A Positive Shift
Greetings Leadership Enthusiasts! For the past several months I’ve been in re-thinking mode about something near and dear to my heart: 360s. They are such a great mechanism for leader development, and for the longest time I held some strong beliefs about how they should be done. Those beliefs have shifted recently so I thought it would be fun to share what led to the shift.
But first, I want to give a shout out to the movie Conclave (you can currently find it on Peacock) which is about the election of a new Pope. I strongly recommend if you haven’t seen it yet. Ralph Fiennes is awesome, and Stanley Tucci always makes everything better. There was a quote in the film that I haven’t stopped thinking about:
Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.
There is an obvious (and very good) political message here, but that is a musing for another time. Instead, the leadership coach in me immediately started creating a list of questions. What things have I been certain about and how has that certainty impacted me? How does my certainty show up at work? How does being certain about particular things serve me? What might it be costing me?
This is what happens when you become an executive coach - always looking for ways to expand your awareness and forever chasing a new insight or different way of seeing. It’s a nice addiction, like watching Schitt’s Creek, and I can’t get enough of it.
This newfound craving of mine matters because that which we cannot see in ourselves drives us, and we can’t change what we cannot see. Thank you, Carl Jung! Improved visibility and clarity always offers more choices, not to mention deeply powerful growth and sustained change. This is the primary reason why I, and coaches all over the world, get hired. Companies and leaders want (sometimes need) help to SEE themselves and their environment more clearly. Which brings us to one of my favorite tools for leaders, or really anyone, to expand their line of sight: 360 feedback.
Is this the first time someone has made an attempt to connect an idea from the film Conclave to 360’s? Quite possibly. Will I earn a few creativity points for the effort? Perhaps the jury is still out, or should I say the conclave is still…conclaving?
Was that an audible groan I just heard? Was it due to my terrible pun or how you might feel about 360’s? Either way, I get it. Both could be cause for concern. However, for the moment, let’s focus on the 360 process because I have a fresh perspective about them mainly due to relaxing my grip on certainty.
Allow me to set the stage…
360’s are a marvelous feedback tool because they help improve visibility, especially as it relates to how your behavior impacts others. It’s super useful to get good data from multiple sources so that we can calibrate and develop plans to act on the feedback. I’ve seen many leaders successfully adapt and alter their style because of the feedback received.
Unfortunately, despite the best of intentions, sometimes 360’s don’t land the way we want them to. The pattern I’ve observed goes something like this: anonymous feedback is collected and compiled into a (sometimes very lengthy) report. While reviewing the report, leaders try and decode cryptic comments or worse, guess and make assumptions of who said what. This creates unhealthy distraction and then to top it off, our human negativity bias kicks in.
Oh, the dreaded negativity bias! An unfortunate feature (or bug?) of our humanness. That darned tendency to register negative stimuli more readily than forms of praise or positivity. It is one of the things that makes giving and receiving feedback hard for all of us, and this especially holds true with an anonymous 360. Too often, I have watched leaders spend weeks obsessing over those few critical comments despite an ocean of positive feedback in front of them.
I often found myself wondering…what could I do differently? How could I shift that feedback experience in a way that accounts for our natural negativity bias? I started looking around for solutions.
Cut to the book, Feedback Reimagined by Pete Berringer & Jen Ostrich. In it, they make a case for how we might share feedback differently - leveraging key learnings from the fields of positive psychology, the importance of social support, a focus on strengths, and appreciative inquiry. It looks like this:
As thrilling as it was to consider a different way to facilitate 360s, in no time I started bumping up against two deeply held certainties:
A non-anonymous 360? Absolutely not! No one is going to get meaty feedback without the protection of anonymity. 360s must be anonymous so that others feel safe providing feedback.
360s must capture the STOP items – after all, the person needs to know the behaviors or modes of operating that are not working for their team/organization in order to correct them.
But then I started asking myself those certainty questions. I quickly realized that the cost of my certainty was a narrow field of view of how feedback can help people and teams. Slowly, I started to allow for the possibility that the best leadership development happens via connection and creating dialogue. 360s are best when they can build bridges of communication. Keeping feedback anonymous makes building those bridges more challenging. Excited, I dug in further and decided to get certified in the Shift Positive 360 method. Soon my mind was buzzing with possibilities and fresh perspectives. Here are a few of my favorites:
No more guessing. When asking about a person’s strengths (vs weaknesses) and what they could be doing to amplify their effectiveness, knowing who said what and the context it came from gives a leader a precise roadmap of actions to take. The speed of improvement gets faster.
A “team of leaders” and a “leadership team” are two very different things. I think most organizations require more of the latter. I started to imagine the benefits of facilitating an open 360 process with an entire team. Results could be more openness and sharing of strengths. More collective learning. More communication and understanding. Less assumptions, more facts. Teams everywhere could benefit!
Inviting social support by asking 360 raters, “What’s one thing – one commitment – you can make to support this person in their success?” can facilitate the creation of strong allies instead of just better stakeholder management. Give me the choice of having an ally or stakeholder at work and I’ll choose ally every time.
Lots of great learnings here, but I suppose the main point of this musing is really an invitation. I invite you to take a moment and check your own certainties. In the context of 360s, are you holding onto assumptions about how feedback must be given? Could there be a better way?
Or what about other certainties related to your work or team? Any ideas or modes of operating worth pressure testing? Where might relaxing your grip on certainty make space for new ideas and fresh thinking? Remember, just as certainty can be the enemy of unity, it can also be the enemy of growth and innovation in how we develop as leaders.
P.S. There is an obvious elephant in the room that should be acknowledged: non-anonymous feedback isn't right for every organization. There is a baseline of trust and psychological safety required for any 360 process to work, let alone the Shift Positive method. Don’t jump headfirst without assessing your environment to determine what would work best.
P.P.S. Interested in learning more about the Shift Positive 360 method? Please reach out! I’d love to chat and kick around ideas for what it could look like for you.