Project: 360 Feedback

The Business

Our client, the Board of Directors of a Victoria-based organization, engaged us to help them assess the CEO. It is their practice to conduct a multi-rater assessment process every second year to ensure that include the perspectives of various stakeholders with whom the CEO engages.

The Engagement

We met with the Chairs of the Board and the HR Committee to define the scope of the project and to better understand their needs. Through these meetings, it was clear that the client required a confidential process to solicit performance-related feedback from a wide variety of highly influential external stakeholders, members of the Board, and the CEO’s direct team. The Board wanted to receive the summarized data and recommendations that could help inform their CEO assessment and development decisions.

What We Did

Design

Based on our client’s needs to provide a high-touch process, we designed a customized 360 Platinum™ approach that allowed for data collection through our web-based 360-degree system as well as through face-to-face and telephone interviews.

Our client had a strong sense of what they needed and how they wanted to get there. We partnered with them, sharing our expertise, current science, and experience-based best practices to ensure we co-created a design that met their needs, aligned with their strategic goals, and would drive future performance results from the CEO.

Execute

We provided the expertise and handled all the administration – helping the Board to keep an arms-length approach from the process.

Once all the feedback was collected, we provided a thorough qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data and a full report.

In any 360-degree engagement, it is typical for us to first share the results with the participants prior to sharing it with their bosses. Here we met with the CEO, coached him on how to effectively hear the feedback, and walked through the results with him, highlighting his strengths and potential development areas. This informal meeting created the opportunity to explore how the CEO could leverage his strengths, recognize his limitations, and begin the process of designing an Action Plan.

We then delivered the summary of the results to the Board along with our recommendations on how to support greater performance results for the CEO and the organization.

Results

The 360 experience: The client considered the whole process a success: stakeholder experience was positive and the Board achieved their governance responsibility on time and within budget. The process design successfully addressed the Top 10 Things to Consider in a 360 degree Review Process (link to blog), nonetheless, there are always lessons to be learned from every project: here the project stretched over a holiday period meaning that the CEO had to wait longer than ideal to get the results.

Performance results: The CEO created an action plan and was able to make immediate positive change. Other developmental actions will require more time. As part of the CEO’s longer-term development, we were able to facilitate performance changes by providing skill-specific leadership coaching. We remain in touch with the CEO and provide coaching as necessary.