line manager, there may be some senior stakeholders, peers, direct reports, maybe customers, and so on. And so the raters are often in different category groups. So in our 360, actually, those groups can be relabeled.
So the names can change, because we find that different organizations have different ways of categorizing the rate is depending on what's important to them.
Yeah, I've actually found working with some of my clients that they really do like that function of being able to, on our system, change manager, for example, to direct manager. It's such a small change, but it makes them feel like, you know, they can bespoke the tool to their business language. What else can you share about best practice in 360s?
The biggest one for me, and the biggest bugbear I have is when you get off the shelf 360s, either personality based or trait based or competency based 360s based on leadership frameworks or personality models that are standardized and are assessing specific competencies or behaviors that are not relevant to an employee to a job to an organization strategy or their goals or aspirations and so I really struggle with the off-the-shelf models because they're just not tailored enough and therefore
don't provide enough meaning for the individual when they're being assessed against these criteria there's a sense of And so what? Why? When they're being assessed against characteristics that don't seem to have any bearing on the job that they do.
Yeah, I'd agree. I think 360 feedback can be a really powerful tool, obviously, for improving an employee's development. And also from a business perspective, you know, it can foster a culture of continuous learning and development, which, of course, leads to increased productivity, increased employee engagement and overall business success.
However, it is important to ensure that while the criteria is the right criteria and that it's used appropriately with the focus on development rather than it perhaps being used as a blame or as punishment in some cases.
I couldn't agree more and I think for me it's both about the tool and how it's utilised and we need to make sure that people are trained to use 360s. In the wrong hands it can be a really dangerous summary of someone's potential and performance because if you go in with a very direct judgment black and white approach and start ranking things and talking about areas in which they're good and the areas in which they're bad. You know, I just I can't even think of the language I take people to use.
Really, the real benefit of a 360 for me is not even the report itself. It's the conversation that comes as a result of the 360 because it's that discovery area. The 360 helps you to identify the blind spots, what is unknown to the individual but known to others.
But for me, the real value of a 360 is the conversation because it has the opportunity to uncover the discovery area if you think about the Johari window the discovery area is when the bits that are unknown to you and unknown to others but are identified through the exploration through that curiosity through the questioning and through that debate with the facilitator or the coach and you have those amazing aha moments where you're like oh my gosh that's why and you just see their eyes light up
and their face change when they have that moment of recognition and for me that's what makes a Because the truth is, the process of 360 is pretty tiresome. They're long to complete. They're pretty tough to administer and to get everyone to complete them. They're pretty torrid for the individual because they don't necessarily enjoy feedback.
But if you have a really good facilitator and coach and you have a good structured feedback process, and of course, a good 360 and good technology measuring criteria that makes sense for the organization or for the role, that's when you're likely to get those feedback. fantastic aha moments, that discovery moment. And for me, that makes all of that hard work worthwhile.
As you were saying that, I was just thinking it definitely makes it worth it.
And we always advise our clients and those that we're training about 360s that there's definitely a duty of care that comes with them and specifically the responsibility to take the individual through the feedback, as you said, and just giving them an opportunity to reflect with an expert rather than them kind of getting this report and thinking, what am I supposed to do with this what does this mean but let's change tack what is the difference between qualitative and quantitative 360s
so quantitative is the one i think most people know of and will have experienced they're usually technology driven and they are usually assessing a set of behaviors sometimes personality because there are some personality tools that are being sold as 360s but we can debate that one later caitlin and they're a great source of numerical data because what they do is they provide a robust way of assessing a set of criteria.
We would prefer a tailored or a completely bespoke set of criteria that truly assess the strategic goals and aspirations of the role or the organization or the level. And we'll provide a set of data, but often there's open qualitative questions in that survey too. And so it combines all that data into one place. In our blended 360, for example, what it does is it gives you each of the different tags or criteria in rank order.
So you can see the areas in which the individual has real strength and where the opportunities are.
And what's quite nice in the quantitative 360, as you mentioned, is they have the opportunity to have some qualitative comments, but actually you can change those qualitative questions. It's more bespoke to the organisation and the type of qualitative feedback that they want to get.
Let's look at qualitative two then. So I mentioned that qualitative is quite different. Very often the qualitative 360s that we build for our clients are not technology driven. They are interview based and they're quite different because firstly, the number of raters that we go to in the quantitative 360s, we can have up to 30 raters. I mean, some people have a phenomenal number of raters.
The minimum number of raters for each of those categories, as you know, Caitlin, is three, but it can mean if they've got five or six categories and they've each got maybe eight raters in each you can have a huge number of raters all contributing to that 360 but with the qualitative we often interview between five or six to 12 people for each of the leaders that is receiving the feedback and so we will conduct structured interviews with those five or six to 12 people and we will take verbatim
notes we have standardized questions and then we will do a content analysis of all of those interviews interviews and handwrite an in-depth qualitative report, which is anything between eight to 12 pages in length. So it's a very different approach. It's very time heavy. It requires senior consultants to get involved, to conduct the interviews and to write the reports.
But the type of report that they receive is profoundly different because I think with the quantitative reports, people still hold back from saying what they really think. They're not that comfortable typing into a system. their true thoughts. But when they're being interviewed and they're being probed and they're being asked questions, for example, what really frustrates you about this person, you're likely to get some insights that you wouldn't necessarily get on the page if they were typing.
So they can be a lot more frank, a lot more direct. And of course, the role of the consultant or psychologist is to pull it together into some very useful and interesting themes in that report. So they're quite different.
So when is it appropriate to you a qualitative 360 versus a quantitative 360 then?
Well we mostly use the qualitative 360 with our exec clients and our exec populations and that's partly about the investment because the qualitative 360s are pretty expensive and the quantitative 360s are much much more cost effective so price makes a massive difference because the amount of investment of time and the extent to which we can use technology and so it generally means that the more senior our clients are, the more likely we are to use a qualitative approach.
And also because the point I made earlier, we can be much more direct in those qualitative approaches. And as a result, we get a huge amount more of those blind spots being uncovered. And we're able to get to that discovery area much more easily through the conversation.
So touching upon your point when you were speaking about the quantitative 360 and having the possibility of having loads of raters, I've always found it actually it's quite nice to see well first of all when someone chooses a lot of raters it's quite ambitious because obviously you need to get them to all respond but when you see the report being generated and actually how many of those raters have completed it it must be such a nice feeling for that employee that they're getting that feedback
but of course not all 360s are the same and actually you never really tend to get a hundred percent response rate so at the same time it shouldn't be disheartening to anyone who doesn't get get that but I always when I've seen 30 plus raters I've always thought oh that's going to be interesting to see how many people respond
and I think it's great and how fantastic when people do respond like you say but the people who do get the majority of those raters responding are the people who manage the relationships with those individuals so they will pick up the phone or they'll send an email private email saying by the way you're going to get an invitation to complete a 360 please could you complete it so they almost prime the people to get involved when we get zero response Caitlin and it just falls into a black hole
it's usually because they had no idea that they are a rater they've been invited to do so they don't know who we are for Adam and so even though we might have prepared the client the client hasn't necessarily prepared their raters properly so yeah it's great when we get a good completion rate but it's it's rare isn't it
like I said there's a bit of management that can come around that in terms of how the employee can reach out to their ratees but of course we can touch on that a bit later but when would you say organization should be considering using 360s in what context
so actually we can use them for a number of different reasons firstly performance management or performance development it could be for leadership development i've run some team workshops where we've used 360s as part of team development and team facilitation and also part of organizational change initiatives as well trying to understand where are the strengths and the gaps and the risks within a population of people so there are a number of different reasons for using 360s and the main thing is
if it's helpful to identify what are the strengths the gaps and the risks of an individual or a population then a 360 is a pretty objective way of doing that
so when should you not use 360s you
should not use a 360 if you're going to do any sort of recruitment restructure redundancy assessment or succession planning because even though we build 360s to be objective and to be fair actually a lot of it is down to the objectivity and fairness of the rater and how they perceive the situation and the context and that individual. And so we have to use 360s more for development and learning than for decision-making.
Would you go so far as to say that there is misuse within organisations when it comes to 360s?
I don't necessarily think it's intentional misuse. I don't think people use it and think, I'm going to use a 360 to get to this answer or I'm going to identify this person. I know this person's got a problem, so I'm going to use a 360 to uncover it.
I don't think it's that black and white but I do think sometimes that clients can veer into asking questions around wanting to use 360 in order to help them make decisions about individuals where in fact it's not necessarily the best way to do that because it is a piece of data and it is an insight but it doesn't provide clear answers because it's still so dependent on the perception and judgment of their raters and the truth is with 360 there's a lot of bias that can come in to account
depending on the culture and the environment in which they're rating?
I'd say that's one thing that does come up quite a lot when you're reading about 360s is the general perception that there is an element of subjectivity to it but of course it's data at the end of the day and it's about through the discussion you have with them and that's why again it's so important that they have a chance to go through the feedback and just discuss what does this mean because it might just be a point in time someone's opinion but if there's some themes coming out then maybe
let's hone in on that. You mentioned about culture So does culture play a role when deciding whether to select and use a 360?
Well, it doesn't necessarily, but it should. And the reason why it should is because in lenient cultures, there is an issue with using 360s or in an environment where there's low psychological safety. And that's because what we see is people using the top end of the rating scale more than the bottom. And so it's really hard to differentiate between high and low performance in a lenient or low psychologically safe culture because everyone rates everyone high.
And you could then be mistakenly saying, oh my goodness, we've got a really high performing population of people here. But actually what we haven't necessarily, what we've got is a very lenient raters who aren't prepared necessarily to critically evaluate the situation or give strong messages and feedback. And so, yes, culture does play a part, but is not necessarily part of one of the considerations that people would take on board.
I don't know if you remember, it was one of the first projects I managed at Zircon, which you were on as well.
It was a leadership coaching program where they were doing 360 as part of that coaching journey and when we looked at the themes across the 360 data for that cohort of leaders that exact situation came to light where there was high scores across the board and it was an indication of potential lack of psychological safety and leniency bias in that cohort and in that organization potentially more widely.
And do you know what when I first looked at that data I thought oh my goodness it's a high performing organization and then I thought wait a minute that doesn't fit the brief that I've had at haul and when we looked further and we looked at other data because we also we actually use strengths in that situation too didn't we yeah and we also did some resilience work with them post the 360 actually there was a burnout issue and a psychological safety issue with that organization and as a result we
identified leniency bias so yeah you're right and it goes to show you shouldn't take data at face value even though there was a huge amount of consistency across all of the 360s suggesting that a theme actually the theme was a product of the environment and the culture rather than a real direct representation of the performance and the potential of those individuals
so if the 360 is done well it's not a generic 360 but is tailored to the organization's needs what would you say are the benefits of using them
they are a holistic and rounded view of the employee's performance i've mentioned already they're great at identifying possible blind spots where these things are I know we did briefly just touch upon our experience on a certain organisation when it
came to 360 usage but do you have any other examples of organisations that you know use them?
I wonder if I could though Caitlin because so many organisations use them 90% of organisations both large and small around the world are using 360s in some way. Now they may not be using them well but they're using them and they may not be using them consistently across leadership and management populations but they are using them in pockets and so it's really interesting for me the ones that are not using them I would say.
So rather than listing companies, I think there's just to say 90% from our research are buying 360s.
You said perhaps not everybody is using it well. So where do they go wrong?
So that is the real question, isn't it? I think when they do it wrong, they use it in the ways that I mentioned earlier that they shouldn't. So they firstly buy off the shelf products, they don't consider the scales that those products are measuring, or they buy per personality-based 360s. As you know, Caitlin, I have a real thing about whether we should call personality a test or a questionnaire because there is no right or wrong personality and therefore it should not be called a test.
And so we shouldn't ever do a 360-based personality tool because there's no right or wrong personality. You can't have the wrong personality. So I think if we buy personality-based or off-the-shelf leadership-based 360s, where there's a standardized set of criteria that can't be tailored I think that's the very first risk. So that's where I think they go wrong to start with.
And that reason for that is because those products won't sync up with or measure or be aligned with the goals and strategy perceptions and aspirations of the organization. They're just going to be measuring what that consulting organization says is important.
So I've mentioned the fact that buying the right type of product is the most important, making sure it's using the products and making sure that we brief the raters so that they're fair and objective and use the full range of the scale and finally that we make sure that we train the people who are going to give the feedback who are going to do the coaching how to interpret the results and not to over interpret the 360. So
just to summarize am I right in hearing that it seems it's the feedback the product and the briefing of the raters that could potentially cause issues if not handled in the correct way
yeah i think so i think those three things are pretty fundamental and so whilst you could jump straight into a 360 really what you need to do is do quite a lot of preparation a lot of briefing really be clear around the communications to make it really work
i understand that people shouldn't use personality based 360s because as you said there's no right or wrong personality and personality is definitely not a test so we shouldn't rate whether someone's personality is good or bad if that is the case what should hr and leaders consider So the
first thing is when you're considering a 360 is you need to look at your own criteria, your competencies, your aspirations, your goals, your vision, your strategy, and look at the criteria that you want to measure. Because you want a really good strong line of sight between the criteria in the 360 and the most important aspects that you're measuring in your organization. The next thing you want to do is look at the length and the style of the report.
because you want to think about the amount of time that you've got to give feedback to those individuals and the amount of time that people have to complete it. You need to make sure that whoever's hosting that 360 comply with ISO 27001, which is the highest level of data security. And you need to think about confidentiality because you shouldn't ever email reports. You need to email a link to download the report to comply with those standards.
And you need to think about GDPR and data protection. A few others, you need to think about the number of raters available and the amount of time it's going to take for all of those raters to complete the 360. So staggering the 360 might be a good idea rather than sending out masses all at the same time because it could overwhelm. And sometimes line managers get asked multiple times, of course, if they've got a number of employees that they look after.
And finally, the line managers need to be engaged because they need to communicate the importance of it and get the buy-in from everybody. And I have actually missed one, sorry.
technology let's hope that the technology is usable and easy to use and is mobile friendly as well so that people can complete them in between meetings or on the train or when they're traveling or in transit so there's a whole load of considerations but i didn't say the most important one i think which is don't think we should have personality based 360s
well there's definitely a lot to consider there again touching back on the avoiding the use of personality based 360s obviously some leading test publishers do sell them but if maybe using them isn't the best way forward. We do love a strengths based approach. So that's coming to my mind in terms of how do strengths come into play? Is there a way that you can take a strengths based approach to 360s? We know that there's no right or wrong strengths.
It's a really good challenge, actually, because I'm here saying don't buy a personality based 360 in my mind. But I am saying that there is an opportunity to use a strengths based 360. However, I would argue there is no right or wrong personality. And I would argue there is no right or wrong strength that people should have in an organization that we're all unique and we all have different strengths.
And the reason why I think Strengths360 works is because in our Strengths360, for example, what happens is the individual selects seven to 10 strengths that they would like to be assessed against on the basis of the things that are most energizing and exciting to them. And then the raters assess those seven to 10 strengths only rather than all 28. And so rather than me saying to you, Caitlin, Lynn, I'd like to assess you against these strengths.
You would say to me, Amanda, I'd like you to assess me against the ones that I think are the most energising. It's still tailorable as a result. It's not standardised, but it's tailored by the individual rather than by the organisation, which is what usually happens in a 360. So
on the topic of talking about right or wrongs, that's reminded me about when I've run 360 training and how a lot of the usage of 360s comes down to best practice. And we have touched upon a fair bit of best practice as we've been speaking. But a couple of key points around it that I think we tend to communicate is firstly around the ratee and how the ratee should help choose who among their colleagues is going to respond to their survey.
But it is advised that there is oversight of who they have chosen. Maybe that's from their manager or that's from someone else in the business so that they don't end up choosing people who will just give them only positive feedback. There needs to be the opportunity for them to receive constructive feedback too. because the whole purpose is you want a holistic view of them. The second thing is the ratee should also personally communicate with those respondents.
So we did mention this earlier about there is a piece around them explaining to the people they're choosing, why is it they're having a 360 in the first place, the purpose around it, and also asking them just to really provide their candid observations, so then they get some great feedback, really.
Another thing that comes to mind is the follow up from the talent professionals touching on what we spoke about earlier, the duty of care, there is to make sure an individual actually gets a chance to get feedback on their reports, whether that's in a more one-to-one coaching conversation or even potentially in a group setting if multiple people are taking the instrument at the same time.
And then, of course, within that feedback conversation, the RATI should get context and guidance from the expert around how to understand the data and look at themes. So I think the ultimate aim is essentially for the rating to receive customised development recommendations that are mapped to the company's leadership competencies, really to help them create a personal development plan.
I think that sounds amazing. I think all of that advice is great, actually. And I think it's the finer details and making sure the communication and the focus is right, which is truly key for a successful 360. It doesn't matter how great our technology is. It doesn't matter how great the questions are in the 360. If we don't do all of that planning and all of that thinking and have a really good plan in place then the whole thing can just fall over.
It sounds like we can advise clients to buy the right product and there is obviously a duty of care to make sure we advise and train them to use the 360 for feedback and development purposes. What would you say are the typical risks associated with feedback?
I think the main risk is that as humans we can be pretty unreliable and pretty inconsistent and it comes from our own subjectivity and having a different understanding of a rating scale or what a definition means and this is actually has a label it's called the idiosyncratic rater effect but it is very significant and it's not possible to undo even with training or even with the very best very descriptive rating scale and so we have to overcome that rater effect by making sure that we have
multiple questions that ask the same thing in different ways And so, for example, in our blended 360, we actually have six questions for each of our competencies or each of our areas in order to overcome that idiosyncratic rater effect.
What's coming to my mind is neuroscience. And so that's my next question to you is, does neuroscience come into play at all then?
What happens when we do ratings and we start making assessments about an individual, because that's ultimately what we're doing, we are creating new pathways and connections. So we're creating neuroplasticity and we're starting to learn about the person as we're rating them in the 360. And then what happens is we're starting to build on patterns or create patterns of responding. And the more we respond, the more the patterns start to be created.
And so for each person, we'll have a unique pattern and we start to apply that pattern throughout the whole completion of that 360. So it's particularly apparent if there's a shortcoming for that individual, because it will light up the sympathetic nervous system, which is the fight or flight response. And what will happen, and there's been studies on fMRI machines that show that actually it highlights parts of the brain, which means that they are more hypervigilant and hyper aware.
As a result, they might be more likely to give more critical feedback. So being personally resilient and personally being in a good place as a rater and not feeling stressed or anxious is quite important. because then we are more likely to be objective. That's the implication of it. If we're feeling stressed and anxious, we're more likely to be hyper alert, hyper vigilant, activating the sympathetic nervous system, and we're more likely to be critical of ourselves and others.
So being in the right place to complete the 360 on ourselves or on others is really important.
Well, considering there can quite clearly be an emotional reaction, then there must be an element of trust in the process, as well as a range of ethical considerations.
trust is pretty profound i mean that's why we need to make sure the ratees have a say on who the raters are when clients are heavy-handed and impose the list of raters to the ratees we really struggle with trust and buy-in so we get that trust by asking them to be the first person to nominate their raters and those rater lists get approved by the organization and you know the whole thing around the feedback that's all trust too and the truth is you can do a really fast fantastic job in a 360
feedback and then you can say one thing really badly or appear judgmental and all the trust is gone. So if it's done badly, it can result in really a broken process, broken promises and mistrust in the process or even real harm. So we have to make sure that we're really gentle in the way we deliver really tough messages.
It all goes back to the managing it effectively. So we have throughout, we've mentioned that we do have a 360, it's a tailored 360 that actually measures hundreds potential talent criteria at four levels so that's from individual contributor up to executive level and it's called the b talent blender 360.
Yeah it's completely tailorable or even we have a bespoke version where you don't even use any of our hundred we completely write your own or you import your own into our technology and so it does mean that we have that true line of sight between what's important for our clients and the criteria that are being assessed in the 360.
Yeah I quite enjoy those projects because you get to work with the client and map their values and their, I guess, organisational language and what they're looking for to the product. But what would you say are the benefits of our Blender 360 then?
So the benefits of our 360, if it's used correctly, it works incredibly well. It's just about the right length in terms of the report. Sometimes it can appear a bit long, but you can take away parts. So it's truly tailorable, both in terms of the questions that we ask, the competencies or criteria that we assess, but also the type and structure of report that we share So if you need a shorter report, that works.
And also we have the flexibility around the qualitative and quantitative questions that they can be tailored to truly meet the needs. So I think the great thing about our tool is that it's a really agile and bespoke tool. So depending on what the client wants, they can get what they need.
So Amanda, let's end with what is the business case for using 360s?
So the main business case for using 360s is for me, I think it's the blind spot and discovery area.
And just to reiterate, the blind spot is something that other people know about you but you had no idea about yourself and so the feedback through that 360 gives you a chance to see yourself through the lens of other people it's that opportunity to have really clear feedback from your colleagues in a structured objective way the other thing is the discovery area which comes from the conversation which is the opportunity through that exploration through that conversation to identify new
discovered areas that were not apparent to you were not apparent to your raters but incredibly insightful incredibly useful and will make a real difference for your career or for your development so it's the product is the output and then the agreement of development moving forward that's for me the most important thing
so at the start i said we'd give some examples of where 360s have made a real difference so could you please share at least one that you've got in mind
well maybe i'll share a qualitative example caitlin maybe you could share a quantitative because we tend to work in different fields don't we for this So the qualitative one that I'm thinking about has been incredibly useful for this individual. So this individual is hugely intellectual, massively respected in his organization as being an expert. He's PhD. He's a scientist.
He is revered in the organization and his history and his work history, the organizations he's worked for have been phenomenal. Plus his education, he's worked at the highest top grade universities in the world.
he's just one of those people who he's phenomenal but with it comes almost an arrogance he doesn't mean to it's because he cares intensely there's a great clarity of purpose and he is driven to be the very best he can be in all everything that he does and for his team to be the same but as a result he only listens up he doesn't listen down and as a result he is sometimes quite closed to innovation and ideas from anyone who who's more junior than he is.
And whilst he's incredibly inclusive and supportive and kind and thoughtful for his team and his employees in a collaboration way, when it comes to innovation or new ideas or ideation, he's incredibly fixed in his mindset. And he's very deferential to the owners of the organization he works for, who are also innovators, who in their mind aren't the real experts.
This chap I'm talking about now is the real expert, but he will defer to to the owner shareholders and he will almost block the ideas of the people who are more junior to him because of this perception that he has now his intentions are incredibly good incredibly good he's hard working he massively invests in the organization in time and so on but that was a massive blind spot to him he didn't see that at all and so that whole messaging for him has been incredibly helpful incredibly useful
because he hadn't seen it at all in any way and so we're now really working with him to understand how he can listen down the organisation and speak up the organisation more to challenge the owner shareholders who were not the experts and to make sure that he is really truly having an opinion. For me that was a really strong message and one that really really did have a great deal of impact for them.
See I really like that example because I think the whole concept around blind spots I think from conversations I even have outside of work with friends and family and throughout their careers is they even know the terminology of blind spots. And so it's language that can fit to everyone. And so thank you for that example.
What about a quantitative one for you then?
So my example, I suppose, was when we used a blended 360 and we've used them a fair bit when running development centres. So there was this one instance we were using it in a high potential development centre and the delegates had completed a 360 as part of the process, along with some other psychometrics. And during the two-day development center, they would have an opportunity to get feedback on that 360.
And so being in those conversations, we got feedback ourselves that they really valued the opportunity to do that. But what was really nice to see was actually the link from their 360 and how it was actually coming into fruition throughout the development center.
So there was links between what was observed in their day-to-day from their peers and stakeholders, but also some of the themes that were coming out and the observations throughout those two days were very i guess in sync so i guess it was kind of rewarding for them to have that 360 almost validated in in some sense and have a real conversation around it so that that was my first one and actually i'm going to be a bit greedy here and i do have another one of how we we apply it obviously within
zircon ourself and so in our one-to-ones that we have every week i remember with my old manager i had the pleasure of getting 360 feedback from her so shout out to helen hargrave Thank you for taking me through my feedback. So yeah, I found, you know, from a personal perspective as well, they've been super helpful in that way.
Amazing that you had a positive feedback experience with Helen and how actually you're responsible for our 360s within our business and the growth and development of our 360 practice as well. So Caitlin, thank you.
You know what? It really makes you put yourself in the shoes of these people that are having 360 feedback because the moment before you open your report, there is that emotional reaction where you think, What is going to happen here? But again, it's very rewarding when you have that opportunity to talk through it with someone. So thank you. Well, that now draws us to the end of this podcast. It's been very interesting.
And all our listeners, if you are interested in having more of a chat about it, then please do feel free to reach out. But if you're interested in receiving some information about the product itself or even booking onto our accreditation training, then please feel free to contact us at hello at betalent.com or go to our website on the accreditation page to book your place on the training and thank you Caitlin for being the
host how did you find your first podcast
I really enjoyed that yeah I think the time has flown by so that's always a good sign but no it's been really really interesting you know I've been listening obviously to our podcasts since they started so it's quite nice to now actually be involved and be an even bigger part of it so thank you it's amazing
well I hope you come back and do another one with me be brilliant share the load with Christian and Angela when she gets back and every now and then we might invite him in you never know mainly for the Christmas and summer party ones you know he's the joker of the family
yeah special joker I guess
and I just want to say thank you to everyone who's listening I hope you have a wonderful and successful day