As per a survey, only 28% of employees find their managers highly skilled at influencing their teams. The good news is that managers can now leverage an ideal 360° feedback tool as a medium to realize and act on their leadership blindspots for improvement. However, most companies are skeptical of using a 360-degree tool as they are not certain how it can help them better manage leaders, who will, in turn, inspire others to perform their best. Let’s understand how a 360-degree feedback tool can benefit your leaders and organization to attain performance goals with ease.
What is a 360 Degree Feedback Tool?
A 360 degree feedback tool is software that is used to collect performance feedback of an individual from various people around them. The feedback offers valuable insights on the individual’s strengths and weaknesses which set the base for self-improvement. The feedback is collected through an open channel from managers, peers, subordinates and sometimes even external stakeholders. Through an ideal 360-degree feedback tool, organizations can guide their leaders on a self-improvement journey and foster a more positive work environment.
The following section outlines numerous benefits of 360-degree feedback for leaders.
Five Benefits of 360 Degree Feedback Tool for Leaders
360 degree feedback tool helps responsible leaders to:
Acknowledge Strengths and Weaknesses
As per a study by Gallup, employees receiving feedback had 15.9% lower turnover rates than employees who did not receive any feedback. In this regard, the 360 feedback software is a valuable tool for improving the self-awareness of leaders by helping them spot their strengths and weaknesses. By utilizing 360 feedback, leaders can peek into their unknown strengths and leadership weak spots, which they didn’t know about before. As a result, they get clarity on where to get started and how to map their journey towards the end goal.
Evaluate Objectives
The tool prepares a comprehensive report by collecting feedback from different viewpoints with transparency. The design of the tool and report should be include efforts to mitigate bias and subjectivity in order to represent a more balanced and accurate assessment of your leadership qualities. As a leader, you can definitely appreciate such feedback to acknowledge others’ perspective towards your leadership self-evaluation.
Improve Decision Making
Multi-dimensional performance feedback empowers leaders to identify potential biases, blind spots, and other areas of improvement. Reflecting on such a comprehensive perspective is the key to improving communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving abilities. When leaders grow in all these dimensions, they make more informed and objective decisions.
Enhance Emotional Intelligence
Leaders often find it challenging to manage their own emotions and understand the emotions of others. With 360 degree feedback they receive insights from peers, subordinates and key stakeholders about their emotional intelligence (EQ). This transparent, honest feedback gives clarity on EQ strengths and weaknesses. Leaders acknowledge the importance of empathy, motivation and conflict resolution to develop a more engaged and productive workforce.
Improve Work Relationships
When you receive constructive feedback through open communication between you and your critics, you find it easy to clarify any misunderstandings early. Now, you also constantly remain conscious of the consequences of your actions, both positive and negative. That said, 360 degree feedback promotes accountability in leaders and prepares them to work towards improving their working relationships with ease.
What Makes this Tool Work?
Leaders feel motivated to change their behavior when they acknowledge its immediate impact on measurable outcomes. In this regard, an ideal 360-degree feedback software can help leaders compare the current level of measurable outcomes with the past. It can help executives better comprehend how altering the way they lead has benefited the company and their performance as an individual.
Various studies confirm that good leadership benefits an organization in multiple aspects, including employees, customers, profits, productivity, and staff engagement. In this regard, see the following graph from a research paper by Zenger Folkman on Harvard Business Review. It indicates a study of over 97,617 leaders on their good leadership traits. Each one of them was assigned scores as per the feedback received on 49 behavioral traits of a great leader.
The X-axis represents the leadership effectiveness index which is the average score on these behaviors. The Y-axis measures employee engagement on various factors such as job satisfaction and project commitment.
The graph indicates how every decile of improvement in the overall leadership of a leader has increased employee engagement by more than five percentile points.
This study clearly underscores how leader effectiveness, not just benefits leaders but other people throughout the organization as well.
Unlock the Full Potential of Your Leaders With Unifai’s 360 Degree Feedback Tool
Help your organization’s leaders perform at their peak and enable them to significantly contribute towards your company by providing them with real-time, data-driven insights. Unifai’s 360 degree feedback software has got everything you need to manage 360° assessments. Unifai offers you an all-in-one portal for assessments to track the performance management of each leader powered by built-in automation. Our 360° feedback software helps your leaders uncover strengths, weaknesses, and blindspots, and foster targeted growth, all with our intuitive platform.
