4.10 360s vs. direct conversation

What makes 360s unlikable for so many people?

They’re…

Blunt instruments.

Instead of giving us a rich, complex, inspiring picture of ourselves, they give us a stripped-down, impersonal summary.

360s are not the best way to develop strong working relationships, because they’re…

Evaluative not relational.

Which is what makes 360s feel impersonal and kind of cold. The raters are scoring you, they’re judging you, and where’s the love in that?

Given these drawbacks, why have they turned into a big business? (Besides the money making part.)

I think the first answer is that…

We do need feedback.

We’re a social species so it matters to us what other people think about us and where we stand with them and how we fit in with the people we spend our days with.

Also, we’re complicated, developmental beings. We have so much to learn growing up, especially about ourselves and about relating to others. And the learning is still going on long after we’ve become adults.

Which means we each have our own blind spots. And given that the definition of a blind spot is that we can’t see it ourselves, we need other people to help us see what we’re missing.

But direct talk about difficult personal issues can be scary. It can blow up on us. Relationships can get damaged maybe permanently.

So it’s no wonder that we look for a quick and easy way to deal with feedback.

But do we want to surrender to our fears?

Especially those of us doing social change and social justice work. Aren’t we trying to change how our society works? Aren’t we trying to make the world a more loving place? Don’t we have bigger ambitions for ourselves and our teams than to settle for 360s as our primary way of talking with each other about our working relationships?

Direct talk is indeed scary—if it’s done without skill and without care. But direct talk can be welcome and nurturing and uplifting…

If it’s done in the spirit of mutual advocacy.

The most effective teams, the ones that go soaring, operate in exactly this spirit.

They don’t allow relational aggression. They don’t just settle for passive support. On those teams…

People actively champion each other.

And they love doing it.

The same is true in the best supervision relationships. A skilled, caring supervisor can make the kind of difference in the lives of her supervisees that no 360 can match. And that’s because she’s taking the whole person into account, the context they’re working in, plus their personal history and present day lives.

And more succinctly, because…

She’s holding her supervisees in her heart.

Check out what these leaders have to say about feedback…

When I give one of my staff an appreciation, I like to take time with it. I describe in depth and detail what I see in her. And what I’m thankful for. I want her to settle in with the appreciation, really take it in, so she can integrate it into her view of herself.

I usually just give people one piece of feedback at a time, because if I overdose them with a bunch of pluses and minuses all at once they don’t know what to do with them.

When I had to talk with Annie about her communication style, I didn’t just lay my feedback on her and walk away and leave her with it on her own. I made sure we had plenty of time to talk. I asked her which of her strengths she could bring into play to improve her communications. Once she figured that out, she lit up, took charge, and was suddenly motivated to solve the problem. Cold information rarely works.

When I give feedback, I want him to ask me questions. I need to have a back-and-forth conversation. I need to know he’s not misreading what I’m saying to him.

I had to talk with Tomas about how he always comes to meetings ten minutes late, just a little bit late, but always, always late. I mentioned the issue, touched on it lightly, then shut up. There was a pause. A long one. Then he jumped into the silence and said, “I know I do that and I wish I didn’t.” And now he’s leading the conversation and it’s not a correction anymore. I’m just there helping him with something he wants to change.

Timing matters. Knowing what’s going on with a person. Knowing their readiness. Three weeks ago Joellen’s daughter was in the hospital. She’s still dealing with that. Not the right time to address an issue I want to bring up with her. Certainly not a time to slap a 360 on her.

Compare the warmth of these leaders doing nuanced, loving advocacy with a 360 printout.

In the spirit of being advocates for activists, let’s zip through the key problems with 360s.

1. The numbers are not standardized.
What one person means with a 7 can be very different from what another person means. 

There are hard graders: “I never give anyone a 10 for anything unless they’ve created the cure for cancer.” And there are easy graders: “I like her so much I just gave her a 10 on everything.”

How informative can a rating be if you don’t know what the raters were thinking when they gave you your number and you can’t ask them questions about their scores?

2. The qualities or skills that are rated have no specific definition.
Ask a dozen people to tell you what “initiative” means to them and what do you think you’ll hear? One focused, coherent definition or a continuum of different definitions?

Or take a skill like “communication.” How is it possible to rate that without the context? Are we looking at how you communicate with your staff, with the street kids in your program, with donors at a fancy event, in the newsletter you send out each month, in a tough negotiation with a competing nonprofit?

And what if you’re really good in some contexts and not so good in others, but it all gets smooshed together under a single rating, what can you learn from a smoosh?

Also, some people give ratings based on personal preferences that have nothing to do with job performance, or worse, are contrary to effective job performance…

“I gave him a 10 on communication because he’s always super polite and never makes anyone uncomfortable. He always finds a way to say yes. He’s a people-pleaser and I like that.”

“My last boss I rated a 2 because she was forthright. She wasn’t unkind, but still I didn’t know how to respond to her. I couldn’t keep up with her. In my family we never talked directly about anything.”

But what if effectiveness as a leader means you have to say no sometimes, big noes, and you have to be forthright so people know what you mean when you’re talking with them?

3. If you combine numbers that don’t have any defined meaning with terms that have no defined meaning, you get an indeterminate result.
A lot of the ratings on a 360 could be read as: “You got a something on something.”

4. 360s are not science. Apart from the comments section they are imprecise renderings of opinions.
The beautiful four-color charts and the graphs with the tick marks and spider webs produced by professional 360 computerized programs are minimally meaningful because there’s nothing about a graph that gives it any kind of scientific authority if the input is mushy.

5. Averages hide more than they reveal.
Here’s a snippet of a 360 debriefing conversation…

“Isabel, you got a 6.6 on communication.”

“A 6.6?! That’s all? That bums me out. I work really hard at communication. All my friends say I’m the best. How can I be so bad at it here at work?”

“Well, I happen to have the actual numbers. Let me read them to you and see if it makes any difference. The individual raters gave you scores of 9, 10, 10, 2, and 2.”

“Wow, that’s quite a spread.”

“What does it tell you?”

“Three people think I’m in the top range so that’s reassuring that I’m not crazy.”

“And the 2s?”

“Oh, I wonder…”

“What?”

“I have two staff who I’ve got on correction plans. I’ve been having intense and serious conversations with them. I’d bet they gave me the 2s, but I don’t know that for sure.”

“That’s right, you don’t know for sure, but if they were the ones who did what would that mean?”

“That might mean that maybe I was an excellent communicator, clear and direct, but they didn’t like what I was communicating.”

6. How do the raters get prepared?
Some raters take the 360 seriously and think deeply about you. Others want to get it over with as quickly as possible so they give cursory responses. Some raters are in an advocacy mood when they’re thinking about you, some are not.

Who prepares the raters? What does that involve? Not all raters are good at assessing skills. If we rated the raters on their ratings how would each one fare?

7. Sometimes the context makes a rating irrelevant.
From a debriefing…

“Pete, you got a 2 on delegating.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Why?”

“Because when I took over here as program director things were a mess. The ED and Board told me my job is to do whatever it takes to turn things around.”

“Have you done delegating in the past?”

“Yes. I’m actually known for being very good at that. At my last organization I got a 9.5 for delegating.”

“What’s different here?”

“There’s no one I can trust to delegate to in my program as it stands now. Once I do the turn-around I’ll get back to delegating. And next year at this time I’ll get another 9.5.”

“So what’s going on now?”

“I’ve made development plans with six of my staff and they’re coming along nicely. But there are two who are fighting me tooth and nail and I don’t see a future for them here. They’re also the most vocal about wanting more authority.”

“So then this rating…”

“Means nothing. I shouldn’t have been rated on delegating this year. It’s not in my job description yet. The 360 didn’t know that.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“See the nice shredder over there….”

8. Number rating systems tend to push people into a more judgmental, less empathic mood.
One time I did a workshop which I limited so six participants so we could get personal and go deep. It was intense and exactly what I hoped for. Afterwards one of the women came up to me, with her eyes glistening, just short of tears, and said, “This is going to change my leadership in a profound way. I’m going to be so much happier.”

But then when I looked at her evaluation (her name was on it,) she rated the workshop a 3 out of 5. I didn’t know what to make of that.

Did she think her happiness was only worth a 3? Was she lying when she was talking to me? It sure didn’t seem like it.

But it got me thinking about how you might get a heartfelt response in person, and a judgmental response when you ask that same person to get into the mindset of an evaluator and give you a number grade.

9. We say raters have anonymity, but…
We all try to guess who made what comment. Or who gave us a bad score to drag our average down. We’re human beings after all, we’re gossipy, we always want to know who said what about whom, especially when we’re the whom.

From a debriefing…

“Look at this comment: ‘She’s kind of cold.’ I know exactly who said that, and wow, that makes me mad because I try so hard with her and here’s the thanks I get.”

“Are you absolutely sure she’s the one who said it?”

“Mostly sure, I’d say 95%, but no, not absolutely.”

“And the consequence if she didn’t say it?”

“Oh, I see. If I’m guessing wrong then I’ve made two mistakes. I’m going to be mad at her and I’m going to miss the fact that someone I think likes me actually doesn’t. Arrrgh.”

“What do you want to do about that arrrgh?”

“I want to have some direct conversations with my staff about how they like working for me. Not to ferret out who made that comment on that 360, though I admit I want to know, but mostly because I’m committed to having really great working relationships with all my staff.”

10. There’s a tendency to globalize negative comments.
From a debriefing…

“They say I’m really difficult to work for. I thought they liked me. They tell me they’re happy working for me. They tell me that often. Maybe they don’t really mean it. Maybe I should just get out of here if they don’t want me around.”

“How many comments said you were difficult?”

“Oh. Just one.”

“Why does it feel like more?”

“Because this 360 comes across as so authoritative.”

“And?”

“I guess I’m giving it too much weight.”

“I notice the 360 didn’t tell you why the person who made that negative comment made it.”

“No, it didn’t and that’s so frustrating because if I knew why, maybe there’s something I could do to fix it.”

We humans are designed to pay more attention to the negatives than the positives. There’s an evolutionary reason why that’s so. We spent most of our history over the eons as hunter-gatherers. We lived in small bands of maybe 30-40 individuals embedded in larger groups of maybe 150-200.

Being a member in good standing in your tribe or band or group was a matter of life and death. If you got kicked out you would likely die. So if someone had it in for you, that was a very serious issue and you’d better deal with it immediately.

We’re hardwired to react to criticism or attack as though it were a state of emergency because it used to be that. Nowadays, though, if someone in our workplace attacks us relentlessly and we can’t make it stop, we can bail out and go get another job and never see them again. We have options our ancestors did not have. But we’re still hard-wired to respond to attacks as if they were a matter of life and death.

12. You don’t have to listen to any feedback wrapped in an attack.
From a debriefing…

“I got a comment that I’m an uncaring person who thinks she’s better than everyone else.”

“And what was that tied to?”

“That I interrupt people all the time.”

“And what do you think about that?”

“The day after I got my 360 report, I watched my behavior carefully and it’s true I do interrupt a lot.”

“And what do you notice about that?”

“Well, I don’t think I’m trying to cut people off. I get excited about what they’re saying and want to be in the conversation with them. It’s my way of saying, ‘I’m with you.’ I grew up in New York City, in a family where we all kind of talked at once. It’s what I’m used to. But I can see its not working here in the Midwest.”

“So…”

“I guess I should be thankful to that person who attacked me.”

“How’s that feel?”

“Not good. It kind of poisons my mood. The attack doesn’t motivate me to change. It makes me want to drag my feet. I just wish people would tell me directly that they’d like me to back off some. Make a request and give me a chance to change before resorting to criticism.”

“Here’s a perspective to consider: You don’t have to accept anything from an attacker. You don’t ever have to be thankful to an attacker even if they have latched on to something that’s true about you. You don’t ever have to accept a truth from someone who is hurting you with it.”

“Okay, that makes sense to me. And it’s a relief. But then what do you do?”

“You go find someone who is on your side who can give you that truth all over again in an advocacy way.”

“I like that! I can do that. My ED is the best supervisor ever. She’s on my side. Tomorrow I’ll tell her I want to stop interrupting people. And we’ll make a plan together and I’ll ask her to hold me accountable because I know she’ll do that in a supportive way. And then this attack will be irrelevant.”

13. Sometimes the 360 reveals that the problem is with the organizational culture, not with you.
From a debriefing…

“All of the comments, 15 of them to be exact, criticized me for being too detail-oriented and having too many protocols and being too demanding with standards that are too high.”

“What’s your reaction to that?”

“When I read the 360 last night I was so mad I was stomping around my apartment yelling, until my partner couldn’t keep it in anymore and burst out laughing.”

“Laughing?”

“She shouted, ‘Hooray!’ ”

“Why?”

“Because, she said, ‘Now you’re going to leave that pitiful place.’ See, this organization thrives on chaos. When I took over the program department I thought I could change it. But what this 360 tells me is the staff here are deeply committed to chaos, the whole lot of them. I just didn’t realize how deeply.”

“It’s really bad?”

“Is it ever. So far this year, they’ve missed 20% of the scheduled teen workshops because they don’t have a system for getting them on the calendar or a system for assigning staff to each workshop.

“So I stepped in and started doing that stuff myself and they resent it. And in spite of my vigorous efforts they’re still managing to miss workshops. I’m not even sure they’re going to get their main grant renewed. The program officer is not happy with them.”

“And you?”

“I’m out of there! Thank you, 360!”

14. There are many contraindications for running a 360 process in an organization.
Here are a few examples of how we need to use our smarts when we’re bringing a 360 into the complicated human environment of a nonprofit.

If the organization is swamped in relational aggression with personality battles raging, the 360 will just become swept into the battles and might well be weaponized. What’s needed is for the organization to declare a state of emergency and do whatever it takes to upgrade their operating system and resolve in a healthy way whatever is driving the relational aggression. Then they can do their 360s if they want.

Don’t allow people who are on correction plans to be raters. That can undermine the authority of the supervisor, which is not good for the supervisor, but also not good for the staff person. “Over my objection, the Board insisted that she be part of the 360 and behind that she developed the attitude that I couldn’t tell her anything anymore, like the Board was backing her against me. I had thought she was finally getting her acting out under control but after the 360 it flared up full force. In the end I had to fire her.”

Make sure the 360 is reinforcing what you want to reinforce. I know of a situation where a Board required Gabriela, the ED, to have a 360 and the Board picked the raters, one of whom was Merv, the ED of competing nonprofit, who delivered a miserable rating and lots of angry comments. And what exactly was it that would have made Merv a happy rater? If Gabriela gave him the flagship program of her nonprofit. In this case the negative rating was actually a big plus, a sign that she was standing her ground. Did the Board mean to indicate that they thought their ED should make everyone happy at any cost?

15.  360s, even at their best, are only snapshot. We need to see the movie.
Maria is not the best at public speaking. Right now Doug is better at speaking for your organization. That’s because English is Maria’s second language. She only started learning it two years ago when she first came to the US.

But she’s trucking. She keeps working at it. She keeps taking classes. She still makes mistakes, but sometimes the way she puts things, the twist she puts on a sentence, turns it into pure poetry.

In six months, she’s going to pass Doug by because he’s coasting. He’s self-satisfied. Compare them in this moment and Doug’s #1. But Maria is the one to invest in. Trajectory matters. How far you’ve come tells us a lot about how far you might go. 360s are not good at trajectory.

And there are life experiences that make a very big difference in what people can accomplish. Maria knows what it’s like to be disregarded because of her accent and hated because she’s an immigrant. She understands extreme poverty on a personal level. She’s had to persevere through very hard times. 

So she brings a special empathy and passion to her work with at-risk teens that Doug just doesn’t have. He has lots of great qualities. He’s good at his job. He rates really well on conventional 360s.

It would take a new kind of 360 to show off Maria’s talents and the depth that comes with her life experience.