Here is a guest post from Kevin Watson - details at the end of this article.  The article continues our theme of inviting people we trust and know to write articles on topics linked to 360 degree feedback and performance appraisals.  If you would like to write an article then "get in touch".

7 principles of feedback

1. Choose correct timing for feedback:

Feedback is most effective when given as soon as possible after the behaviour has been observed. Immediate feedback will help to reinforce a desired behaviour and make it more likely to happen again.

2. Ask for self assessment:

Asking the person for his or her own assessment first will involve them in the feedback and helps to generate a dialogue between the coach and coachee. As people are often well aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, encouraging them to voice their own opinions before providing your own will help them take responsibility for their own performance.

3. Focus on specifics:

When you focus on a specific behaviour, you avoid the risk of personality differences and the other person will be more willing to accept the feedback. For example, when providing corrective feedback:

Do: "When you were talking to customer xyz, I noticed that you forgot to use her name"

Don't: "You are not building rapport with the customer"

And when providing praise:

Do: "When you spoke to customer xyz, I noticed that you used really good open and closed questioning techniques"

Don't: "You communicated well there"

4. Limit feedback to a few important points:

Good leaders identify one or two critical areas and help the person address them one at a time. Restrict your feedback to one or two important points so that you do not overwhelm the other person with too many things to consider.

5. Provide more praise than corrective feedback:

Positive reinforcement is one of the strongest factors in bringing about change. Unfortunately most people only focus on the negative.

6. Give praise for expected performance:

People deserve to be praised for doing their job to the expected level. However, too many people take the expected level for granted.

7. Develop Action Plans:

Work together to identify the desired performance or result and how it can be achieved. Decide when the steps will be accomplished.

Call to action!

On a scale of 1 to 10 (where 1 is poor and 10 is excellent) rate your performance against each of the principles above when providing feedback to your team and colleagues.

Finished? What do you notice? Is there any one principle that is particularly stronger than the others? What do you do that makes this so strong?

Which principle is relatively weaker than the others and what can you possibly do to strengthen this? When can you start to exercise your feedback skills in this principle and with whom?

Kevin Watson

My Own Coach Limited

http://myown-coach.co.uk

Kevin Watson is a coach, trainer and consultant supporting personal and team development by pushing beyond those self imposed boundaries and inspiring a call to action, helping them become stronger and measurably more successful in their own terms.

He is an accredited coach with the CIPD and Oxford School of Coaching & Mentoring and a Master Practitioner of NLP.

His professional experience spans over 25 years in retail and was part of the senior team responsible for taking Selfridges from an old department store to the shopping experience it is today.

I was checking something today and noticed that we had roughly 1000 360 degree feedback appraisals completed yesterday in our system.   It made me think.  If those had to be sent out on paper, I'd guess they would be 5 pages long;  3-4 questionnaire pages including open format questions and some sort of instruction page.  So, 5000 pages.  That is a lot of paper.

The great god google states that it takes one tree to create 8,333.3 sheets of paper (the sort of accuracy that some of our competitors generate from their 360 reports!).  Add in some people looking at their reports online rather than printing them and a good dollop of performance appraisal forms that we had completed yesterday as well and I suspect it is a tree's worth of paper.  Sort of interesting.

Brendan

This is a guest post from Kevin Watson.  We've known Kevin for a number of years and worked with him supporting his projects or using his great skills and experience where we have needed his expertise to support our clients.  We recommend him without reservation.  Here are his thoughts on the 360 degree feedback session.

"At first glance, going through a 360 degree feedback report with someone can appear just like a coaching session.

Sure, there are many similarities as you guide that person through the report, exploring the different perceptions, drawing attention to the important trends & patterns that help reach a deeper understanding of his or her performance as viewed by the different respondents.

 
As with coaching, the person is guided by the quality of questions asked and it is equally as important that these come from a place of non judgement, empathy & congruence.

However, a closer look will show a key difference from coaching and this can be critical for a successful debrief session.
 

Most coaching sessions follow a structure found in the GROW model. In this ever popular framework, the coach will help clarify the goal or outcome (Goal), explore the reality of the current situation (Reality), generate a number of possible options that can achieve what he or she wants (Options) and seek to gain commitment to a clear plan or strategy (Will).

However, the debrief session differs from this as it does not seek to draw out solutions or commitment from the recipient.
 

Instead, it recognises the need for feedback to simply be recognised as valid and for the person to have time & space to enable this deeper level of acceptance.
 

Only once this has been achieved can the coaching cycle be completed at a later time.
 

Put another way, maybe the framework to use for a great debrief session is simply GR!"
 

Kevin Watson

My Own Coach Limited

http://myown-coach.co.uk

 

Kevin Watson is a coach, trainer and consultant supporting personal and team development by pushing beyond those self imposed boundaries and inspiring a call to action, helping them become stronger and measurably more successful in their own terms.

He is an accredited coach with the CIPD and Oxford School of Coaching & Mentoring and a Master Practitioner of NLP.
 

His professional experience spans over 25 years in retail and was part of the senior team responsible for taking Selfridges from an old department store to the shopping experience it is today.

One of the core skills required of a 360 degree feedback debriefer is that of asking questions; naturally during our training programme, we delve into what type of questions these might be.

Given that one of the primary purposes of the debrief is to facilitate a balanced understanding of the feedback in the report, on the part of the recipient, ones questions should encourage the recipient to explore and reflect on the feedback.

Consequently, a 'good' question will often reveal more of a given situation, circumstance or context, to both you and more importantly to the recipient i.e. what assumptions have they built up in their day-to-day working? How far do they see the impact of their behaviour?

These type of powerful questions do not often come naturally, but a useful way to construct a question can be considering it's component parts; the construction, the scope and the assumption.

Construction refers to the what, who, when, where, how, and why?
Scope refers to you, they, your manager,the team, the department, the organisation.
Assumption refers to an underlying belief you may wish to challenge.

For example, if the recipient believes his fellow team members are inefficient in delivering projects, this presents you the opportunity to test the assumption:

WHAT leads you to believe THE TEAM is INEFFICIENT? WHEN do you see THE TEAM being inefficient?

It would be all too easy to accept their assumption that the team is inefficient and be drawn into resolution mode too early by asking, 'What needs to happen to make the team more efficient/less inefficient?'.

Better to ask as many questions as possible; change the construction, broaden or narrow the scope, and test the various underlying assumptions which inform their current view of the world.

John

We were delighted to run this session for the third time on Wednesday; thanks again for all those who attended and expressed an interest in our thoughts on 360 feedback.

As ever, we are really interested to understand how people are using 360 degree appraisal in their organisations, their good and not so good experiences, and their desire to conduct the process again with a keen eye on 'best practice'.

The session provided ample opportunity for attendees to discuss their experiences within groups, as well as exploring a 'real' 360 degree feedback report which highlighted the need to ensure the face-to-face debrief with a recipient was well prepared for.

Some questions raised and answered were, 'What sort of rating scale should I use?', 'How can ensure recipients don't just select their friends as respondents?, and 'When is the best time to share the report?'.

It was very enjoyable and interesting to have proper debate around the different schools of thought and approaches; 360 degree feedback practice, as with many things, is a broad church and pragmatism should help rule the day.

We will be running a session again later in the Autumn; please contact us if interested in attending, and we look forward to seeing some more of you in due course.

John

Just a reminder for the date of our next seminar entitled "How to successfully implement a 360 degree feedback process within your organisation", on Wednesday 21st July 2010.

This popular seminar is now running for the third time and offers attendees a great opportunity to learn, share best practice, ask questions and network.

By the end of the seminar, you will:

• Understand the critical factors that will ensure success when introducing 360 degree appraisal into your business
• Take away a checklist to help you work logically through the implementation process
• Appreciate the key principles that will help you design a great questionnire, communicate effectively to get company wide 'buy-in' and facilitate face-to-face debriefs.

If you cannot join us for the seminar then please do sign up for the webinar opposite, where we will be sharing the same content.

You can register for either event through the 'Free Stuff' registration form to the right hand side of this blog post or here

We hope to meet and speak with some more of you next month.

John

We are very pleased to announced dates for our latest seminar & webinar entitled "How to successfully implement a 360 degree feedback process within your organisation", on Wednesday 21st July and Thursday 22nd July respectively.

This popular seminar is now running for the third time and offers attendees a great opportunity to learn, share best practice, ask questions and network.

By the end of the seminar, you will:

• Understand the critical factors that will ensure success when introducing 360 degree appraisal into your business
• Take away a checklist to help you work logically through the implementation process
• Appreciate the key principles that will help you design a great questionnire, communicate effectively to get company wide 'buy-in' and facilitate face-to-face debriefs.

If you cannot join us for the seminar then please do sign up for the webinar, where we will be sharing the same content.

You can register for either event through the 'Free Stuff' registration form to the right hand side of this blog post.

We hope to meet and speak with some more of you next month.

John

360 degree feedback can become complicated.  Often there are some tricky things to think through.  What is useful when you are putting together a 360 feedback project is to have some key points to focus on and to test your solution against.  My three are

1. Ask the right questions
2. Follow a well-structured process
3. Have a great conversation around a great report

If you check whatever 360 feeedback process or service you devise against this list then you will do ok.  Are we asking the right questions?  Is our process well-structured?  Are the people involved going to have a great conversation around a great report?

Our 360 degree feedback white paper expands on these - but don't lose track of these simple requirements.

Brendan

We were very pleased to have been invited last month to present at a 'HR in Law' breakfast briefing seminar on how to implement a 360 degree feedback process within a firm.

As well as a high number of attendees, there seemed to be a real appetite for the topic with some great questions being raised about how to introduce the process within a partnership structure.

Not unsurprisingly, the concerns raised were less to do with the technology of an online system to handle the process, and more to do with how the critical face-to-face debrief should be approached.

We have written many times before as to what makes this stage of the process go well, and we re-iterated the points during this seminar; namely, that you quickly establish the boundaries of the debrief which is not to give the feedback but to explore the feedback with the partner.

The dynamic of the debrief changes instantly, as the recipient feels they have the opportunity to discuss the feedback without being judged; it becomes all about helping raise their self-awareness and where appropriate challenge them to accept that there are things worth paying attention to.

John

How this links to 360 degree feedback will follow!

Let's assume we have a basic traffic light system.  And we find out that we have the following distribution

• Red 50% of the time
• Amber 10% of the time
• Green 40% of the time

And someone wants to know what colour it is on average.  What to do?

Average requires numbers.  

So, let's give Red the number 1, Amber the number 2, and Green the number 3.  A bit of Maths will find the average now (50% *1) + (10% * 2) + (40% *3) ... 1.9 is the answer.

So our average is 1.9 which is nearest to Amber (which we gave the number 2).  So on average the colour of the traffic light is Amber ... somewhere in the middle.

We know this is wrong - the light is on amber least of all - but it was an attractive solution somehow. 

Even more tempting is to ask people to respond to a question with responses that can be

• Strongly Agree
• Agree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Disagree
• Strongly Disagree

and then give people a score out of 5 for how people answered on average.

Let's say we have done that and the average is 3.1.  What does that mean?  We're going to say that on average the respondents roughly "neither agree nor disagree" with the statement.  But go back to our traffic light example... the colour that the traffic light is least often is amber, what's to say the same hasn't happened here?

Statisticians will tell you that the underlying problem here is that you are treating categorical data as if it is numerical data; if you are very unlucky, you may find yourself in a debate about likert scales and the Polytomouse Rasch model.  What I want to highlight is, this superficially simple concept of giving each point a number and averaging the responses is not that simple and may lead to inaccurate conclusions.

Way's round it?  Either don't use averages in your report, or make it clear that you are using the scale to reflect a mark out of 5.  That at least gives your average credibility even if it doesn't get around the problem of the average obscuring the underlying scoring. 

Note, this doesn't stop you using numbers or charts in your report - I'll discuss that in another post.

This article forms part of the structure of a new white paper I am writing on reporting in 360 degree appraisals (I promise this is the heavily statistical bit and the rest is more down to what we see as best practice!).  If you sign up to our white papers, then you will receive that document as it is completed.  Click here to sign up.



Brendan

Just a brief pointer to a news story which caught my eye last week; the annoucement of a new soon to launch website www.failin.gs which offers the opportunity get feedback from anybody who knows you.

With a slight air of whimsy, it allows users to sign up and request anonymous feedback from anyone they choose; friends, family, colleagues, etc.

Not unsurprisingly, the comparison with 360 degree feedback in the workplace is made and it naturally brings out comments from psychologists and alike who question it's usefulness and merit; rightly so, they highlight that it has to be handled appropriately if being used for meaningful ends.

The idea of feedback from outside the workplace is potentially a good one for people who may wish to pinpoint changes they wish to make in their lives; it carries forward the idea that others can see our strengths and weakenesses with greater clarity then sometimes we can.

Or maybe it's just a chance to tell a friend they are a little mean when it comes to buying a drink after work.....

John

I thought of this phrase again recently after another of our one-day 360 degree feedback debrief training sessions.

In this instance I was delivering the training to a number of managers who were going to conduct the debriefs with their own team members; as their 'Line Manager', they had contributed to the 360 degree feedback report itself, and so their ratings and comments were on show accordingly.

What I noticed this time and before, is the way 'Line Managers' can find it more difficult to do a debrief more so than say a HR person, or a Coach, or any independent person who doesn't have a direct supervisory relationship with the 360 feedback recipient.

The challenge they often face is that they want to 'solve the problem' for the recipient (and themselves in the process); in doing so, they will often move very quickly from exploring the feedback to simply asking 'So what are you going to do about this issue?'.

Whilst this may be a vaild question when the recipient comes to put an action plan together, it is far too early to move to solution mode before understanding the feedback in greater depth.

For much of the debrief, in fact pretty much all of it we would advocate, the focus should be on raising the self-awareness of the recipient and having them accept there is something to be done.

Perhaps the title should read, 'Line Managers are from Mars, Skilled debriefers are from Venus'...comments on a postcard please....

John

Having worked with Bowland and a number of other 360 tools over the last few years, my aim here is to share some lessons learnt and gain views from others.  As a bit of background, I work as a people development consultant with professional services and public sector clients.  In my former career, I was Head of Learning and Development for a 'top five' Built Asset Consultancy that employed over 3000 people internationally.   So, here are the five top lessons I've learnt over the years. 

1.  Understand the context

Working as a consultant, often a 360 degree feedback process forms part of the client's desire to change and develop their people as part of a leadership programme, is part of a performance appraisal process, or is an external manifestation of a desire to develop a coaching culture where 'open and honest feedback' becomes the norm.   If a client has experience of the 360 process or is an HR/L&D expert then this is often the case - i.e. you immediately understand the context in which you are approaching the process.

In my experience, however, many clients will launch into a 360 solution before really understanding the issue they wish to address, or an understanding of the process.   I've had calls which simply say 'Sue, John needs a 360 report, he's got the self-awareness of a bull in a china shop and has no idea.  I need evidence.  Can you send him a link to a 360 thing so we can sort it out?".   The short answer is "no".  The long answer is "why?"

My view is that to really get the most from a 360 tool, you need to ask the right questions of the organisation upfront to understand what they want to achieve - both at an organisation level and for the individual.  Only once you know this, all the planning, the communication and the design process can begin.

2.   Select the right tool for the job

Only once I know what the client wants to achieve can I select the right tool.  Countless times I've had clients (SME's and large organisations) ask me to "create something quickly" or not appreciate the amount of preparation, positioning and communication that needs to sit around a 360 tool for the process to be successful.  For very small audiences, this might include being asked to use Word or Excel to get feedback and co-ordinate it all via e-mail, or using a tool like Survey Monkey. 

I have personally received feedback using processes like this and whilst the feedback itself was useful, I can be sure the time it took the administrator to co-ordinate the process and produce a half-decent report was money ill-spent. 

Just because you are already paying an administrator a salary, don't think that it's time well spent to create a cheap 360 process in house using Excel/Word/E-Mail etc. and that the cost of using a proper 360 feedback tool is wasted - think of the quality of the output, the ease of the process and the benefits of letting a tool and an expert manage the process, so you can focus on the results.  Pay the money and let the tool manage the process.

3.  Position the process and manage expectations.

Depending on the context of the 360 process, you need to design a communications strategy to manage the expectations of those being rated and the respondents.  This will be different depending on the circumstances and might include meeting with line managers to gain their support, ensuring those being rated (and those doing the rating) know why, what and how the data will be used. 

I quite like the model of having a senior group of people going through the process before their team members, so that they can extol the virtues of the 360 feedback process to them and gain trust in the process.  This also means that those being rated may have also just rated their line manager.

Depending on the organisation's culture and purpose of the process, I might also suggest that the 360 feedback is kept entirely confidential - i.e. the results are only seen by the external consultants (me and my team) and the individual who has been rated.   Although I cannot categorically prove this alters the results and drives more honesty, I have seen it create trust in the process where there may otherwise have been scepticism.  Often the client sponsor may only receive a summary of trends and results.

4.  Keep focused on the outcome

This is something that I think is often lost on a 360 project.  Yes, you will want to align any questions and tools with your own organisational competencies.  Yes, you might want to brand your 360 feedback process to make it your own.  And yes, you might need to get sign off on all communications from your Board to ensure they align with your business strategy and goals. 

But remember, the purpose of the process is (probably) to give individual's feedback on their performance, to develop their skills in certain areas and build their self-awareness.  So, whilst I completely understand that anything you do needs to align with your people strategy, when designing a 360 don't lose sight ot the outcome and then react accordingly. 
A client once said to me, "Sue, we can't issue the 360 until our leadership competency framework is complete and that's not being signed off for nine months".   My response was to understand the context of the 360 (in this case a leadership programme affecting a small proportion of the employees) and to ask the client what generic leadership competencies he thought the business might want to measure (Bowland has a 'vanilla 360' which lists out the common one's which is useful).  And then we were off - giving feedback to individual's in the programme within weeks, not months.  As I've said, focus on the outcome for the individual and the organisation and make a decision accordingly.

5.  Manage the individual's receiving the feedback.

I know from the recent Bowland talk I attended that Brendan is passionate about giving the feedback report to the individual in the feedback session and not before.  Having done this both ways, one big lesson learnt is to wholeheartedly agree.   However innocous you may view the comments in a report, the recipient may read it differently, given their perception of their environment. 

You can easily end up with a defensive individual in the session on a witch hunt to find the person who says they 'always do X' when they think they only 'sometimes' do it - and this rather detracts from the process.   Likewise, you have no idea of the emotional state of the individual if you send them the report 'cold'.

And finally.. 

As a consultant I would always recommend repeating the process regularly (6-12 months), integrating it with others business processes and using it as a benchmark of performance improvement.  In my mind 360s are a great way for an L&D or HR Leader to address the 'return on investment issue' of any project without having to covert the result into hard cash, which is often a tricky one to prove. 

A conversation which runs "50% of our people thought our line managers were poor in leadership skills a year ago, but now 85% of them think they are strong, and this is down to our leadership programme/coaching development/investment in X" is music to my ears.

Sue Miles is Director at Chaseville Consulting Ltd and works alongside clients as their extended arm to design and deliver people development projects.
www.chaseville.co.uk

This is the final post in a series from our 360 degree appraisal white paper.  In many ways it is the most important in that it talks about the conversation at the end of the process.

We like to use the term 'debrief ' to refer to the session where a recipient receives their feedback. It is not a coaching session – its focus is simply to ensure that the report is understood and the recipient has the opportunity to ask immediate questions.

Our first principle is that the recipient should not receive the report prior to the debrief session.  The 360 report can be powerful and has the potential to be misunderstood. The ability to place feedback in context, avoid misunderstanding, and spot potential issues is a core skill of the debriefer.

Our second principle is that the debriefer is there to enable understanding not proffer opinion.

During the meeting there is often the opportunity to challenge the recipients interpretation of the feedback but that should come from a standpoint of seeking understanding not of offering solutions

Here is our structure for a debrief session.

• Introduction and welcome
• Explain the purpose of the 360 feedback debrief
• Get the recipient to briefly describe their role
• Briefly describe how the report is structured
• Hand over the report and invite the recipient to skim-read it
• Ask for their overall reaction
• Review strengths
• Review potential development areas
• Identify actions
• Agree next steps
• Ask for feedback on the 360 process and the debrief

Brendan

The rating scale in 360 degree feedback can be oddly contentious.  Everyone has an opinion.  Here is our view based on a lot of experience (which of course makes us right !)

How many rating points?

We recommend as few as possible.
Keep it simple. Our standard scale would be 3 points plus 'not applicable'. So; Strength, Competent, Development Area would be a great scale. We work with longer scales but we find that they add complexity more than they provide information.

Should there be a middle point?

Yes.
We know the fear - everyone will score in the middle (the Veblen effect). But they don't - really, they don't. And often people have a "she's fine", "ambivalent", "mixed feelings" type
response that they want to give. Forcing them to go positive or negative creates a false response.

Is “not applicable” allowed?

Yes.
You might call it something else : "no evidence"? But in 30 or so questions we have to expect some people to just not know.  Now - most importantly, you should review the responses to questions to ensure that questions are not overloaded with N/A responses - or that one group of respondents are answering in this way. If they are then the question requires rewording or removing.

The words : We favour scales such as "Strength", "Development Area" rather than "Often","Sometimes".

The latter scale, citing frequency, are however effective and really this is just personal preference. I find that the behaviours read better as a statement rather than as a question and this fits with a statement based rating scale. What I would avoid at all costs is
a numerical rating scale.

Overall thoughts

The rating scale in 360 degree feedback is less important than people make it - I believe that respondents look at it initially to get a feel for where to place their mark but really they are providing graduated feedback more than specific.

When debriefing though you do tend to use the rating scale as part of the language - and for that reason we concentrate on how the report will look when we are designing the rating scale rather than how it appears in the questionnaire.

Want to read more?  Download our 360 degree appraisal white paper.


Brendan

A 360 degree feedback questionnaire falls out of your competency framework.  Here are our rules of thumb for your questionnaire.

• Between 20 and 40 questions is about right
• Usually we see these as groups of 3-5 questions per competency
• Adding a narrative question for each competency is normally the right way to go.
• Consider whether every group of people can answer every question. If not, then exclude the questions from that group. So, peers may answer a subset of the overall question set for example (and so reduce the burden upon them).
• It can be useful to have a question (or even 2 or 3) at the end of the 360 that asks people to give broader feedback or cover points they would like to make
• Questions should be brief, clear and unambiguous, and describe an observable behaviour
• If you have people for whom English is not their first language then we would recommend translation of the questions. You probably don't need to translate the whole system but the nuance of questions matters

Questionnaire design can be a technical area - but if you stick to relatively short, clear questions then you can avoid issues that can flow from having complex overlapping questions which ask about more than one behavior.  As ever, simplicity is crucial in 360 degree feedback.

Brendan

In previous posts I've discussed the principles of a 360 degree feedback focused competency framework and I've given some rules of thumb.  Here is how I would go about creating a framework in practice.

• Start with your values and stated strategy - look to existing materials and language (collect any relevant documents/posters etc)
• Get directors, or senior management to express their desired behaviours – a facilitated workshop around suggested behaviours is an excellent way of drawing this out
• Seek to identify best practice in each area
• Involve managers and staff, outside of HR, in design and implementation - a series of workshops works brilliantly in reviewing your first drafts
• Keep it simple : use straight-forward language
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Train people in how to use, understand, and assess against the competencies which often challenges the core of the organisation.

By involving people through the process you will ensure that when you create a question set for your 360 feedback the respondents and recipients will recognise the language and feel that the questions are highly relevant.

This is an excerpt from our 360 degree appraisal white paper.


Brendan

Continuing this series of posts on how to get a 360 degree feedback project up and running, let's look at the design phase.

The design phase covers reports, competencies, and questionnaire design. We try to start with the report – by doing so, you recognise that it is the output of the process that is important. 

The competencies are very important, but if you start with how the report will be structured, it focuses the mind on how these competencies will be used.

One of our key principles is that 360 degree appraisal is a method of consolidating feedback rather than averaging it; consequently, this influences everything we do so let me spend a little time on it.

360 is useful when it describes to you the range of responses that your colleagues give against observable behaviours. That some people think you are a star at delegating while two of your direct reports find your approach troublesome, is the value of 360.
So, only create scores or averages where they give value rather than obscuring information.

Second, we believe that narrative feedback offers the richest information - the rating scales simply tell you where to look. Anyone who has given 360 feedback will tell you that the comments that raters provide give you the evidence and narrative that explains or gives context to the behavioural scoring.

With these principles in mind, in my next post I'll draw out the detail of how we go about designing the report (competencies and questions will follow later).

(This series of posts are excerpts from our 360 degree appraisal white paper).

Brendan

One of the questions on 360 degree feedback rating scales is - should we allow a 'not applicable' option?  It may be phrased as "don't know" or "no evidence" - the question is should we let people not give a full response.

We have always argued that you should and to the fear of some clients' that it will be over used, we have responded - don't worry it just isn't.

As we have a databank of millions of responses to 360 degree feedback, today I checked that out.  Over all of our millions of responses we have a 6% selection of 'n/a' or a similar option.  About what I expected.   And I can now say "don't worry about it" with more confidence.

One thing to point out - don't be too casual about this.  As part of your review of a successful 360 degree feedback process we would always recommend that you checked out how many n/a's you received on each question and from each respondent group.  You may need to remove or reword a question if people are unable to give a response.


Brendan
 

I found myself trying to answer the question "should we use a rating scale of 1 to 10 or 1 to 5 for our 360 degree feedback.  Trying to be helpful, I started thinking through the merits of both approaches.  Easiest route to answer this type of question is to think about it from the respondents perspective.  And that is when you spot the problem.  I don't know what being a 3 out of 5 or 10 at "delegating" or "client service" means.  It just doesn't work.

We often encourage clients to not use numbers in their reports - our belief is that averaging at an individual level usually loses more than it gains.  Using numbers for the respondent is almost impossible to implement.  So, the answer is use a worded rating scale.  5 points normally works with a not applicable/no evidence option.

Brendan