The charity leader’s guide to 360 feedback

By Atkinson HR

As a charity leader, you’re rarely short of opinions. What you’re much more likely to be short of is feedback. Structured, honest, useful feedback about you. Your leadership, your blind spots, the things people notice but will very rarely say to your face.

That’s the gap that 360 feedback is designed to fill. Used well, it’s one of the most valuable tools a charity leader has for building self-awareness and trust. Used badly, it can be an expensive way to confirm what everyone already suspected (minus the useful bits).

If you’re thinking about introducing 360 feedback for leaders in your organisation, here are some of the questions that might be useful to reflect on.

What is 360 feedback, exactly?

At its simplest, 360 feedback gathers structured feedback about a leader from the people around them – line manager or chair, direct reports, peers and other stakeholders such as trustees, volunteers or partners. They are often carried out through a confidential questionnaire.

The results are usually pulled together into a report and talked through in a one-to-one coaching session. It’s called “360” because the feedback comes from all directions, not just top-down – the only direction many leaders are used to receiving feedback from (if they receive any at all).

What does the process actually look like?

The detail varies from one organisation to the next, but strip it back and most 360 processes follow the same basic shape.

1. Contributors are chosen. A good mix matters more than a big number – a line manager or chair, most or all direct reports and a handful of peers, trustees and wider stakeholders. These should be put together to give a genuine spread of perspective without becoming unmanageable.
2. The leader completes their own self-review. Rating yourself against the same questionnaire your contributors will use is a useful exercise in itself. This can help you to reflect on your own leadership before you’ve seen a single piece of feedback from anyone else.
3. Contributors complete the questionnaire. This usually involves a rating scale against a set of behaviours, plus space for open comments, completed independently and confidentially.
4. A report is compiled. Scores are typically grouped by category and by contributor group, so a leader can see how their direct reports rate them compared with, say, their trustees, without any comment being attributed to an individual.
5. The results get talked through. However it’s structured, this is usually where the real value sits. Not in the report itself, but in what’s done with it afterwards. How do you interpret the feedback and translate it into a meaningful development plan?

Why bother?

Because the alternative is guessing. The benefits that come up most often, and that matter most for charity leaders specifically:

• Self-awareness you can’t get any other way. Strengths you didn’t know you had and blind spots nobody’s told you about. Your role as a leader brings an inevitable challenge that fewer people will feel able to give you the feedback that can really support your development.
• A more accurate read on “how”, not just “what”. Most charity CEOs and leaders are judged on outcomes and income. 360 feedback measures behaviours and values – arguably the thing that determines whether your team stays and thrives or leaves.
• Less noise from individual bias. One person’s frustration, filtered through a structured, balanced process and combined with a range of different views, becomes much more reliable data. A well-delivered 360 process can help to distinguish between the one-off individual frustrations that someone may have with the themes and patterns of behaviour that you can act on.
• A healthier feedback culture, role-modelled from the top. If you can sit with feedback about yourself and visibly act on it, you make it safer for everyone else in the organisation to do the same. Whilst 360s are anonymous, they can help create the long-term conditions where people feel much more comfortable giving kind and direct feedback face to face.
• Particularly useful during change. Mergers, restructures, growth are the moments when trust is under most pressure in many organisations. These are exactly when leaders benefit most from an honest read of how they’re coming across.

What does good look like?

A good 360 process is designed with care to make sure it’s genuinely focused on development and to ensure that it adds value. A few markers to look for:

• The right contributors, for the right reasons. Not just cheerleaders and not just critics. Contributors should be people who’ve genuinely worked with you long enough to have something to say. It’s usually good practice to discuss and agree your contributor list with your line manager.
• Behaviour-based questions, not personality judgements. “Communicates decisions clearly and in good time” is useful. “Is a good communicator” will probably invite shrugs and quizzical looks from those filling it in.
• Contributors who prepare properly. The best feedback comes from people who’ve thought about specific examples and taken the time to share genuine reflections. Not answered on autopilot between meetings.
• A leader who reads it properly, too. Take your time and look for themes and patterns rather than picking apart individual comments. Resist the urge to mentally reverse-engineer who said what.
• An action plan that outlives the feedback. A report that gets read once and filed is a wasted opportunity. The value is in what changes afterwards. Make sure you use the feedback to help shape 2 or 3 focused and measurable development areas.

When it goes wrong (the horror stories)

This is the risky part. 360 reviews can be rich sources of feedback and data. If done poorly, they can also misfire.

There’s the halo effect 360, where a well-liked, clearly brilliant leader scores five-out-of-five across the board, including in categories nobody’s actually observed them in. “Well, they’re brilliant, aren’t they” is not evidence. Whilst they might be nice for the reader to lead, these reviews are often, actually, the least useful.

There’s the “everyone’s fine” 360, where contributors, worried about being identifiable in a small team, play it safe and rate everything down the middle. The leader gets a report that says, in effect, “fine, fine, fine” about a leader half the office has quietly been grumbling about for a year.

There’s the friends-and-fans 360, where the contributor list is quietly curated to avoid anyone who might say something awkward. Still called 360 degrees but in practice they’re closer to 40 degrees.

There’s the comment that gives the game away. Someone leaves a piece of feedback so specific, and so obviously written in one person’s voice, that anonymity evaporates on contact. Trust takes a hit that outlasts any benefit from the exercise.

Finally, there’s the report that changes nothing. Read once, nodded at and filed away. Eighteen months later, the same feedback comes round again, unimproved, and everyone involved quietly wonders what the point was. This can be more damaging than not doing 360s in the first place.

None of this makes 360 feedback a flawed tool. It makes it a one which is important to manage effectively. They are genuinely powerful when designed and run well.

Why use an external facilitator?

Most of the horror stories above are avoidable, and this is really where an external facilitator earns their keep. Someone outside your organisation can:

• Design a questionnaire that’s actually fit for purpose, rooted in your organisation’s own values and leadership behaviours rather than a generic template.
• Hold the confidentiality that makes honesty possible. Feedback flows more freely when people trust that comments are genuinely anonymised and handled by someone independent of internal politics.
• Coach you through the report properly. Helping you separate the signal from the noise, without the understandable instinct to defend or explain that can creep in when feedback comes via a colleague.
• Keep everyone honest about bias. Halo effects, central tendency, recency bias can all occasionally creep into 360 feedback. An experienced facilitator can spot these patterns in the data and help you to work through the feedback effectively.

A 360 process run internally can work. A 360 process run by someone with no stake in the outcome, who’s seen a hundred of these before yours, can work better.

If you’re thinking about running a 360 process for yourself or your senior team, and would like a second pair of eyes on how to get it right, the team at Atkinson HR would be very happy to have a free, confident, no commitment conversation.