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341: How to Process Your 360 Feedback, with Tom Henschel

39m 34s

341: How to Process Your 360 Feedback, with Tom Henschel

This episode of Coaching for Leaders, featuring executive coach Tom Henshel, explores how to effectively use 360-degree feedback for leadership development. A 360 gathers anonymous input from an individual’s superiors, peers, and direct reports, offering a holistic view of their impact. Tom emphasizes that 360s are most powerful when tied to coaching or development programs, not performance management, as raters may withhold honest feedback if they fear negative consequences. Confidentiality is key: in coaching engagements, only the recipient sees the raw data, fostering trust and enabling deeper self-reflection. Recipients are not obligated to act on every comment or identify who said what; instead, they should focus on recurring themes for the greatest developmental impact. Tom notes that most people have already heard the feedback before, so the real value is in recognizing patterns and prioritizing growth areas. The episode also advises recipients to thank raters but avoid over-communicating about specific feedback, as anonymity protects the process. Overall, a well-handled 360 can be career-transformative by providing clear, actionable insights into how one is perceived and where to focus improvement efforts.

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You may have heard that getting a 360 is a good idea. Maybe your organization is offering a through a coach or the leadership program you're in is offering it. But what should you expect and how do you get the most out of a 360? On this episode Tom Henshel has tons of answers for us. This is Coaching for Leaders Episode 341. Produced by Innovate Learning Maximizing Human Potential Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders and I'm your host Dave Stahovjak. Leaders aren't born. They're made and this weekly show gives you access to the practical wisdom that will empower you to become a better leader. Of course one of the ways that we become better as leaders is by getting feedback and I have often received the question over the years about how to solicit feedback effectively and one of the tools that I'm often asked about is how to effectively use a 360. Many people in our audience have certainly done 360s in the past. Many of you listening will have a 360 done either suggested to you or maybe you'll decide on your own to do it throughout your career. I have a lot of questions about this even recently and so I thought I would call up the person I know who's got the best expertise in utilizing 360s has done it a ton over the years and someone of course you know well too and that is Tom Henshel. My friend Tom Henshel is the host of the Look and Sound of Leadership podcast. If you have been listening to this podcast for any length of time you know I've been on a mission for a long time to get all of you listening to that show as well because Tom does a brilliant job of featuring a monthly executive coaching tip from the perspective of his work with clients. He's a very gifted executive coach and also a dear friend. Tom I'm so glad to welcome you back to the show. I am so glad to be here. Thanks Dave. So 360s. Wow there's so much we could say on this isn't there. Yeah. Let's start with what a 360 is. I know there are a bunch of people in our audience who know what a 360 is but there's also folks listening like I've heard this term. What is it? Right so 360 are you know the points on the compass it gets you all the way around the wheel. A 360 is you at the center. You are the hub of the wheel and you're going to get feedback from people above you. People on the sides of you your peers and then people below you in the organization and you're going to get them all. Usually it's divided up so you'll know the different categories but that's the 360 feedback instrument. And there's many different kinds. So different kinds of instruments. I just want to say that I think 360s are possibly career transformative. They're just enormously powerful. I'm an enormous supporter of them and I'm so glad that you're talking about them on the show. Only two. What is it that's so powerful about them? Well I think as human beings we have an innate wonder like how do people see us? You know how do we come off in the world? And 360s really help you get a picture of that. They really can gather information where you can look and go oh that's how I'm coming across. That's powerful. So I'm trying to get my head around this and I'm thinking about folks who've not had this done before and wondering like how does this work? Does someone show up someday and say hey you need to do a 360 from the HR organization or my manager or do I hire a coach? What have you seen work for people and what are some of the options? Well what I think you're asking is kind of why would it happen in your work? And I think it can get triggered by a couple of different things. One is if you're getting coaching almost always a 360 goes along with a coaching engagement. A lot of people that I know get 360s because they're in some sort of high potential leadership development program that might go six months or 12 months or even 18 or 24 months, 360 is part of that program. Some people get them in their MBA programs. I've rarely had a 360 happen just because you know somebody comes up to you one day and goes hey Dave we're going to do a 360 on you. It's like that's pretty unlikely that it would not be connected to something. And then one of the things that you and I can talk about is whether 360s are intended for performance management. Because here again I personally have a bias about this that 360s really I don't think are helpful as performance management tools. So if somebody came to you and said well we want to get you a 360 so that we can kind of give you a wake up call that would that would concern me. But I think it does happen sometimes just not very often. What's the concern for you about that because I've seen that same thing too. Well the concern for me is that if an organization is using 360s as performance management then the Raiders are going to be cautious. Most Raiders don't want to throw you under the bus. Most Raiders don't want to punish you. They might want to send you a message. But if they have a feeling like oh my gosh if I write something bad about Dave he's not going to get his promotion. Oh gosh if I write something bad about Dave he might lose his bonus. And by the way someday that might happen to me. Well then the 360s become a weapon and people start to get very cautious about them in the organization. Because here again I'm one day I'm going to get a 360 done on me but another day I'm going to be your Raider. If they're in the organization then I'm going to be contributing to 360s all the time. So when they're used as performance management then people tend to be cautious about them and not trust them. I have at least one story that's happened to me as a coach and this was years ago Tom coming to an organization when I didn't know as much as I do now. And we did a 360 and clearly the executive who had initiated this coaching engagement was hoping that the 360 would deliver a message to the person in the organization who was getting the 360 and it didn't. And I think part of it was that reason is it was not the culture in the organization to do 360 and so people were very cautious and it ended up being one of those things that I think it would have been better had the engagement not happen in some ways just because all of a sudden there was this muddled like well now what we wanted to quote unquote send a message and the message didn't get sent. And I've seen things like that and heard stories about that happening a few times in my career and so it really gets that's where this gets complicated if you don't think about it well and set up good expectations. Yes. So when I walk into an organization as an executive coach and I'm you know coaching for the first time in an organization one of the things that I want to know is how savvy is the organization around coaching and 360s because if I'm the first coach that's been there and I'm going to do the first 360 then the feedback possibly is not going to be very robust. But if I'm in an organization you know big organizations with tens to hundreds of thousands of employees where 360s have been being done for years and years and years everybody's kind of used to it and they know the game. So your story is you know yes that happens I'm sorry to hear it but it's one of the things that I think your listeners need to be thoughtful about is well gee I'm about to get a 360 but what's the organizational history and what's the culture around the 360 is my feedback and really be robust. If I really want to see how others see me am I really going to get it because if I'm the guinea pig if I'm the canary in the coal mine I might not get great feedback I might kind of get lukewarm feedback that's possible. One of the things I'm curious about coming back to what we were talking about earlier is just thinking through this feedback piece and the culture of this is who gets access to information and I asked some of our Academy members for questions about what they're wanted about 360s and three asked when managers receive 360 feedback about their employee what should they do with it any do's or don'ts and for me that almost generated an even larger question of if I'm getting a 360 from a coach or from someone inside the organization who sees the data how do you navigate that when you're working with someone Tom. So his question assumes that the manager is going to see the 360 that might happen if for example I'm part of a leadership development cohort where yeah the people who are running the leadership development program are going to see the 360 because they're going to work with me on it but if it's a coaching engagement it is in part of my agreement with an organization that the receiver is the only person who sees the data. Now the receiver can do what he or she wants with it the receiver can share it with let's say her boss the receiver can share it with her team I had I have had leaders who do that who say I'm going to send my entire team my 360 results it's like wow okay go ahead that's fine but my point is it's the receiver's option most of the time certainly in the coaching it's a confidentiality issue when it's tied to a bigger leadership development program or something then I think you might want to ask who's going to to see my feedback because again, you might want to know, is it going to get tied to my bonus? Is it going to get tied to my performance review? And if you're in an MBA program here again, who's going to see it? Are all the administrators in the program going to see it? You might need to clarify that. Okay, so there's so much I want to ask you about what you just said. First of all, tell me why you set it up that way with the confidentiality. Why is that important to you that just the person getting the coaching sees the data? When I use a 360 in my coaching engagements, they are one of three things that helps set the goals for the coaching. So the 360 is one thing. You, if I'm coaching you, you get to also have goals and your boss or the organization is going to have goals. Well, the 360 is only one of those things, but the reason why the 360 can really be robust and people trust that they can give you good feedback is because they know it's going to sit with you and only with you and you get to decide what you want to do with it. So I think that it's important that the receiver know, this is private. I'm not getting outed. Nobody's going to, you know, kind of expose me. And so I can actually take it in differently. And if I'm defensive about it, well, I can get over it in my own time, but I'm not being exposed. And I think that just makes the whole process very different. So I'm hearing two things from me there. One is how as a receiver, you receive the feedback and it's so there's a difference there. But the other thing I'm hearing you say to is if I know that and that's the expectation in an engagement and in the organization doing it, then as a rater, someone giving feedback, I'm also more likely to give more direct, real data versus maybe I make it a little softer than I intended. If I don't know what's going to happen with that. Exactly. That's exactly so. Yeah. I want to ask you something else about that too, just on assessments in general. And maybe this is just me getting a soap box here for a minute. But I just want to on any assessment, any organization does, even if it's an individual assessment, I so want whoever the consultant or the managers, whoever decides an assessment is going to be done is just to have some clarity upfront before people do to like who's getting the data. Is this going with our team? Is this going to get reported somewhere? And I think that all of that's fine. I think there's good reasons for the organization to get access to data from assessments that in place take. But I would just like to know that in advance, like if someone who's taking an assessment or is giving an assessment to people, I just think that that's a nice, clean thing to do if you're in the position of administering assessments. Yeah. I think it's a really important thing to know. And I would ask if you're suddenly being invited to receive 360 feedback. Yes, it's an important question to ask who's seeing my data decides me. Well, and I'm also curious about the other side of this because you said a moment ago of having leaders who've shared a lot of the data by their own choice with many of the people around them. And in some cases with their whole teams. And this actually lines up beautifully from the question I got from Katrina, who asked when you do a 360, how do you go about making sure people who give feedback are heard and feel like their feedbacks being acted on. And so the other question that goes along with that for me, Tom, is do you have an obligation as someone who has received feedback to tell people what was heard or to act on it? How do you navigate that? Well, so I'm going to broaden this a little bit because I think this goes to the issue of communication. If you are receiving feedback, let's imagine that I'm coaching you and we're going to do a feedback report on you, Dave. I'm going to work with you before the 360 to do a lot of communication with you and then you with your radars. So I'm going to encourage you to reach out to your radars first and say, Hey, you're going to hear from my coach. And this is what's going to happen. And yes, this is expected. And please give me good feedback. Then I'm going to reach out to those people. And I'm going to send them an email that I've worked on for years and years, Dave, to help people and understand what the process is and understand what's going to happen to their feedback and so on and so forth. And then you're going to get the feedback. And afterwards, because now this is Katrina's question, right, is what about afterwards? What's your obligation? None. I don't think there is any obligation other than the good manners of you reaching out and saying, thank you. Thanks for giving me feedback. Even if you don't know whether people responded or not. But once that's happened, the truth of matter is your radars don't know what the feedback was. They don't know if their feedback reflects others or was outlier. So you have no obligation to go to them and say, Oh, I know which comment was yours. Because by the way, you don't know which comment was theirs. It's anonymous feedback. And you certainly have no obligation to say, you know, I'm working on this thing, building better relationships with my peers because that's all the feedback I got. No, you might want to say that to people. But I don't think you have an obligation other than saying, thank you. I don't think you have any obligation at all. I'm thinking back to when we had Celahine on the show a few years back talking about accepting feedback. And I hear this in your answer, Tom, of this thought that a lot of us have of like, if we hear feedback from someone that we have to act on it. And that is a myth. Like we don't have to act on feedback, even if it's good feedback. We don't necessarily have to act on it. Well, but also to you know, Katrina said, how do we let our Raiders know that their feedback has heard to which I go, how would you even know that that person responded? You know that that person was on the list. But maybe, you know, you only got 98% response rate. And there's some people missing. Well, you don't know who isn't missing. How would you let people know they quote unquote got heard? You don't know who's commented. Who's? Well, and that raises a question too. Because often in 360s, there's a lot of qualitative feedback. And I know you do this a lot is as a solicit quality to feedback. How do you navigate confidentiality and anonymity with Raiders? And okay, this person said this thing and it's going to sound like it's them to the other person when they receive the feedback. How do you process that when you're working with someone? Wow. Okay. There's a loaded question. Well, well, now we're really getting down into the meat of it. Right. So let me first start with qualitative versus quantitative. And let me just make really clear. Quantitative feedback is data driven feedback bars charts, percentages, graphs, numbers. It's going to say to you, you rated yourself a four, you're boss rated you a three, your direct reports are rated you a five on this one question. And a lot of times it's in a competency. And then you can look at, you know, another part and see that that competency is made up of six different questions. And you can really drill down into the data, but that's what it is. It is data. And sometimes you get comparative data, like other people going through this program rated this or whatever. Qualitative feedback, as you noted, is what I do. I, my 360s are just four open-ended questions. And the 360 raters respond to those four open-ended questions, either in interviews or in emails. And it is put in verbatim into your report. And so you see nothing, but verbatim comments. That's qualitative feedback. So either way, it's a lot of information. Bars charts graphs. That's a lot of data. Qualitative feedback. It's a lot of data to take in. Before I hand you your 360, I have a little spiel that addresses the question you asked. It is this. Here's my spiel that I would say to you, which is, you're about to see a lot of information about yourself. It's just people's opinions. It is like they bought a ticket to a movie, they all went to see the movie, and they all have an opinion. We are not interested in any one opinion. We're interested in the overall audience response. We're looking for the themes. So while there might be one comment here that really is prickly or that hurts, we're not going to get focused on any one comment. Because there's no value in that. We're in our coaching work, in our development work, trying to go for the biggest bang for the buck. Let's look for the themes. And now by the way, Dave, this is really getting to answer your question. And you might read one comment and think, you know, I would understand this better if I knew who said it. And you would start thinking about who said it. And I will say that is number one, that's human nature. It's completely understandable. And it is not helpful. Because if we're really looking for the themes, the overall audience response to the movie called Dave Stahoviak, well, then it doesn't matter who said that. It doesn't matter which reviewer said that. The question is, is that reviewer like the reviewer sitting next to him on either side? So that idea of like, oh, who said what? And what do I do with it? It doesn't matter. Go for the themes. I so want to hire you to call me up and say what you just said to me every morning. It's the themes. It's not about what anyone person said. Don't focus on one negative comment. There's so many places in life. Yeah. But he isn't that the truth, right? I mean, yeah. And by the way, I mean, I'm now going to, this is going to take us off in a different direction. But I think that in general, with 360s, I approach them with the assumption, when I'm the coach, I approach them with the assumption that nobody's getting new information, that no matter how harsh the information is, people have heard it before. I want to say that the most typical reaction I get from executives that I work with when they read their 360 as they close it, they look at me, they kind of smile at me and they go, "Yeah, my husband's been telling me that for 20 years." Oh wow. It's not news. So even with the harshest of feedback reports, and I have had some that are pretty brutal, not directed at me, but I mean, I have delivered some feedback reports that are pretty brutal, I still assume it's not news. They've heard it at some point. And if they haven't heard it at some point, "Oh my goodness, then I'm sorry, and it's really gonna hurt." But in general, no, people have heard it before. It's not shocking. Interesting. So this begs the question for me. You go through that, you look at the data, you start to encourage people to look for the bigger themes. Then what? Right. So, it happens now and then that someone has given a 360 and not given a lot of support. It just happened recently with a woman I coached several years ago. Oh, I love this woman. She's in New York. She works for this global non-profit company. They do amazing work. She's one of the senior leaders there. They were piloting a 360 program. She got this 360 that was 37 pages long, which I think is way too long. It's like way too much data. And she called me up and said, "Can I send this to you?" Because my head is spinning. I don't know what to do with all this data. I said, "Well, is the organization helping you process it?" And she said, "No, I'm part of a beta program." They just did the 360 and gave it to me. I was like, "Oh my gosh, that sounds like malpractice to me." But I said to her the same things I've already said, which is look for the themes. And don't try and figure out who said what. And if you look for just the themes, even over 37 pages, I'm going to believe that certain themes will emerge. So if that's true, then the question becomes, "Well, what's the action plan?" So let's imagine, so this woman's thing was that she was highly results-driven and not so high in relationships. And that people were pushing back on her about that. I was like, "Well, so be thoughtful about that. If that were true, and you wanted to enhance your relationships and not be quite so kind of results-oriented, what would you do differently?" And what she came up with, this was just off the top of her head. She said, "I think I would chat more in the morning instead of just making a B-line for my desk." I was like, "Great." So she came up with a little simple action plan, and she's been executing on that, and it's helped. So when you say what's next, if you get handed a 360 and you don't get any support, first of all, I'm sorry that makes it more difficult. But be thoughtful and make a plan. If you were going to coach one of your own people about something like that theme, what would you coach someone to do? Well, do that. And in an ideal situation where you're working with someone and you really go through and you look for the themes, does the development plan come out of it? Are there a few action items? Does the coaching start to line with that? I'm just curious how that looks in the follow-up. Yeah. Well, that's the hope. I mean, listen, my general coaching practice is six months long. That might sound like a lot. What I've learned is it's nothing. And because it's so short and we have so much work to do, I don't even have the first coaching session until the feedback report is finished. So when I come in to meet you for the first time as your coach, I am bringing you your feedback report because it tends to spring-load the coaching. And yes, absolutely. Then we start to build a development plan off the 360 in terms of what's most important. In our coaching, if you and I are going to work together for six months, we're going to get two, maybe three things done where we really can move the needle. We're going to talk about a lot of different stuff, but where we're really going to dig in deep, it's going to be two or three things. Your 360 is going to have 10 things in it that might feel important. But yes, of course, a development plan, I think, is the whole point of a 360 is what are the themes here that I think would really make me a better professional, really help me move towards my long-term career goals that I should be taken care of now. Oh, look, this thing about, let's say, relationships. I need to build better relationships. That's going to be really helpful for me. How do I want to go about that? So there's one more piece here that I want to talk about we haven't talked about yet, which is strengths. A lot of times I find that people totally blow over the good stuff. So for me and in my qualitative 360s, the first question that gets asked is, what are three or four of Dave's greatest strengths? And so the first two, three, four, sometimes five, six pages of verbatim comments are people just saying Dave is great at this. Dave is great at that. Dave is great at this. And people tend to flip through that and say, I don't want to, let me get to the good stuff. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, that's good stuff too. That's your strengths. Let's not diminish that. And the same thing in quantitative feedback where people are rating you at fives. And it's just this solid line, five, five, five, five, five. It's like, wow, that's great stuff. I think it's helpful to get reaffirmed, not to diminish it and dismiss it and go, oh, yeah, I've always been good at that. But like, no, that's right. That's what I actually can trade on. That's part of how I'm going to build my career is because I really can count on that stuff. So that's another way that 360s can be really helpful, not just around kind of developmental feedback, but also around reaffirming your strengths. Well, and it goes so much in line with what we've talked about in the show over the years, Tom and Lisa Cummings, as taught us, and strengths finder is, yes, there are things as leaders we all need to work on and get better at. And we also need to and should really focus and celebrate and and be aware of what we do really well. And a 360, it sounds like is a great opportunity to be reminded of that and reinforce that for ourselves. You're going to get both in a 360, right? And my point is, don't skip over the strengths. By the way, it's part of the way you're showing up. It's what people recognize with you. Why would you ignore it? It's equally important as your development issues. So one thing I'm also curious about and you said something a moment ago, which made me realize this one of the prompts for us having this conversation today was me receiving three or four emails questions for Q&A shows in the last six months or so from people who are managing teams, not coaches, not consultants, managers of teams who have said, I'm going to do a 360 for our team. I'm going to do a 360 for everyone. What's the first step? What's the right assessment to use? And because of all the things you've just said, Tom, there's a certain part of me that just sort of cringes when I read a question like that because I think there's so many things that could go wrong if you haven't really talked, if you don't really have the experience that you've just articulated here, do you ever get questions like that from people? And I'm curious, how would you respond to that if someone wants to do a 360 for their whole team? So I think doing a 360 for your team is very different than doing an assessment for your team. So I all the time do off-sites with leaders in their teams and I'll do disc or I'll do Myers-Briggs. Those are assessments where everyone is doing it at the same time and we get to learn together about a model around human behavior. Great. 360s are so different because 360s are individual feedback. So let's imagine you've got a team of, let's just say a dozen people and everybody was going to show up in Austin, Texas on May 1st and get a 360 delivered. I wouldn't know how to manage that as a facilitator. Everybody's going to read their 360 and do what? Because everybody's going to have such a different data and such different information. So I'm concerned about a 360 for a team as a team event now. So let me, that's one scenario is if it's an event like we're going to all go to Austin on May 1st. On the other hand, if you really want to help your team develop and say I would like my team to be in a process over the course of a year or a year and a half where everyone's going to get a 360 and get some action items and their development is going to get some support. Well, that's great and each person's going to get an individual debrief. Then I'm all for it. That's great. So I hope you hear the difference that I'm imagining is if you want to do a 360 for your team, then I think each individual needs individual support. Don't try and do it as a team event. And I'm guessing from what we said earlier as far as confidentiality and not using this as performance management that the manager wouldn't be the person that would be facilitating that and doing the debriefs. It would be someone else in the organization, in the HR organization or a coach or consultant who's coming in to do that on their behalf. I hope so. I really do hope so. And I will just say this, which is, if you're going to have it done internally by, let's say, your HR group, I think you need to find out if your HR group is trustworthy because I know that some HR groups are not trustworthy where information leaks and people get talked about and the people in the HR groups, frankly, are a bit of a gossip. That can happen. And so I don't think you're going to get good 360 data if that's what's going to happen. So yes, I'm with you. I don't think the manager should be trying to coach an individual with a 360 feedback. Now let me stop for one quick second because there are companies that ask managers to get feedback as part of a performance review process. And that's different where, you know, if I'm your manager, Dave, and it's performance review time, I'm going to reach out to four or six people, usually in an email, hey, can you send me a couple bullet points about Dave this year? I know you worked on that project with him. And I'm going to get some feedback and bullet points and it's going to go in your performance review. That's fine. And that's great. I love that kind of performance review, actually. But that's not 360 feedback. That's not what we're talking about here. So I just want to be sure that we don't mix apples and oranges or toss out the baby with the bath water. Perfect. Thank you. We've heard all these, we heard all these different ways to look at this, which is fabulous. I love what you've articulated. Someone's going in and getting a 360 for the first time. What's the one thing that you'd like them to be remembering or holding for the first time as they're waiting for that 360? Or maybe they've even received that report and thinking about the next step. You know, my oldest daughter when she was little just hated getting shots. And when she knew she was going to the doctor for days ahead of time, she was all 10 stop or shoulders were up around her ear. She was just having anxiety. If you're getting a 360 for the first time, I understand why you might approach this feeling like you're about to get hit. And I want to say to you, no, think about it this way. What if you thought about it that you're going to get the first of many pieces of feedback over your career and all this is a baseline. You're just setting the baseline that's going to establish the themes that you are going to work on for years and years and years and years. And so you want to know what the road in front of you looks like. It's a gift. This is the first step of many. The first of many. I often get emails from people who are looking for recommendations for coaches and almost always when I get those emails, the email goes right over to Tom's inbox and you've seen why today because Tom has not only just so generous and caring, but it's all very gifted and thinking through so many of the nuances of this. Tom, thank you for the gift you've given us on your time and your wisdom on this. I'm so grateful. Well, I'm grateful to I think 360s are really, I'm not joking when I say they're a gift for organizations that give them to people. Really, I think they can be a bit like a loaded gun and it's dangerous to assume that everybody knows how to use a loaded gun, but they're not necessarily dangerous. They really are terrific tools for growth and I'm so glad for the opportunity to talk about it with your audience today. Thank you so much. Obviously, if you know someone who's going through a 360 right now or maybe about to, this is a great conversation to share with them. Thanks in advance if you do. There's also a number of related episodes that will connect back to today's conversation. Today's related episodes actually are all episodes that Tom has been a guest on before. I think this is his eighth appearance now on coaching for leaders. I went ahead and just created a Tom Henshel button in the library because he's been on the show so many times and has just shared so much wonderful wisdom with us over the years. Four episodes in particular that I've really loved talking with Tom on his first appearance was episode 107. Three steps to soliciting feedback. If you click on the Tom Henshel button in the library, that's one of the meal come across. In that episode, Tom and I talk through what are the ways you can solicit feedback effectively, but very powerfully and just as importantly, how do you respond when you get feedback? Again, that's episode 107. Another episode that'll come up when you hit the Tom button is episode 190. How to improve your coaching skills? Tom and I talked a lot about coaching in that episode and Tom shared a number of analogies that I find helpful all the time. I think back to that episode almost weekly when I'm thinking about coaching and maybe coaching others. It is some of the analogies I found to be really helpful for me. That's episode 190. Another one you'll come up with is episode 279. How to grow your professional network? Tom and I talked in detail about how you really build a framework for yourself and for the people around you that is farming over time. A wonderful and beautiful network versus going out and hunting down a network, which is a lot of people try to do. When we aired that episode, we received so much positive feedback. That's episode 279. Check that out if you haven't heard it. Most recently, episode 316, Tom was on talking about executive presence with your elevator speech. That is not the episode you think it is. If you think elevator speeches are about talking at someone for 30 seconds while you're riding up the elevator and getting the perfect words in and having that memorized word by word, that is not the best way to do an elevator speech. In fact, a great elevator speech is even more about listening. Tom and I talked in detail in that episode about that. You can access all of those episodes by going to coachingforleaders.com/podcast. It'll get you to the podcast library. You can click on Tom or whatever other topic is of interest to you to search down the most relevant episodes. Something new this week as well. Each week we edit the show. We'll be listening to a lot of the content. The easiest way is to go to coachingforleaders.com. Set up your free membership that will get you access to the weekly leadership guide that comes every Wednesday with all the show notes, the resources we talk about in the episodes. It will start to include those bonus audios when they're available. In addition, a whole bunch more that I found online that I think will be helpful to you each week, including other podcasts and resources out there. You'll also get access to my free audio course, my library, the member cast, the book notes. There's more and more being added all the time. If you haven't set it up yet, you're missing out. Go to coachingforleaders.com right now and you can activate your free membership and you will get access to all of that. It will be a great source for you between the shows to continue your leadership development. Next week I am so glad to welcome also back to the show Brenda Bernstein. He was on just about a year ago teaching us about how to write and continue to refine an amazing LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is a network that for many of us in our careers is so important. Brenda is going to be coming back and now teaching us the two point over version. Once you get a good profile, what are the things you can do to start to use LinkedIn even more effectively? We're going to be talking about that in detail next week and we're going to be responding to your questions about LinkedIn. Thank you so much to Anthony Swan for the kind review on iTunes. Anthony, thank you so much. So many of you have left rings in the last couple of weeks for the show. Thank you if you've done that. I appreciate it a ton. If you'd like to leave one too, coachingforleaders.com/itunes. See you next week to talk more on how to leverage LinkedIn. Take care.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. A 360-degree feedback tool gathers input from an individual’s superiors, peers, and direct reports to provide a comprehensive view of how they are perceived.
  2. 360s are often used in coaching engagements or leadership development programs, but they are generally ineffective as performance management tools because raters may be cautious.
  3. Confidentiality is crucial
  4. Recipients have no obligation to act on feedback or reveal which comments came from whom; the focus should be on identifying overarching themes rather than individual remarks.
  5. Most people already have some awareness of the feedback they receive; the value lies in recognizing patterns and prioritizing development areas.

Summary:

This episode of Coaching for Leaders, featuring executive coach Tom Henshel, explores how to effectively use 360-degree feedback for leadership development. A 360 gathers anonymous input from an individual’s superiors, peers, and direct reports, offering a holistic view of their impact. Tom emphasizes that 360s are most powerful when tied to coaching or development programs, not performance management, as raters may withhold honest feedback if they fear negative consequences.

Confidentiality is key: in coaching engagements, only the recipient sees the raw data, fostering trust and enabling deeper self-reflection. Recipients are not obligated to act on every comment or identify who said what; instead, they should focus on recurring themes for the greatest developmental impact. Tom notes that most people have already heard the feedback before, so the real value is in recognizing patterns and prioritizing growth areas.

The episode also advises recipients to thank raters but avoid over-communicating about specific feedback, as anonymity protects the process. Overall, a well-handled 360 can be career-transformative by providing clear, actionable insights into how one is perceived and where to focus improvement efforts.

FAQs

A 360 feedback assessment gathers input from people above, beside, and below you in an organization, placing you at the center. It provides a comprehensive view of how others perceive you, often using different instruments.

It's often part of a coaching engagement, a high-potential leadership development program, or an MBA program. It's rarely done independently without being tied to a structured initiative.

No, they are not ideal for performance management because raters may be cautious, fearing negative impacts on promotions or bonuses. This can lead to less robust and trustworthy feedback.

In coaching, only the recipient sees the data to ensure confidentiality. In leadership programs, administrators may see it, so it's important to clarify who has access upfront.

If the manager sees the data, they should handle it carefully. The recipient usually controls sharing, and managers should respect confidentiality unless the program specifies otherwise.

No, you don't have to act on any feedback. Focus on themes rather than individual comments, as feedback is just opinions, and you decide what to prioritize for development.

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