Over the last month or two I have been writing about our standard 360 degree feedback process.  I have finally arrived at the most important part of the process - indeed the reason you should be undertaking the whole initiative.

An effective debrief is a crucial element in 360 feedback.  The report - in whatever layout and format - should have brought together the feedback of the various respondents.  The recipient of that feedback needs guidance on the report, assistance in understanding the feedback provided, and often support in drawing actions from that feedback. 

The debrief is so crucial that I will draw out a number of separate posts that cover our suggested best practice.  If this area is of particular interest to you, can I suggest you go to our main blog page and in the right hand panel (you may need to scroll) there is a search option ... type "debrief" in there and you will get various articles we have posted.

For now - here is a bullet point list of our structure for a debrief which is derived from a training course we run for in-house for our clients or as an open course for other interested parties.

• Introduction and welcome
• Explain the purpose of the 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

The most controversial element with clients is whether to hand over the feedback report before the debrief takes place.  We believe best practice is to hand it over in the debrief session - a topic for another discussion.


Brendan