360 Feedback

A 360 gathers feedback about you from a mix of people around you, anonymously, and shows you the whole picture at once. You invite people. A spread works better than a set of allies. Someone you work for, someone who works with you, someone who knows you at home. They answer. Nothing is revealed to you while this is open. That last part is deliberate. Feedback read one response at a time gets argued with one response at a time. You find the reason each comment is wrong. When five arrive together, and three of them say the same thing, the argument becomes harder to have, and the pattern is the useful part. The roots are in the Johari Window, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham's model from the 1950s, and specifically its blind quadrant. What other people can see about you that you cannot see yourself. A 360 shrinks that quadrant on purpose. Multi-rater feedback became standard practice in organisations from the 1990s onwards. The research is mixed on whether it improves performance by itself. It reliably does one thing, though. It tells you how you are experienced, which is a different question from how you intend to come across. Expect one comment to sting. That is usually the one worth sitting with.