An open 360 assessment is a feedback tool for measuring skills, behaviours and competencies of an individual.
A 360 degree review gathers anonymous feedback about an employee from the people working most closely with them, such as direct reports, peers, and managers. The assessment has many applications, including performance appraisals, success planning, team development, and is an excellent tool for leadership and management development.
360 feedback provides a complete picture and measures the overall opinion of a group rather than just relying on one or two views. The reports identify blind spots and highlight the strengths and development areas of a person. Multiple sources of feedback contribute to a better understanding of a person's development gaps.
360 profiling is one of the most effective ways to uncover development areas, strengths, and performance issues.
Identify Blind Spots
Understand behaviours the individual is not fully conscious of and leverage unknown strengths in the person's role. Highlight focus areas for development and behavioural change.
Highlight Strengths
Quickly spot strengths to enhance self-awareness and motivation. Understand where the individual excels in their job role and leverage their strengths to boost team and organisational success.
Recognise Development Areas
Identify development areas and use them to map training and improvement pathways. Focus on areas that will drive the most significant impact on performance and improve workplace relations.
Intuitive Reporting
360 profiling highlights strengths, development areas and blind spots to create a clear and easy development plan to enhance performance.
The purpose of a 360 review is to assist individuals to build self-awareness, understand their strengths, and recognise development areas. 360 degree feedback also draws attention to any blind spots where a person may be self-critical or self-confident. There are many uses of an Open 360 Feedback report.
Some of the most common uses of 360 profiling include:
Hundreds of New Zealand companies use the 360 feedback process due to its success across many areas. A 360 review offers numerous advantages, here are some it's many benefits:
Get started with 360 Feedback
Leaders need to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses to confidently lead a diverse workforce. Open 360 review tools provide leaders with feedback on their performance from a range of people they regularly interact with, including colleagues, peers, direct reports, and customers. Leaders performance is assessed against core leadership principles including, communication, people performance, influencing and company values. The diversity of feedback cultivates a broad understanding of a person's leadership strengths, development areas and blind spots.
One of the best 360 feedback tools is FinxS Open 360 Assessments. Organisations have complete control over the customisation. They can customise the question scale, determine the response options, use their unique set of questions to measure specific competencies relative to job performance, and track leadership development year on year.
1. Define and Assess your Leadership Culture
For organisations to thrive, a business needs to identify what they need from an immediate manager and leader. Open 360s provide a model for expressing this in a way that the direct reports and leader can understand. Define your organisation's view of leadership and analyse whether your leaders embody this vision and are walking the talk.
3. Identify Leadership Blind Spots
Most leaders have blind spots. These are areas in which they are critical of themselves or where they are overly self-confident. Uncovering these blind spots through feedback from peers and direct reports as well as building stronger self-awareness is vital for leaders to understand what may be holding them back. There is a massive expectation for leaders to act and behave in a certain way, so when they are under pressure, blind spots can emerge. So uncovering these blind spots through feedback from peers and direct reports as well as building stronger self-awareness is essential for leaders to understand.
2. Assess Current and Identify New Leaders
Once you've defined your ideal leadership culture, you can use 360 degree feedback to assess your current leadership team and identify new high potentials who embody strong leadership qualities. Ask a leader's direct reports, peers, managers and even key suppliers or clients to assess them against this leadership criteria. From the review, you'll gain reliable insight into a leader's strengths and weaknesses, with clear areas for leadership development.
4. Monitor Leadership Growth
360 Feedback provides an efficient and regular way of monitoring leadership performance. The results are useful to leaders as it helps them understand how others perceive them in the organisation, versus only hitting targets. The review illustrates how others see their leadership style and how well they inspire, motivate and communicate with team members, or how others view their attempts to develop people and drive change.
The 360 Profiling System allows you to build a unique questionnaire that aligns with your business goals and evaluation process. Simply choose from one of our pre-designed questionnaires or create your own! From the customisation of the rating scale to the question type, you have complete control and creative licence of the questionnaire and will be using one of the best 360 feedback tools available.
Here are a sample format and questions to use in an Open 360 Feedback review.
Instructions: Please answer the following questions about the job performance of the specified employee. Emphasise your individual experience working directly with this person not what you have heard from others.
We would like to learn about what the individual does well in five specific areas: leadership, management, communication, motivation, and envisions. If possible, please provide specific examples and areas for improvement so the employee can obtain a realistic and actionable view of their performance.
We will combine your answers in an anonymous report and provide the feedback to the employee.
Sample Questionnaire:
Leadership
Management
Communication
Motivates
Envisions
These are five examples of question types that will help you gain specific and actionable insights to gain insight into an employee's performance in the workplace.
The resulting Open 360 Feedback reports are intuitive and easy to read, making them one of the best 360 leadership assessment tools. A traffic light reporting system clearly highlights strengths, development areas and blind spots. Easily identify rating differences between groups and use the results to inform development pathways.
