Strategic Uses of 360 Degree Feedback

When implemented strategically, 360 degree feedback can be a great mechanism for aligning behaviours, culture, and capability with the organisation’s expectations and long-term goals. It can play a pivotal role in leadership development, high-potential programmes, culture change as well as providing valuable insights for individual development and sometimes performance measurement.

Our approach positions 360 feedback within four overarching strategic pillars:

Building Leadership & Organisational Capability

Ensuring that leaders, teams, and personal contributors possess the competencies and behaviours needed to deliver current and future strategic goals and address capability gaps that could limit performance. This involves designing feedback processes to focus on both current and future competency requirements. 360 feedback for leadership development in this pillar supports individual alignment with organisational needs and helps uncover where leadership strengths can be leveraged, as well as where targeted development should be deployed.

Potential benefits include:

• Aligning leadership behaviours and culture to what’s important
• Identifying capability gaps early, allowing for proactive interventions
• Aligning individual development with organisational priorities
• Leveraging leadership strengths across the organisation for wider impact

Driving Culture & Values Alignment

Using the organisation’s values as the basis of the questionnaire helps embed and reinforce them in several ways:

• Manager/leader alignment: Helps individual managers to understand where they are ‘getting it right’ and the values they need to better exhibit.
• Organisation: Helps the organisation’s employees gain a clearer awareness of the values-based behaviours their leaders and managers should be demonstrating. This helps turn the values into meaningful behaviours and over time, the process creates a shared understanding of “how we work here,” embedding values into everyday working.

Potential benefits include:

• Aligning individual behaviours with the organisation’s values and expectations
• Raises awareness of the behaviours leaders and managers should exhibit
• Creates a consistent and recognisable organisational culture
• Reinforces values in everyday work
• Builds trust and engagement by showing that values are actively measured and rewarded

Growing Talent Potential

Using 360 feedback to grow the potential of employees by highlighting and focusing development on the traits and behaviours that define high-performing leaders is a pragmatic way of developing future leaders. This is particularly valuable when used in high-potential programmes or to inform talent reviews.

To discover more about how to get this right. See our article How to Use 360 Feedback for Talent Management.

The process begins by identifying the key attributes consistently demonstrated by top-performing leaders, such as inquisitiveness, drive, adaptability, emotional intelligence, resilience, integrity, decisiveness, accountability, learning agility, influence and humility etc. These leadership traits become the foundation on which the 360 questionnaire is designed, ensuring that feedback is directly linked to the attributes that underpin great leadership.

Potential benefits include:

• Focuses development on traits proven to underpin great leadership
• Increases retention of high-potential employees through targeted growth opportunities

Supporting Performance Management

Integrating 360 feedback into a performance management process can provide a more balanced way to measure and appraise performance. This approach offers a richer perspective by capturing both what is achieved and how it is achieved. Whilst this brings benefits, such as encouraging a broader view of contribution, it can also have drawbacks compared with a manager-only appraisal.

Potential benefits include:

• Providing a balanced view of both results and behaviours
• Improving fairness and credibility in performance evaluations
• Enhancing organisational accountability by linking performance to behavioural expectations

To explore this in more detail, see our related article:
360 Appraisal: The Advantages and Disadvantages When Used as a Performance Management Tool

Conclusion

For 360 degree feedback to deliver its full value, it must be more than a standalone exercise. Every intervention should be clearly anchored to a defined strategic purpose, whether that is building leadership capability, aligning culture and values, accelerating high potential development or strengthening performance management. By linking the design, implementation, and follow up of 360 feedback directly to the organisation’s priorities will drive measurable impact, reinforce what matters most, and contribute meaningfully to long term success.

FAQs on Aligning 360 Degree Feedback with Strategy and Culture

Q. How do you link 360 feedback with strategic goals?

A. By designing the questionnaire around the behaviours and capabilities needed to deliver the strategy. This ensures feedback highlights strengths to leverage, gaps to close, and development that directly supports long-term business goals.

Q. What role does 360 feedback play in driving culture and values alignment?

A. By basing questions on company values, 360 feedback reinforces the behaviours that define culture. It shows leaders where they live the values well and where change is needed, helping align day-to-day actions with organisational expectations.