There are many factors that drive the sustainable performance of an individual in an organisation over time. These include having a clear vision, being driven by specific goals, collaborating with a supportive team, and having an effective system of performance management, among others (Sonnentag and Frese 2002).
One factor that seems to cut across all of the others and potentially has the most significant impact on performance is feedback (London & Smither 2002). Feedback is the signalling that people receive (positive or negative) about their behaviour and results that challenges and motivates them to improve. Organisations must, therefore, pay attention to creating a culture of effective feedback so that their leaders, managers and professionals will have a clear understanding of the changes in behaviour and results required as they face the heat of battle each day.
As human resource professionals, we should be very concerned about the feedback that positional leaders and managers receive in our organisations for a number of critical reasons. First, as people grow into higher positions of leadership, depending on the dominant leadership culture in the organisation, they unfortunately become more and more insulated from the truth and the realities of the organisation. The people around them are either too afraid to confront them with the true state of affairs or will rather say what the leader wants to hear so that they remain in their good books.
With an increasingly-global workplace with dispersed teams and hybrid work, supervision and performance management have evolved significantly, and managers are struggling to get their fingers on the pulses of their teams and organisations much more these days. The impact is that we are unfortunately creating more positional leaders who are lacking in self-awareness and therefore providing sub-optimal leadership to the people around them.
Secondly, in an attempt to transition from command-style leadership to a culture of transformational leadership, a culture of excessive “politeness” seems to be emerging in our organisations. Managers are unable to be honest in correcting the people around them, and people are increasingly fragile when confronted with the truth about their performance. In this extreme situation, many managers are abandoning their responsibility of giving feedback to their team members altogether. This is also not a sustainable or effective practice. It creates more dysfunction and undermines the culture of performance.
Organisations need to find innovative ways of fostering and sustaining a culture of feedback that will ensure that managers get the feedback they need so that they are more effective and productive, and that they are more confident in providing feedback to the people around them in a professional and ethical manner that does not sacrifice psychological safety in the workplace. There are a number of interventions that could support this goal, including providing managers with training on giving effective feedback, providing managers with coaches, and providing training to employees on how to receive feedback (Bickman et al. 2012).
One particular intervention that continues to receive attention amongst researchers and practitioners is the use of 360-degree feedback. While there are arguments in favour of and against the use of 360-degree feedback in organisations (Waldman & Atwater 1998; London & Beatty 1998; Fleenor et al. 2020), organisations that use it effectively have made significant progress in improving the self-awareness of their leaders, creating a culture of performance, and motivating employees towards higher levels of performance (Metcalfe 1998).
360-degree feedback involves managers receiving feedback on their behaviour from their supervisors, peers and subordinates (from all directions). This way, they get a view of their leadership behaviours from the various rich perspectives that supervisors, peers and subordinates bring. Some people refer to it as the “wisdom of the crowd.” The 360-degree perspective creates a more balanced and holistic view of the leader’s behaviour than the typical unidirectional appraisal or feedback from their supervisor alone.
Based on studies that have investigated the use of 360-degree tools (Fleenor et al., 2020; London & Beatty; and our own field experience), we suggest that 360-degree appraisals should be used only for the purpose of development and not tied to rewards and promotion. When organisations use 360-degree feedback to determine salary increases, bonuses, and promotions, the feedback received is not honest, as people tend to be “polite” in their responses so that no one’s income is curtailed significantly.
So, the feedback from the 360-degree appraisals should only be used to identify learning gaps that can be bridged through training, mentoring, and coaching programmes.
Also, rather than focusing on just numerical ratings of behaviour, 360-degree tools should create an opportunity for more qualitative and descriptive feedback using prompts like “What should the manager STOP, CONTINUE, or START doing?” This is called the “Traffic Lights” approach. Again, this ensures that the feedback is clear and actionable and not just focused on numerical ratings.
Overall, creating a culture of feedback in our organisations is important for achieving sustainable performance. When done properly, feedback supports psychological safety in our organisations and bolsters productivity. 360-degree tools have been found very effective in creating a culture of feedback and performance when used as a tool for development, not reward, and when focused on descriptive and actionable responses, not just numbers.
