Sometimes it may be necessary to go beyond being a facilitator to improve aspects of performance. The author gives an example.
Kim Gregory
Jane Coomber’s report (“How to… get the most from 360- degree feedback”, Coaching at Work, volume 2, issue 3) offers valuable goodpractice advice for someone facilitating a feedback session – an HR professional,line manager or consultant. However, coaches must go beyond this. There’s a big difference between facilitating 360-degree feedback and coaching a client around a 360-degree report (surely what most clients deserve from a coach).
We should also:
We should also:
- Engage and energise. Help them to bring the document alive. Respondents have often invested significant emotion and courage into the process. We need to do the same.
- Dig deep and look beneath the feedback, for example, “If we all have a strapline people use to describe us (‘she’s the decision maker here’), then what does this feedback tell us about yours?”
- Be prepared to be directive if necessary. Sometimes it’s necessary to hold a client temporarily outside their comfort zone. When one client continually dismissed his consistently critical feedback (“He comes across as arrogant”), I took us both back to it. Several times. Twelve months on he’s seen as “possessing 100 per cent self-belief but not a hint of arrogance”.
- Seek to influence the questionnaire design so it’s aligned with areas that the client’s working on. This is a golden opportunity to have broader organisational feedback let’s use it.
If all 360-degree feedback used Coomber’s approach then we might reasonably imagine that much good work would be done. But readers of this magazine coaches, clients and purchasers of coaching need to go beyond this, and towards something that offers significant additional value to the stakeholders.
Kim Gregory
Managing director,
Gregory Coaching
kim@gregorycoaching.com
Volume 2, Issue 5