360 feedback for yourself: find out how others really experience you

A 360 gathers anonymous feedback about you from a spread of people, perhaps someone you work for, someone who works with you, and someone who knows you at home, and then shows you all the results together. PiViva reveals nothing while the feedback is still being collected, so you see the full picture in one go. Research shows that 360 feedback helps most when you set a goal and act on what it tells you.

Why is honest feedback so hard to come by?

Most people won't tell you the whole truth to your face, and usually for kind reasons. They like you, or they work with you, or they simply don't want an awkward conversation spoiling a perfectly nice afternoon.

So you hear "it was great" after your presentation, and the real view reaches you third-hand, months later, if it reaches you at all.

And when feedback does arrive, it tends to come one comment at a time, which makes it very easy to argue with each one in turn. That's a natural human response, and it's also why so much well-meant feedback ends up changing very little.

What is 360 feedback, and where did it come from?

Multi-rater feedback has been used in organisations for decades, and the idea behind it is a simple one: ask people who see you from different angles, and then look for the pattern in what they say.

Its roots lie in the Johari Window, the model Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham created in 1955, and in particular in its Blind square, which holds what others can see about you that you can't see yourself. A 360 is designed to shrink that square, gently and on purpose.

The research is worth knowing about. In 2005 James Smither, Manuel London and Richard Reilly brought together the studies on 360 feedback and found that the improvement afterwards is generally small, but larger when people believe change is possible, set goals and take action. An earlier review by Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi in 1996 found that feedback improves performance on average, though in over a third of cases it actually made things worse. So how you handle feedback matters a great deal, and that's very good news, because it's the part you can do something about.

How does 360 Feedback work in PiViva?

You invite people to take part, and it helps to choose a real spread of people who see you in different settings, which tends to tell you far more than a small circle of allies would.

They answer anonymously. Nothing is shown to you while the cycle is open, and everything is revealed together when it closes. That's quite deliberate. Feedback read one response at a time tends to get argued with one response at a time, as you find a reason why each comment must be wrong. When five responses arrive together and three of them say the same thing, it becomes much harder to wave the message away, and the pattern is where the real value lies.

It's worth expecting one comment to sting a little. That's usually the one most worth sitting with, once the sting has worn off.

What if the feedback is hard to hear?

Give yourself a day before you do anything with it, and be kind to yourself in the meantime.

Then pick one pattern, the one that came up most often, and decide what you'd like to do about it. Smither's research suggests that taking action is where the benefit comes from, so you might turn it into a goal in Goal Setting or a small habit in Building Habits.

You can also add what you've learned to your Johari Window. If a piece of feedback knocks you more than you expected, the Self-Compassion Break takes just five minutes and can help you steady yourself.

This is a lovely one to take to a coach. If you share the results with a coach from the PiViva Coach Directory, you'll have someone to help you make sense of it all and decide what to do next. For many people, 360 Feedback becomes the moment they finally see themselves the way others already do, which is often far more generously than they expected.