360 feedback is a mirror you didn't know you needed. It's a system where professionals can get confidential, anonymous feedback from people they work with. Think of it as a full-circle view of your strengths and weaknesses.
Now, let me tell you a story about how this tool completely changed my perspective as a CEO. Somewhere around the middle of my tenure as Firmafon's CEO, I enlisted a coach to conduct a 360 analysis on me. I wasn't on a quest for anything specific, just intrigued by personal growth and curious about others' perceptions of me. But boy, was I in for a surprise! The 360 analysis underscored a significant issue I was unwittingly grappling with: multiple team members indicated a severe lack of empathy on my part. This revelation was a complete blind spot. I believed I dedicated a substantial amount of time to understanding and considering others' emotions, yet the 360 analysis shed light on the fact that some of my key relationships needed attention. In short, this insight catapulted me on a long and rewarding journey towards a deeper comprehension of relationships and empathy. While this journey is still unfolding, it has already profoundly impacted both my professional and personal relationships. It's likely a prime reason I transitioned into coaching. All of this sprung from a simple insight in a 360 analysis.
Blind spots should be a concern to any individual interested in personal development. We don’t know what we don’t know! To a CEO this challenge is especially relevant! The power dynamics between a CEO and their board, owners, and employees is so complicated that getting the unpleasant feedback that is sometimes necessary for growth is almost impossible. This problem is so prevalent that the author and psychologist Daniel Goleman (who popularized the concept of Emotional Intelligence) coined it “the CEO disease”.
In addition to helping you see things you didn’t know, a 360 can also help you gain new perspectives and insights into areas you already knew you needed to develop. Sometimes the external perspective and weight is what you need to find the motivation to fundamentally change.
Uncovering and addressing these development opportunities can often have a significant business impact. Just think about avoiding a single unwanted turnover in your exec team, or taking the right fork in the road for one of the key decisions you face as a leader.
Back in the 90s when I worked at Intel 360 surveys were simply done by emailing around Word templates. A lot has changed since those days! Today, there are numerous automatic surveying tools ideally suited to anonymously collect feedback from stakeholders. This is how most 360 programs are run. However, the CEO’s situation is special. The job scope, challenges, and complexity of relationships are at a level where simple – mostly quantitative – surveys typically will not fully surface all the development opportunities.
Instead, a better way of conducting a 360 analysis for a CEO is to have an experienced coach do qualitative interviews with stakeholders. These interviews are strictly confidential between the coach and the stakeholder, and the interactive format allows the coach to use their experience and intuition to dig deeper into areas where the real meat is.
Specifically, the CEO and the coach select a list of stakeholders to include in the analysis. Typically, this will include board members (often key investors and the Board Chair), direct reports (the management team), and any co-founders that are not covered in the other categories. A good number of stakeholders is 5-10.
The CEO now emails the stakeholders with the coach CC’d describing the confidentiality and anonymity of the process, emphasizing the importance of providing as candid feedback as possible. The coach now schedules a 30-minute call with each stakeholder asking them to think about two questions:
These questions are broad in nature on purpose. It’s important to keep it sufficiently unstructured to help unearth issues in unexpected places.
Based on the interviews the coach compiles a report that highlights key strengths and areas for growth. Part of the art of doing a good 360 analysis is to translate all the qualitative feedback collected in the stakeholder interviews into relevant and motivating growth areas. This is where the domain expertise and general skill set of the coach really can make a difference.
If you’re a customer of Engelbrecht Coaching, your report might look something like this.
The report is typically delivered to the CEO in a face-to-face or video meeting with the coach. Often, some of the feedback can be challenging to take in, and having an experienced partner to help process it is helpful.
The process might identify as much as 5+ growth areas, and the instinct of a growth minded CEO might very well be to start working on them all right away. However addressing issues from a 360 which are often of a fundamental nature is better done one or at most two at a time.
A better approach is for the CEO to work with the coach to identify the key growth area(s) and then do a focused development plan to address.
Are you a CEO interested in unlocking your next level of growth through a 360 analysis? Don’t hesitate to reach out!