Enhancing 360-Degree Feedback for Senior Executives: How to Maximize the Benefits and Minimize the Risks

Robert E. Kaplan, Charles J. Palus

• Publisher: Center for Creative Leadership Press
• Year: 1994
• Print ISBN: 9781932973471
• eBook ISBN: 9781604917925
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

In the past few years, management development has increasingly involved 360-degree feedback--an experience in which a person receives ratings of performance from peers, superiors, and subordinates; compares these with self-ratings; and perhaps gets limited coaching and sets goals for improvement. It is generally considered an effective development technique for all levels of management. Senior executives, however, because of the breadth of challenges they face, sometimes require a richer feedback experience--one which might also include one or more of the following: detailed verbatim descriptions of performance, observations from family members and friends, psychometric measures of personality and motivation, and data on early history, plus an extended coaching relationship with a professional in leadership development. With this added scope and power, however, comes increased risk, which makes it essential that additional precautions be taken. In this report, the authors offer guidelines for how enhanced feedback can be provided safely and effectively.

Making Safe Use of Enhanced Feedback

For HR managers whose responsibility is to help executives with performance problems, a major challenge is: How can a person’s weaknesses be alleviated without sacrificing strengths? (This challenge is acute for executives who consistently get outstanding bottom-line results but who do a lot of damage in the process.) Enhanced feedback can help, but to use it safely and effectively, we believe certain dictates of good practice must be followed. First, the best general strategy is, obviously, to choose a service provider with a competent, constructive staff. Second, because high-impact feedback may be unsuitable for a certain percentage of executives, it is critical that participants be carefully selected. Third, to accommodate the fact that participating executives will be unsettled to one degree or another by the heavy dose of feedback, it is vital that staff of the service provider tide participants through the unsettled period.

Select the Right Staff

Feedback is only as good as the staff offering it. The service provider selected should have staff that is: competent at management development, proficient at personal development, effective with senior managers, and mature.

To be competent at management development, one must understand the executive’s job, the business and institutional context in which executives perform their jobs, and the typical performance problems that executives have. One must also be adept at the behavioral methods for helping them correct performance problems. The emphasis in management development is on cultivating knowledge, skills, and abilities. It is an outer emphasis.

To be proficient at personal development, one must understand personality, identity, basic motivation, and adult development and also be able to help executives grow as human beings—to moderate intensity, overcome inhibitions, get a better perspective on basic beliefs, and become more honest with themselves about their basic drives. This is an inner emphasis.

To be effective with senior executives, a person must be credible to them. This requires one to be assertive enough to hold one’s own and capable of matching them intellectually. A peer relationship must be established.

Maturity means that the staff member consistently puts the client’s needs ahead of his or her own, has empathy, is accepting, genuinely cares, and is unfailingly constructive. Of the several criteria for an effective staff, this is the one that bears most heavily on the potential for harm. Any indication of ego problems in a staff person—any tendency to be destructive, self-serving, overly ambitious, neglectful—is adequate cause for the HR manager to disqualify the prospective service provider. If ever there was an occasion to check a person’s references thoroughly, this is it.

Select the Right Participants

Almost all managers can handle 360-degree feedback as it is generally practiced, and, consequently, little attention is usually paid, or needs to be paid, to screening. Enhanced feedback is a different story. Some executives may not be up to the rigors of what one person called “emotional boot camp,” and so it is imperative that real effort be put into screening.

In our experience there are two types of individuals at risk (Kaplan, 1983; Lieberman, Yalom, & Miles, 1973): those who are fragile and those who are highly defensive and rigid. Both types lack the resources to deal effectively with high stress.

Another risk factor, independent of makeup, is disarray in the executive’s life. Suitability for an intervention like this is circumstantial as well as personal. A crisis of one kind or another in an executive’s private life might make this a bad time to go through an intensive developmental experience. (On the other hand this could be an advantageous time if the individual is more open than usual to soul-searching.) Likewise, the destabilizing circumstance may be job-related—if, for example, the executive is in danger of being terminated or demoted. An HR executive who is experienced in using providers of enhanced feedback commented, “I worry more [about possible harm] when the person is in trouble.”

An executive should only participate in an exercise this personal and this intensive (“intrusive” one executive called it) if he or she wants to. Readiness is everything. A former participant spoke about the willingness to experience a certain amount of pain. “Some people are not ready to cope with this process. The positive inducement is not there.”

Timing is key. One executive made the following comment: “When you see the power of the [intervention] … you say, ‘Why didn’t I do that earlier?’ But the answer is ‘Was I ready for it earlier?’”

So the question is, How do you screen out individuals who, because of their psychological makeup or because of their current circumstances, have an instability or potential instability that the feedback could compound and aggravate? We recommend the following three screens: responsible nominations by the organization, informed choice by the executive nominated, and responsible decisions by the service providers.

The organization nominates. Enhanced feedback is not one of those activities that organizations put managers through in droves, and so decisions about who should receive it can be made on a case-by-case basis. Typically, participants are nominated by a higher-level executive, the HR executive, or the top-managem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• A Closer Look at Enhanced Feedback
• Possible Outcomes
• Making Safe Use of Enhanced Feedback
• Conclusion
• Bibliography