The third installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.

3. Build trust throughout the process. If you’ve been asked to conduct a performance review for someone, he/she is putting his/her trust in you. You will hear what the client’s managers, employees, and coworkers see as strengths, and you will likely hear some naked, unadorned criticism. Your client is making himself/herself vulnerable, and you need to provide a safe space for that vulnerability.

a) Keep the client informed. One of the best ways to build trust is to make it clear what you are doing, why you are doing it, and when it will be done. Review the plan for the performance review with your client. What questions will you be asking? Who will you be speaking to? What will you guarantee in terms of confidentiality? How will you frame the discussion with the respondents? How will you follow up with them? Which steps will the client be a part of? What is the timeline for each step?

b) Introduce yourself and your qualifications. Make sure the respondents know who you are and why you are conducting the review. It helps to have the client contact the respondents to introduce you. One mistake I made was to start one review process assuming that most of the respondents knew me or had been told I would be contacting them. I found out I was wrong when I got an email that said, “Who are you and why are you doing this?”

c) Be flexible to the respondents’ preferences. Respondents are doing a favour for you and your client by sharing their time and thoughts. Work to accommodate them! If they prefer a phone call over an online survey, pick up the phone. If they prefer to talk face to face, set up a meeting. If you arrange an interview and they prefer open-ended questions, go open-ended. If they prefer that you structure the interview, come prepared. Of course, the degree to which you can be flexible depends on the purposes of the review (e.g. if you need hard quantitative data, you need to be consistent in how you gather it), but for the most part, you and your client will learn the most when you conduct the interview in a way that works best for respondents.

c) Discuss what comes next. After the questions have been answered, the data have been sorted, and themes are bubbling to the surface, your client might feel a bit lost. “I knew I wanted feedback,” he/she says, “but what do I do with it?” Prepare for this question before you meet with your client to discuss the results of the review. Make sure you can discuss, with examples, some of the things your client is known and valued for. Make sure you can describe diplomatically, but accurately, the behaviours or patterns that are holding the client back in his/her performance and work relationships. Provide ample opportunity for the client to pause, consider, and contribute their reactions as you discuss the results.

d) Above all, be ready to summarize feedback themes and suggest appropriate goals. Suggest goals that include behaviour/traits for the client to maintain, and ones to develop. Furthermore, provide your client with options for support as he/she acts on all this feedback: if you do performance coaching, explain how you would support him/her in this process. Or refer your client to someone who can provide coaching, or help the client prepare a plan for asking a manager or colleague to work with him/her over the next few months as the client tries to bring the feedback to life in his/her performance.

The second installment of what I’ve learned conducting 360 reviews.

2. Determine the best format for the desired outcomes.

If you’re seeking feedback, you can gather it through an online survey (Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are easy to use and either free or cheap), by interviewing people yourself, or by asking a third party to conduct interviews.

The questions you ask, and the way you ask them, determine the answers you will get. Do a test run of your survey or interview questions to understand how respondents interpret and answer them. Here are some different purposes for reviews I’ve conducted, and how we designed it accordingly:

a) Baseline comparison. One person wanted a baseline gauge of her abilities in ten different areas. She planned to compare these baseline results with the results a year later. In this case, the design was fairly straightforward: survey questions were designed to evaluate the ten areas in both qualititative and quantitative ways. The exact same survey can be used a year from now to show if there has been any improvement in her performance in these areas. The entire survey was conducted online.

b) Recognition and direction. Another individual wanted to know if he was meeting goals he had set for himself, and wanted input into what goals to work on next. We used rating scale questions to see how well he was achieving goals, and open-ended questions to explore areas of strength and weakness. Respondents answered online, and we had follow-up telephone discussions with a subset of respondents to explore their answers further.

c) Exploratory and relationship-focused. A third individual wanted to understand what his team knew about him that he didn’t know. Rather than an online survey, this performance review consisted of open-ended questions in telephone conversations, and was more participant-directed than client-directed. The outcome was a series of themes and learning opportunities that we might not have discovered if we had set out with our own pre-formed questions to explore.

Next post: part three – trust and relationship-building while conducting reviews.

Over the past year, I delved into a new professional development area by conducting 360 performance reviews. Here is some of what I’ve learned, part one.

1. Find the right people to participate.

a) Upward, downward, and lateral. Get feedback from people the client works for, people who work for him/her, and people he/she works with. Make sure you have an adequate sample size to represent all three categories.

b) Representative viewpoints. Check each category to see if you have an adequate representation of different genders and ethnicities.

c) Positive and constructive. Don’t limit respondees to people with whom the client has a positive relationship. Ask the client: Who will give you positive feedback? And who will have constructive feedback for you? Often, the people the client hasn’t been able to develop a close relationship with are the people who will have the best information for the next learning opportunity.

d) Who stands to benefit. Ask the client who he/she will work with the most in the next six months. Be sure to include these people as respondents, so that their input feeds into the client’s working relationships in the months to come.

Next post: part two – deciding on the best format for gathering feedback.