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:
Ensuring that leaders, teams, and personal contributors possess the competencies and behaviours needed to deliver current and future strategy 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:
Using the organisation’s values as the basis of the questionnaire helps embed and reinforce them in several ways:
Potential benefits include:
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.
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, 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:
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:
To explore this in more detail, see our related article:
360 Appraisal: The Advantages and Disadvantages When Used as a Performance Management Tool
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.
