360 Feedback Questions: 20 Examples and 5 Tests

Pick up a typical 360 survey and there’s a good chance you’ll find a question like this one: “Is a strategic thinker.” It sounds like leadership. It fits neatly in a competency model. And it asks a direct report to rate something that happens inside another person’s head.

Most advice about 360 feedback questions stops at a list of sample items. The list is the easy part. The harder skill is telling a strong item from a weak one before it reaches dozens of raters. A weak item doesn’t announce itself. It collects ratings like any other, lands in the report looking just as precise, and adds noise to the number a leader may build a development plan around.

Our team builds and reviews 360 items as a core part of what we do. Below are 20 example questions, then the five tests we run on every item.

20 example 360 feedback questions

These are illustrative items written for this page, not necessarily items from a TruScore assessment. Each one passes the five tests below, and raters answer how often, or to what extent, they see the behavior. The last column applies the rater-group test.

Area	Question	Best rated by
Communication	Shares the reasons behind decisions that affect the team	Direct reports, peers
Communication	Listens without interrupting when others raise concerns	All raters
Communication	Keeps people informed about changes that affect their work	Direct reports, peers
Direction	Sets clear priorities when the team has more work than time	Direct reports, manager
Direction	Makes expectations clear before work starts	Direct reports
Delegation	Hands off work along with the authority to complete it	Direct reports
Delegation	Lets people decide how to do the work once goals are agreed	Direct reports
Delegation	Lets others finish delegated work without taking it back	Direct reports
Coaching	Gives feedback while the work is still fresh	Direct reports
Coaching	Asks questions that help people solve problems themselves	Direct reports, peers
Coaching	Talks with team members about the skills they want to build	Direct reports
Coaching	Recognizes good work in specific terms	All raters
Decisions	Explains the trade-offs considered when making a decision	All raters
Decisions	Makes decisions in time for others to act on them	All raters
Decisions	Changes course when new information shows a better option	Manager, peers
Collaboration	Shares information with other teams without being asked	Peers
Collaboration	Works through disagreements directly with the people involved	Peers, manager
Collaboration	Credits others’ contributions in group settings	All raters
Accountability	Follows through on commitments made in meetings	All raters
Accountability	Acknowledges own mistakes openly	All raters

Open-ended 360 feedback questions

Rating items show where someone stands. Comments show what to do about it. Three prompts cover most programs:

1. What should this person keep doing?
2. What is one thing this person could do differently that would make the biggest difference?
3. Think of a recent time this person was at their best. What did they do?

Why item wording carries more weight than it looks

In a 360 degree feedback program, the items are the instrument. Every score in the report is an average of answers to a sentence somebody wrote. When the sentence is unclear, raters read it different ways and the average stops meaning much. When it asks about something raters can’t see, they fill the gap with reputation or a general impression. Either way, the number looks as precise as any other.

Survey researchers outside our field make the same point. Pew Research Center’s guide to writing survey questions puts it plainly: “Even small wording differences can substantially affect the answers people provide.” Pew writes about public-opinion polls rather than 360s, but the principle carries over: a rater can only answer the question the item actually asks.

The five tests for 360 feedback questions

1. The Line-of-Sight Test

Could a rater have watched this happen? A 360 should measure behavior, not personality. Behaviors such as “Starts meetings on time” are things raters can see and things a leader can change. Traits such as “Is confident” or “Is highly motivated” describe who someone is. Raters can only guess at them, and even an accurate rating points at something that takes great effort to change. Items about intent, beliefs, attitudes, or what a leader “understands” fail for the same reason: no one can watch them happen.

The fix is to name what the trait looks like from the outside. “Is a strategic thinker” becomes “Explains how the team’s priorities connect to the organization’s goals.” A peer can watch that happen. A direct report can tell you how often it does.

2. The One-Thing Test

Does the item ask about one behavior? “Communicates clearly and often” is two questions. Picture a leader who sends crisp, well-organized updates once a quarter. Clear? Yes. Often? No. The rater must pick one number for two different answers, and the leader can’t tell which half dragged the score down.

Pew calls these double-barreled questions and notes that they’re hard to answer and the responses are hard to interpret. The quick screen is to hunt for “and” or “or” in the item. When you find one, split the item into two or keep the half that matters.

3. The Rater-Group Test

Can each rater group that sees this item answer it? “Represents the team effectively with senior leadership” is a fine item for a leader’s manager, who is in the room. Direct reports often aren’t. Many will still answer, because they were asked to, and those ratings can end up reflecting reputation rather than observation.

Run each item past each rater group, the way the last column of the example table does. Our own assessments give every rater group the same items, so we write each one to be answerable by everyone who sees it, and raters can choose “Not Sure” when they haven’t seen the behavior. If you have an item that only some groups can answer, our 360 feedback software can show it to just those groups. (Our rater selection post covers who belongs on the list in the first place.)

4. The Frequency Test

Does the item carry the quality, so the rater only has to say how often? This is the principle behind our rating scale post. An item like “Makes goals clear” already contains the standard. The rater says how often, or to what extent, they’ve seen it, which is easier and more reliable than a judgment about how good someone is. Our scale runs from “Never or to a very small extent” to “Always or to a very great extent,” with “Not Sure” for raters who haven’t seen the behavior.

Compare that with the agree/disagree format common in homegrown surveys: “My manager sets clear goals. Strongly agree to strongly disagree.” Pew calls the pull toward agreeing with statements like this “acquiescence bias.” We see no reason a rater reading a flattering statement about a colleague would be immune to it. A frequency scale sidesteps the problem by asking what the rater saw, not whether they agree.

5. The So-What Test

If this item comes back low, will the leader know what to do, and is it worth doing? Passing the Line-of-Sight Test isn’t enough on its own, because the easiest behaviors to observe are often the most trivial. A low score on “Checks in with the team regularly” leads to an obvious fix (check in more), but it won’t develop anyone.

Our position is to write behaviors with weight. The item should stay observable and still point at a skill worth building. “Checks in with the team regularly” becomes “Checks on progress early enough to remove obstacles before deadlines slip.” A rater can still see it. A leader who scores low on it has something real to work on.

Before and after

These are illustrative items written for this page, not necessarily items from a TruScore assessment.

Weak item	Test it fails	Stronger version
Is a strategic thinker	Line of Sight	Explains how the team’s priorities connect to the organization’s goals
Communicates clearly and often	One Thing	Gives clear direction when assigning work
Represents the team well with senior leadership	Rater Group	Keep for manager and peers; for direct reports, “Shares what they learn from senior leadership that affects our work”
I agree that my manager values my input	Frequency	Asks for input before making decisions that affect the team
Checks in with the team regularly	So What	Checks on progress early enough to remove obstacles before deadlines slip

What the five tests won’t settle

These tests screen one item at a time. They don’t tell you how many items the survey should have (our rater fatigue post argues for “right-sized”), which rating scale to use, or which competencies belong in the model at all (our custom assessments post covers that decision).

They also don’t replace testing on real people. An item can pass all five on paper and still read one way to its author and another way to a peer in a different function. Pew pretests new questions before they go live, and a 360 deserves the same care. A short pilot with a handful of real raters catches a surprising number of problems.

We’re biased, of course. We build 360 content, so we think item quality deserves more attention than it gets in many buying decisions. But the five tests work on any instrument, including ours.

Where to start

If you’re building a 360 from scratch or revising one that has been in place for years, start with the items your leaders have struggled to act on. Those are usually the ones failing a test.

Our 360 degree assessments are built from a competency library designed to measure behaviors, not traits, and our team can map that library to the competencies your organization already uses. Already have your own 360, 180, or Self survey? We can host it on our 360 feedback software, and your dedicated assessment expert will support you every step of the way.

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FAQ

Are 360 review questions, 360 assessment questions and 360 degree feedback questions the same thing?

Yes. Organizations use all of these names, along with 360 evaluation questions, for the items raters answer in a 360. The full set of items, with the rating scale and comment prompts, is the 360 degree feedback questionnaire, often just called the 360 survey.

How many questions should a 360 degree feedback questionnaire have?

There’s no single right number. The survey should be long enough to cover what you’re measuring and short enough that raters finish it with care. Fewer, sharper items usually beat a long list of overlapping ones, which is one more reason to run the five tests before adding anything.

Can we write our own 360 questions?

Yes, and many organizations do, especially when they have a leadership model of their own. Run each item through the five tests, pilot the survey with a few real raters, and consider pairing your custom items with library items that have already been through reliability testing.

Can I use the example questions on this page?

Yes. They were written for this page as examples, so adapt them to your own competency model and run them through the five tests in your context. They haven’t been tested as a set.