360 reviews have few facts, strictly speaking, and are still useful
A provocative view of a 360 review from your team is that it contains no facts. Or if you prefer: the only facts it contains are that this group of people, whom you chose, said these things in response to these prompts on this day. You have facts about people’s perception of you; this is different than having facts about your performance.
It’s worth spelling out this potentially obvious thing because most good natured leaders can’t help but take feedback from the team as the most pressing thing they must act on. A pile of feedback like this can displace your metrics, your objective performance, your sustainability. You read the “areas for growth” section as an urgent to-do list and start running at as many items on it as you can.
The attentive, responsive spirit behind that is right but the blind, scattered execution is wrong.
Consider an example: suppose in your 360 there’s a preponderance of “I wish he were more in the weeds, I want to see him handle more on the ground.” It may be perfectly clear from everything else you know that you should, in fact, be doing less of that weeds-y stuff and delegating it deliberately. In a case like this, the feedback doesn’t tell you what you should do. It tells you that people’s expectations of how you’ll use your role need to change.
-ben
What to do with a 360 review once you get it back
First, break down the responses into units. A unit is a repeatable behavior or a discrete mental move. Then cluster the units by what’s upstream of them. When you have put together a good cluster, fixing one upstream thing, one upstream unit, addresses all of the items in the cluster.
Second, if you’re reviewing this with a coach or manager of yours, write out the patterns you see before getting the take from your coach or manager. You’ll see things in the raw data that your leader might not because you have more context. You lived the experiences that are being evaluated and categorized in the feedback.
Before you read the growth section, where everyone tells you how to get better and/or stop screwing up, keep this in mind: In every 360 I’ve delivered over fifteen years, there is more raw text in growth areas than in strengths. This is not because everyone I work with has more growth areas than strengths. Rather, people giving feedback in these reviews work harder to justify criticism than praise. They want to get it right, so they write more. At first glance, you’re likely to see the higher word count and conclude that the team, on net, thinks poorly of you. Don’t fool yourself this way.
A final move that can be especially helpful: describe the person on this page, the one getting all this 360 feedback, as if they aren’t you. Maybe this is a leader you’re considering hiring, and the feedback in this review is all you’ve heard about that person so far. In your summary of the 360, you’re telling someone else you trust about this candidate.
-ben
What if it’s not the journey or the destination
After a couple decades off, I got back into running a couple years ago. Gradually, I’ve been building up my weekly and monthly mileage and shaving down the time it takes to complete that mileage. I run 2 or 3 races a year.
A thing I’ve come to appreciate about this sport is the competition is the exact same activity as the training. That can make me less anxious about the competition and it can enrich the experience of the training. There’s usually a day or two (sometimes many) in a training cycle where I tumble into a well of gratitude. “Hey, whatever happens in the race is cool. But I have what happened today.”
I’m healthy enough and safe enough and this hurricane season is quiet enough that I get to do this. I get to move under oak limbs, look at an ibis, and sweat ~5 lbs of liquid weight into my shoes. The point of this isn’t the race or the training cycle, the destination or the journey. It is point-less; it is this point in time.
When I’ve been at my best at work, work feels like this and I feel this way about it. Maybe this is obvious, maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s a paradox: somehow this has also been the mode and mood when I achieve the most.
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Writer Annie Dillard (RIP) on encountering a weasel:
The weasel was stunned into stillness as he was emerging from beneath an enormous shaggy wild rose bush four feet away. I was stunned into stillness twisted backward on the tree trunk. Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.
Our look was as if two lovers, or deadly enemies, met unexpectedly on an overgrown path when each had been thinking of something else: a clearing blow to the gut. It was also a bright blow to the brain, or a sudden beating of brains, with all the charge and intimate grate of rubbed balloons. It emptied our lungs. It felled the forest, moved the fields, and drained the pond; the world dismantled and tumbled into that black hole of eyes. If you and I looked at each other that way, our skulls would split and drop to our shoulders. But we don’t. We keep our skulls. So.
Blogger and project-doer and home cooking enthusiast Seth Godin on history and leadership:
Significant work involves tension, change, and the transitions of starting and finishing. What we’ve done will change what we do. What we do will change who we are. And the cycle continues. The challenge of leadership is helping people put that history to work in a positive way.
Writer Teju Cole on American sentimentality and moral reasoning:
That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a “wounded hippo.” His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees is hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.