Dumpster Fire by EFF electronicfrontierfoundation 50617066023
Dumpster Fire by EFF electronicfrontierfoundation 50617066023
You're a senior leader who's initiated or agreed to participate in a 360-degree feedback assessment, with input from your direct reports and other colleagues, including (if applicable) peers, Board members, investors and other stakeholders. A coach or consultant has conducted a series of interviews with your feedback providers and distilled and edited their responses, or perhaps the qualitative feedback was entered directly by your providers and will be shared with you unedited.
If your 360 also included a quantitative component, your providers rated your capabilities on a number of items on a multi-point scale, and your feedback will be compared with others' to illustrate perceived strengths and weaknesses. Your ratings will probably be compared with those for all the leaders in your company who participated in the process, but the 360 provider may also have a larger data set derived from other organizations to provide a baseline.
You've just learned that your 360 report is ready, and you're about to review it for the first time. What can you expect? I no longer conduct 360 assessments, but I have in the past, and today I often work with clients to help them make sense of their reports. Here are four themes that characterize the 360 reports I've observed over the years:
It's typical for 360 reviews to be conducted in organizations where feedback is relatively infrequent, occurring at lengthy intervals in the context of formal processes, rather than on an as-needed basis in normal conversations. Anonymous 360s are often proposed as a way to navigate around a reluctance to share feedback more freely or discomfort with face-to-face dialogue. As a result, negative feedback is stored up instead of being discharged, which gives it more force and intensity when it finally finds expression in a 360. Further, in a 360 a number of separate incidents and situations are often distilled into a single comment, which can take the form of global criticism, rather than thoughtful critique, to use a distinction derived from the work of psychologist John Gottman: “[Criticism] is different than offering a critique or voicing a complaint. The latter two are about specific issues, whereas the former is an ad hominem attack: it is an attack on [the other person] at the core.” [1]
One of the most reliable patterns in human psychology is the strength and duration of negative emotions and the relatively weak, fleeting nature of positive emotions. [2] This clearly benefits us as a species--evolution has selected for this response because it focuses our attention on potential threats and keeps us safe from harm--but at the individual level it also imposes a cost. We have to work much harder to acknowledge or even notice forms of appreciation and encouragement. As a consequence of this dynamic, every single time I've reviewed a 360 report with an executive they've rushed through all of the positive feedback it contains, or ignored it entirely, and focused almost exclusively on the negative.
This is a function of hierarchy and the role it plays in our working relationships. Even in relatively flat organizations, we consistently establish hierarchies--research psychologists Deborah Gruenfeld and Larissa Tiedens have noted that "the production of hierarchy is a central and omnipresent component of organizing." [3] We typically make a greater effort to regulate our behavior when interacting with someone who's more senior or junior to us in a hierarchy, and when a conflict occurs across a hierarchical boundary, the shared knowledge that the senior figure may choose to resolve the dispute by exerting their authority usually limits the extent of the struggle. In contrast, we're less regulated with people who occupy the same level in a hierarchy, and we often lack clarity on how to settle conflicts with peers, resulting in more rivalries and rancor. A predictable consequence of these factors is that 360 feedback from peers is more critical than feedback from superiors or subordinates. Executives are often surprised by this and may even feel betrayed because they view some of their peers as friends--and yet this, too, is a result of the relaxed boundaries and broader range of emotional expression that we allow ourselves with peers.
In other words, you'll be portrayed as responsible for all of the problems cited in the report. (This will be more pronounced if you're the CEO, but it will be a theme in your report no matter what your title.) This is the result of another aspect of human psychology, a cognitive bias known as the "fundamental attribution error" which leads us to ascribe greater causality to individuals than to situational factors. [4] But this bias is heightened by the construct of the 360 itself, in which you're positioned as the player on the field and your feedback providers are positioned as "objective observers." What this framing fails to take into account is that the "observers" are also players, whose actions have shaped and influenced your own--but don't expect your feedback providers to take responsibility for their contributions, because being asked to provide feedback to someone else rarely prompts self-reflection.
Most people initially have a negative response to their 360 report. This can be confusing, because in contemporary business culture we're so often told, "Feedback is a gift." And yet in my experience much feedback is stressful and unwelcome--some gift! The key is recognizing that all feedback, including your 360 report, is data. [5] And as you would with any data, you have to separate the noise from the signal. This is the essence of my commentary above--there's plenty of noise in your report, but there's also some very valuable signal. The task is to identify and focus on the latter without being overwhelmed by the former.
Specifically, be sure to thoroughly review and fully acknowledge the positive feedback in your report--it may be even more useful to you than the negative feedback, as the great management thinker Peter Drucker noted:
Waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. Concentration should be on areas of high competence and high skill. It takes far more energy and far more work to improve from incompetence to low mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. [6]
Reviewing your report may feel like the end of the process, but it's really just the beginning*.* Once you've digested it, the next step will be to talk about it. This may seem paradoxical--didn't you go through the trouble of an anonymous 360 to avoid having these awkward conversations? That may have been the original plan, but organizations make a huge mistake when they imagine that leaders will read their 360 reports and magically transform themselves without any messy dialogue. The real value of a 360 report is in providing a shared data set and a common starting point for a series of conversations, and while these conversations won't necessarily be easy, they can be made less stressful. [7]