The Comprehensive Guide to 360 Assessments

What are 360 Assessments?

360 assessments are a form of feedback in the workplace that allows managers, peers, direct reports, and even external stakeholders to assess a person’s work capabilities. This wealth of information can be used as the starting point for action planning, training development, and goal setting that ultimately improve employee development, and thus, organizational productivity.

Just like your friends and family know you the best outside of work, your direct reports know you and your professional tendencies best inside the workplace. When you hear something from people close to you, chances are it will land better than advice and/or feedback from people you don’t work with often.

By implementing 360 assessments throughout your organization, your leadership team can uncover areas of growth that they may not have recognized in the past. While providing 360-degree feedback may seem like a daunting task, it’s the ability to do so efficiently that sets the groundwork for organizational transformation. Here are just some of the potential outcomes of implementing a great 360 program throughout your organization:

• Leadership development opportunities
• Coaching, mentoring, and training from qualified coaches
• Improved employee engagement
• Boosted revenue

To learn more about 360 assessments from a 1,000-foot view, read this introductory guide.

How 360 Assessments Effect Revenue Growth

Let’s dig into the connection between assessments and revenue growth. While 360 assessments do not directly result in more revenue, they do lay the foundation for a sustainable revenue scale. Using a combination of the core types of assessments below, you can begin crafting growth plans specific to your organization:

Leadership Competencies

A company’s success hinges on its leadership team — their skills and passion for their work, how they show up every day, and ultimately how they bring out the absolute best in the people around them. If a leader is lacking key leadership skills, including self-discipline, excellent communication, and humility, how can you expect them to do great work themselves, let alone encourage an organization?

On the other hand, when leaders recognize these weaknesses, they can work on specific skill development that allows them to be more effective leaders. Ultimately, this creates more engagement and productivity from the ground up.

Management Competencies

While the leadership team might not be as involved in the day-to-day, nitty-gritty work, an organization’s managers are right in the thick of it with their team members. They must be able to solve problems quickly, motivate team members by example, and delegate duties to create organizational efficiency and productivity.

Not unlike leadership competencies, these managerial skills are pivotal to revenue growth. If a manager is lacking in one area, it can impact the productivity of their direct team members. When these weaknesses are turned into strengths, however, productivity can skyrocket and impact overall organizational success.

Individual Competencies

No matter what level you are in an organization, you must be an effective individual contributor. From mastering your day-to-day organizational skills to building beneficial relationships, these core competencies are crucial for everyone in an organization.

By combining these three assessments, leaders can gain an entire understanding of developmental areas that can impact their organization. Dive into each of these and their impact on revenue to learn more.

5 Key Features of an Effective 360 Assessment Tool

So you realize the potential benefits of 360 assessments — now what? The truth is that there are dozens of potential programs available that could benefit your organization in one way or another. 

However, if you implement the wrong solution throughout your organization or attempt to assess leadership manually, it could do you more harm than good. To the right are five core things to remember when searching for your solution.

We take each of these features a step further in this guide so you can select the best solution for your organization.

360 Assessments For Consultants

As we mentioned above, 360 assessments are a great tool for business consultants who are brought into an organization for short periods of time. As if assessing leadership competencies wasn’t hard enough for someone inside the organization, you understand how much more difficult it can be from the outside looking in.

That’s where 360 feedback can help. As opposed to you delivering unsolicited advice to various members of an organization, you can show them how their own team members feel about their abilities. Here are three ways that white-labeled assessments assist with your consulting efforts:

1. Trust — Again, your ability to build trust as a consultant can make or break your ability to meaningfully impact an organization. Off the bat, an organization’s people will likely be hesitant to trust you and your methods. However, when you implement a 360 review program, you show them you are here for their development.
   
   
2. Identify Gaps — Your ultimate goal as a business consultant is to help organizations improve. Simple, right? The easiest way to do that is to break down their current standing, identify where they want to get to, and pinpoint the gaps currently preventing them from accomplishing those goals. 360 programs directly identify those gaps.
   
   
3. Supported Recommendations — Opinions are valuable, but data is priceless. If you were to enter an organization and provide unsupported opinions about their performance, it simply won’t resonate. However, if you have the data to support those opinions and make data-driven recommendations, you are far more likely to help them achieve success.

If you’ve been looking for a solution to improve your performance as a consultant, white-labeled 360 assessments may be exactly what you need. Learn more here!

Communicating 360 Leadership Assessments

Delivering assessment results may seem like a daunting task. After all, people rarely enjoy having their weak spots uncovered, and if you take the wrong approach in delivering these results, it could create resentment.

Whether you’re delivering results as a consultant or internal stakeholder, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure your intentions are not misunderstood. Here are some things to keep in mind through the assessment process to optimize your results:

• Be Conversational — First things first, approach the topic with conversation in mind. Because team members are already defensive, it’s critical that you open the floor for conversation. This should not be a one-sided presentation where you expose a person’s flaws; it should be an opportunity to discuss why the assessment is important and how it can impact their professional, personal, and company-wide growth.

• Focus on Tangible Goals — With developmental areas uncovered, you want team members to start formulating how they will improve in those areas. To do so, you must work to create tangible goals that turn perceived negative feedback into an action plan.

• Communicate Strengths — The goal of 360 assessments is not just to uncover potential weaknesses; it’s also to identify where a team member thrives so they can use that skill set to their advantage when developing in other areas. Every leader brings some incredible, unique strengths to the table, and when you communicate that those strengths are recognized by their direct peers, they are more likely to be receptive to feedback and work to improve.

Communicating results doesn’t have to be so challenging! Read more about how to take the right approach and create even more buy-in. 

What to do After 360 Assessments

So you’ve implemented a program throughout your organization, collected feedback from key stakeholders, and communicated results to participants — what’s next?

In reality, this is where the real work starts. Remember, the entire premise of 360 feedback is not just to tell team members what they could be doing better — it’s to use those results and proactively build development plans, training programs, and action items that ultimately result in organizational success. Here’s how you can accomplish that in two steps:

• Identify Trends — Though it’s true that each individual assessment delivers valuable information about participants, it won’t tell the whole story. Sure, you can (and should) create plans specific to each person, but what if you could uncover a weak spot for your entire leadership team? If raters identify the same weaknesses across multiple departments, you have identified a company-wide training opportunity that can be used to improve your success

• Construct Developmental Programs — Whether it be aforementioned individual plans, small group growth initiatives, or company-wide training, you must put your collected information to use. If you simply deliver results without any next steps, the whole purpose of the 360 program in the first place is wasted.

For a detailed overview of the entire post-assessment process, read the full post here.

Breaking Down Custom 360 Assessments

Last but not least, we want to discuss custom 360 assessments further. While they might not be the right solution for every organization, they are the only solution for some. Off-the-shelf surveys offer a number of benefits — speed, simplicity, and more. However, many organizations may be at a spot where they need something else.

Enter custom assessments. If you are struggling to know if you need a custom versus prebuilt solution, ask yourself these five questions: