Verbal 360 Degree Feedback Coaching

Today many companies use 360 degree feedback systems to help their managers and leaders to develop. Most often these systems consist of predetermined questions around the leadership values that the organization has identified as part of a strategic leadership culture initiative. These questions are then put into an online system.  Each leader in the organization can send this questionnaire to informants of their choice: their bosses, their peers, their direct reports or even customers.  Each of the informants answers the questions by checking a box between “agree completely” and “disagree”. In most systems there is even room for one or two verbal comments.  What I found working with these systems is that most managers immediately go to the verbal comments and ignore the average numbers and the range.  And, indeed, it is very hard to say what exactly it means when somebody slightly disagrees with the statement “Mr. Y is a visionary leader”. It is actually even harder for the recipient of the 360 degrees feedback to find out what to do to become a more visionary leader or even to know whether this is what people want from him. Open Space Technology resulted from the observation that “the most important conversations happen in the coffee break”. My SF 360 Feedback  is derived from a similar observation: “Talking about solutions helps”.  So whenever you would like to help an organization create better leaders in their company, SF 360 Feedback is a good option to choose.

How it works:

First step:

You have an individual meeting with the leader who would like to get better at what she does. The conversation is mainly a goal setting conversation. You ask questions like:

–          If this 360 degrees feedback process is useful for you what will be different afterwards?

If you want to read more, download the article here: SF360 Feedback