Management Style, and a summary of 360 feedback

Until the later 1960's, feedback on management style has usually come from the top down. Either as part of a yearly performance appraisal, or after a particularly disastrous event at the company, a manager has received feedback from their boss either as 1) part of a heated exchange of views just before the manager is fired or 2) heard vague, uncomfortably said mouthings about improving relations with people.

This started to change with the advent of sensitivity groups, or "T" groups in the 1960's. During these sessions lasting several days, employee from a variety of organizations came together to learn how people felt about each other in a group.

The main focus was on personal growth and development. Because of this focus, employees came back to their workplace intent on acting differently and better towards their fellow employees. Unfortunately, "T" groups were not successful in the long run because managers who came back to the same work environment that either didn't reward such new, more caring behaviors or were overwhelmed by other managers acting the same old way. In response to this, the various consulting groups and institutes that ran T groups began to focus their feedback sessions on work behaviors and management style. Through various exercises, situations and discussions, participant's behaviors were compared to national norms, and received counseling and feedback on how to improve.

Starting in the 1980's, a new wrinkle to this approach was developed. As the idea of increasing employee influence and autonomy ("employee empowerment") became popular, the thought arose that a manager ought to receive management style feedback from more than one source, from those who knew them best: their subordinates, their boss, their peers and themselves. This information was usually gathered via numerical surveys and open-ended questionnaires. This feedback from all the circle that knew someone became known as "360 feedback."

Options for implementation

There are three options for implementing 360 feedback, each more comprehensive and powerful in promoting change, both organizational and personal:

1) Send a few managers to an outside consultancy for assessment and feedback. In this option, managers may hand out survey to whom they know (and expect to get feedback with minimal negative information) the data collected by the consultancy, and the managers receive an "offsite" training and feedback session with similar managers from different companies. This approach has been derogatively called "sending the fair-haired boys to charm school."

While this approach has its merits, its major deficiency is the same problem that T groups had: a few individuals are changed, the overwhelming mass of management is not, and the systems and processes that encourage old behaviors are still in place.

2) The second approach is to bring such a program "in-house", where many managers receive 360 feedback. In this approach, the feedback can be more systematic for two reasons: 1) surveys are handed out to all subordinates and peers rather than those who have been "volunteered" by the person receiving feedback. This tends to reduce "sampling bias" of just giving it to those who might give just good feedback; and 2) the implementation of this process can be from the top of the organization down the bottom. This has the advantage of allowing upper management to be an example of willingly receiving such feedback and encourage them to be both models of behavior and coaches to those underneath them.

3) The third approach involves all of the second approach, and also deals with "systems issues." Where 360° feedback alone can only deal with problems caused by individual behavior, it by itself does nothing for the systemic causes of problems, such as organizational structure, inappropriate and distorted measurement systems, company-wide lack of skills, or performance appraisal and pay problems. 360 feedback can serve both as a catalyst to help management realize the systematic causes of organizational problems, and can be part of the solution, so that management style becomes in harmony with other organizational changes senior management is trying to make.