Here’s a list of reasons why people have had bad 360 review experiences. We want to help more people to get the insightful feedback they need to develop:

It can feel like 360 feedback is being done to you.

Sadly some people use it to help manage performance – as a stick to beat you with. What if 360 reviews were an exercise that you choose to do because you want to improve?

Too many managers and HR departments use 360 feedback to assess performance.

When that happens kind teammates hold back and competitive colleagues will be biased. Subjects feel the need to be defensive, limiting the opportunity to learn and develop. What if 360 reviews were private for the subject’s eyes only so they can hear what they need to grow?

Numbers kill conversations. Metrics treat people as machines.

So many 360 reviews present pages of bar charts. That’s a confusing way to understand how your behaviours affect others. How do you score someone out of ten on “Demonstrates drive and determination”? How do you make sense of the difference between a 5 and 7? People need stories about how they are experienced to really understand how others see them. They need thought provoking questions to help them say what they mean. What if 360 reviews never attempted to reduce a person to a bunch of numbers?

There is no objective truth. No one perspective can give a full picture.

A review with your boss is such a narrow window on your effectiveness, it will only provide a limited understanding of your strengths and development areas. What if you always had multiple viewpoints from lots of people’s experience of you?

If you don’t ask the right questions you won’t get the answers you need.

Few people can provide valuable insights when asked for “feedback”. What if 360 feedback questions stimulated answers from people who think in all sorts of ways and it was always ok to skip a question?

Power dynamics exist even in the most high-trust teams.

It’s rarely safe for everyone to speak their mind and sign their name. What if 360 feedback was always anonymous to provide the safety required for honesty?

Digesting feedback on your own only leads to tears.

We can find it hard to be objective about personal feedback. We tend to overplay any negatives and gloss over our strengths. Reviewing 360 feedback on your own is never a good idea. Doing it with your boss might also be difficult. What if 360 feedback was always used as a starting point for a meaningful conversation with someone you trust? What if your 360 feedback tool allowed you to choose who that is? What if it actually helped you have a really constructive conversation?

Gathering anonymous 360 feedback can be a logistical nightmare.

It is 10 times harder than getting team menu choices for half a dozen meals in a row. What if the logistics became so delightfully easy that the feedback got better and you asked more often?

Business software is often built for people who never use it themselves.

Few purchasing decision makers really understand what makes good software. What if your 360 feedback software put the people who use it most first – participants who provide feedback closely followed by review subjects?

Too many software providers focus on selling to the largest companies.

The best features and the best deals aren’t accessible to micro-businesses and freelancers. What if 360 reviews tools trusted by large enterprises were accessible to everyone?

Most 360 review providers optimise for a slick demo, sales process and on-boarding experience.

Once you’re in, you’re stuck. What if you could be confident that you can leave any software provider whenever you wish and take all your data with you painlessly?

You don’t want to book a demo of some software.

If the next step in buying some software is to speak to someone chances are you’ll have to commit to hundreds of dollars in fees before you run your first 360. What if there weren’t any barriers in the way of you starting right now?

In contrast, AdviceSheet is built to help you do 360 reviews the way we believe they should be done. With AdviceSheet we made all those “What if”‘s a reality. Try it right now – it’s free.

• Uncover your blindspots
• Recognise your strengths
• Grow more effective

The post An end to un-insightful 360 degree feedback experiences appeared first on ThenSomehow.

When done right a 360-feedback review can really help you and your colleagues grow, and ultimately perform better.

But running a 360 review can be a time consuming process. From working out the right questions, collating and sharing feedback, and having the follow up conversations, they take a lot of organising.

And there are some issues with the way some 360s are set up that can sabotage useful feedback, the very thing they’re trying to elicit.

In this guide we dig into current best 360 degree feedback software to help you decide on which one to use for a people-first business, alongside the benefits and challenges.

Buying software can be a painful process, and you may not find out that it doesn’t quite do what you want until months into using it. So our goal is to save you time and assist you in choosing a 360 software provider that supports the development of your people.

What to look for when buying 360-degree feedback software for people-first businesses

There are a few basic things everyone needs from 360 degree feedback software, and some extra things that can make it an integral part of a people-first culture, where employees feel empowered to take charge of their own development.

These are the basic things to look out for in the software:

• Ease of use
• Automated admin and reminders
• Transparent pricing

These are the people-first things to look out for:

• Is it based on metrics or qualitative feedback?
  People-first 360 software should be able to gather rich qualitative feedback in order to support development conversations (rather than generating metrics, which treats people as if they are robots and can be hard to make sense of.)
• Can feedback be given anonymously?
  People-first software should offer anonymity, so that it is safe for people to give honest feedback.
• Is the final report confidential or not and is it designed to be used as part of a performance review?
  A people-first 360-feedback report should be confidential, and not used as part of a performance review, appraisal or viewed by a manager without the employee’s permission.
• Who owns the process?
  In a people-first culture, employees should own the feedback process (rather than their manager who has the needs of the organisation as their priority.)

By way of contrast, 360-degree software that’s not people-first:

• Prices are hidden.
• Metrics based.
• Doesn’t empower people.
• Used as part of performance reviews by default.
• Organisation-first.
• Not confidential.
• Goes to a manager first and they decide what to do with it (not you).

Why these things are important:

Hidden prices
When prices are hidden and they want you to book a demo, you know it’ll be expensive!

Metrics are disempowering
Many 360 tools generate rafts of scores and bar charts that make no real sense, they leave people scratching their heads as to what they mean and what actions to take. Numbers treat people like machines and can hijack development conversations. People need rich feedback and stories to really understand how they are experienced.

It’s development not appraisal
When 360s are used by managers as part of appraisals and performance measuring – as the basis for a bonus or promotion – not your people’s development, they put organisations first. When that happens, ‘friend’ teammates may hold back from being honest, whilst competitive colleagues may be biased. And the subject of the review will undoubtedly feel defensive, limiting the opportunity to learn and develop.

We dig deeper into more of these people-first factors for 360 reviews here.

When building AdviceSheet, we looked at other 360 feedback tools and decided to make AdviceSheet both transparent and people-first.

• There’s no demo needed – you get instant access
• Transparent pricing
• It’s not linked to performance reviews
• It is anonymous and confidential
• It’s based on gathering qualitative feedback, not generating metrics, because it’s designed to be really useful and for individual development, not a way for managers to (arbitrarily) measure team member performance.

Which 360 degree feedback software in 2026: a buyer’s guide

When comparing 360 tools we broke them down into:

• Specific 360 tools
• General purpose survey tools / forms
• Employee engagement tools
• General purpose HR software

Specific 360 Tools

These tools are designed to run 360 degree feedback reviews only, with varying levels of support and customisation:

AdviceSheet

AdviceSheet by ThenSomehow was built out of a frustration with metrics-based 360 software.
AdviceSheet offers a no-strings free trial, transparent pricing and instant access so you can use it out of the box.
It is UK-based so if you’re in the UK, you know you’ll be able to get hold of support in your time zone.
AdviceSheet features:

• Generates qualitative feedback in order to drive meaningful coaching conversations, there are no metrics.
• Offers anonymity for respondents, and confidentiality so that the ‘subject’ gets to see the report first.
• Supports personal development, so is not linked to performance reviews.
• Customer review: “totally different from your average employee survey tool. We found its questions to be searching and demand thoughtful answers. If you want a simple 1-10 survey then go elsewhere, but if you want to get under the surface and understand what is going on for your team and why they feel the way they do, then AdviceSheet is a great tool.”

www.thensomehow.com/360-degree-survey/

Spidergap

Spidergap is UK-based so you can trust it with your data, but the reports are metrics based.
Spidergap offer a free trial and you can use it out of the box.
They have transparent pricing – with cost on a sliding scale based on how many people starting from $12.50 per person (for very large teams.)
Spidergap features:

• Fully customisable questions
• Reports are metrics based with some free text
• Spidergap have a range of partners to help with coaching and facilitation https://www.spidergap.com/partners
• Spidergap say they have been used by over 18,000 users to create over 20,000 projects and assess over 100,000 employees
• Customer review: “Easy to edit, and so is issuing emails with links to the questionnaire, assessment and reminders. Reports are clear and informative. The summary information at the front and the detailed scores later, is an excellent format as a report. Set up was easy and it takes minutes to get a questionnaire ready. I believe the templates need to be a bit more streamlined… there are alot of features on the interface which I don’t use which I think is redundant”

www.spidergap.com

Lumus 360

Lumus 360 say they are “UK’s leading provider of 360 degree feedback tools and services for organisations, trainers and consultants” – they produced 1257 reports in 2021.
They offer a range of implementations and customisations for 360 reports, with a support option. Lumus 360 features:

• Fully managed or self-serve reports
• Mostly metrics-based
• Various reports offered https://lumus360.co.uk/360-degree-feedback-template.html#indvReport
• Customer review: “impressed with how bespoke it was… great service… Any issues experienced were resolved straight away”

www.lumus360.co.uk

Appraisal 360

Appraisal 360 offers instant access, self-serve or fully managed 360 surveys with questions designed for a range of industries and roles.
Appraisal 360 features:

• Transparent pricing on sliding scale per no of users
• Metrics based – mostly, with a very small free text section in the reports
• Customisable reports
• Options for bespoke reports, branded reports
• Customer reviews: “No learning required for using this tool because their support time responds very timely. A cost effective solution” vs “They take too long to complete process”

www.appraisal360.co.uk

General Purpose Survey Tools / Forms

You may have already used one of these well-known and easy-to-use survey tools. Several of them include templates for 360 degree surveys, but running one through a survey tool like this could be a logistical nightmare (as we found out when we built an MVP for AdviceSheet using Typeform, Zapier and Google Sheets.)

Typeform

You may already know Typeform. They make stylish survey forms and we love it, but it’s a general purpose survey tool and it doesn’t email out invitations, and you won’t know if people have responded which makes running a 360 through Typeform an admin nightmare.
Typeform features:

• Typeform does have a 360 review template and it has question examples.
• Easily integrates with Google Sheets, Slack and Zapier
• Transparent pricing – from £21/mth + free trial
• No demo needed
• Customer reviews:
  “The forms and surveys are super easy to set up, easy to integrate with other software”
  “Reporting is very basic and while you can see the number of people who started your survey you are not able to see partial responses”

www.typeform.com

Survey Monkey

You may also know Survey Monkey, which boasts that 20 million questions are answered daily through its platform. Survey Monkey has a 360 template with predefined templates and preset questions. It has been used 21,500 times apparently.
Survey Monkey features:

• The template includes 52 multi choice and scale questions.
• Transparent pricing – from £192/yr. The free plan only allows 10 questions.
• No demo needed.
• Can send reminders in the paid version.
• Customer reviews: “It’s an easy and helpful tool but comes with many paid features that can be used only after purchase”
  “The entire process is easy to do, intuitive, and very effective.”

www.surveymonkey.com/

Survey Sparrow

Survey Sparrow includes a “personalised and engaging 360 review survey experience to your employees, be it supervisors or peers.” The multi-UI platform offers both chat-like surveys and conversational forms:

• Create a custom 360-degree feedback survey
• Customise your Employee 360 reports & emails

Survey Sparrow features:

• multiple share options
• email reminders
• Click-free dashboard
• Integrations
• Pricing: Starts at £99 per month.
• Customer review: “​​I found it a bit expensive”

surveysparrow.com/

Employee Engagement tools

Many employee engagement tools such as Culture Amp and Lattice offer integrated engagement surveys to ascertain what employees think and feel on a range of issues within an organisation. Whilst they offer 360 reviews, many lead with continuous feedback options.

Culture Amp

Culture Amp is full-suite performance software which includes 360 feedback plus performance reviews, goal tracking, and continuous development.
It offers built-in 360 survey templates to ensure consistency, and most of the questions in their review are open-ended or multiple choice (not ratings based.)
Culture Amp understand that ‘The audience is the individual. 360 feedback is designed to go directly to the individual, perhaps via a coach, written for the individual and NOT the manager.’
Culture Amp features:

• Hidden pricing
• Have to book a demo
• Intuitive reporting highlights strengths and areas for improvement.
• Gives a unified view of 360° feedback, goals/OKRs, and 1‑on‑1s.
• Customer reviews: “Once you get the hang of it the administrative side of the platform is pretty easy to navigate and the data you get from surveys is really incredible.”
  “The reports section summarises well huge information sets (if you made a large poll or 360 session) while still being able to drill down to the details (if allowed due to anonymity)”
  “The team also takes themselves *very* seriously when it comes to their “people science”. We entertained using Culture Amp for performance management but the inflexible nature of their team was a huge turnoff.”

www.cultureamp.com/

Lattice

Lattice is an all in one user-friendly talent management HR solution. It is a continuous feedback tool, with a combination of real-time feedback and employee-performance reviews. Lattice integrates one-to-ones, OKRs, goals and performance.
360 reviews are included as part of the platform. Softwarereview says “Survey questions can be your own or pulled from Lattice’s template bank with over 100 people science-backed queries. You can send bulk reminders and nudges to complete 360s, and once the results are in, you can drill down by theme or question.”
But if you want to use it for 360s, you have to buy all the other functionality that you don’t need. The interface is cluttered with a lot of features, which is confusing.
Other notes:

• Transparent pricing but note that there’s an annual agreement that starts at $3,000.
• Lattice’s 360 reviews are controlled by a manager not by the subject – the manager sees the review before you do.
• Customer reviews:
  “Lattice simply is not as effective if users do not make it a point to use it for tracking their goal progress.”
  “Interface can be difficult to learn for new users.
  “Lattice has been a game-changer for our company”
  “had a hard time navigating the different tabs at first:”

lattice.com/

Leapsome

Leapsome describe themselves as a people enablement platform. Leapsome aims to support more collaboration between managers and employees, and more ownership for the employee; development-focused questions; and the use of a goal or OKR system to plan and execute change. They also take place within a wider growth-oriented culture, which supports the review process on an ongoing basis.

‘Flexible’ 360 reviews are offered as part of their comprehensive software, and includes best-practice templates and frameworks or customise everything — from questions to timelines and anonymity settings. You can roll out 360 reviews to all employees and, if you’d like, also gather one-off feedback for an individual or employee subset.
Leapsome features:

• Pricing is modular and starts from $7/user per month but you have to request a demo.
• Metrics based
• Customer reviews: “It has reduced the time I spend on admin around reviews and surveys by at least 50% and offers a high-quality experience for both myself (as an admin user) and employees.” vs “the full feature set can be a bit overwhelming to start”

www.leapsome.com/

General purpose HR software

All singing, all dancing HR software that has 360’s included as an add on. Our view is because the software is trying to do everything, it won’t be done as well as 360 specific software.

Bob

Bob provides “a 360° view of your people by incorporating their complete career timelines, bob activity, goals and achievements into the performance review, giving you the tools for a fair and unbiased review.”
Bob does not show prices, you have to request it and a demo is required.
Bob’s 360 feedback features:

• 360 feedback is integrated in the platform – but it is metrics based.
• Anonymous feedback is an option
• Best for organisations between 50 and 350 employees
• Customer reviews: “implementation took longer than expected”, “flexible but also requires a lot of configuration”

www.hibob.com

Final advice on 360-Degree feedback software

Remember to take your time when planning and implementing your 360 programme. The most effective people-first solutions support your people’s development by giving them information they can use to realise their strengths, uncover their blindspots and grow. If you’re looking for good 360 degree review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation: have a look at tools like AdviceSheet.

The post The best 360-degree feedback tools to use in 2026 for people-first businesses appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Good feedback can make the experience of working with colleagues and coworkers more enjoyable

Asking your colleagues to provide constructive feedback can be a daunting task, and getting honest feedback takes time and practice. However, it is a vital part of improving communication and collaboration in the workplace, and understanding each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

If you’ve been asked to give feedback on a colleague, it might feel really awkward so here’s examples of how to give feedback to co-workers on 3 hard things:

• when your colleague smells bad
• when your coworker acts like they are your boss, and 
• when your coworker is too passive-aggressive 

It may feel difficult, but when you experience behaviours like this at work you need to talk to your coworker about it, and give them some feedback.

Respectful, timely feedback is a driver of growth and collaboration. Between colleagues and coworkers, good feedback can make the experience of work more enjoyable, and helps you all work together better.

When giving feedback in person or writing it in a 360 review, you may be concerned about how honest you can be without making the issue worse, but the important thing is to call it out – it doesn’t help anyone if you beat around the bush or hide what it’s really like to be working with them. 

Your coworker may not realise the impact it’s having, and hearing the feedback might be enough to change their behaviour on its own.  At the very least it offers an opportunity to have a conversation to get to the bottom of it. 

Not sure how to give difficult feedback?

Here are four principles for giving feedback to your coworkers with examples to help you – once you learn how to do it, it will be much easier in future so follow the same approach for conversations with colleagues and for 360 feedback reviews:

1. Focus on the behaviour: be explicit about what your colleague did and how they did it. Don’t make it personal.
2. Explain the impact: what effect your coworker’s behaviour is having on you, on how you feel, and on the work.
3. Speak for yourself and not for others
4. Suggest a solution and be open to talk about it. The behaviour may be annoying but there might be good reasons for it. 

Examples of the 3 hardest things to feedback to a coworker on:

1. One of my colleagues smells bad

How do you tell someone they smell bad? This might not sound serious, but it is a sensitive issue and many of us find talking with a colleague about the way they smell really awkward and difficult.

In a previous career, one of my coworkers had really strong body odour. Several people complained about it to our manager, Bill.

Bill went out and bought a big can of deodorant, called my coworker in to his office, sat them down and said, “Look, there’s no easy way to say this, but you really smell at the moment, so I bought you a can of deodorant and I want you to use it.”

The young man in question said, “Oh, okay.” He started using the deodorant and the problem was solved. 

Such a forthright and blunt course of action is not often appropriate. A young man in his 20s might take it well, but someone else may not. 

So here’s what to do:

• Ask your organisation to make it easy for people by having toiletries readily available – for example putting toothpaste, deodorant, and breath mints in the toilets.
• If you need to have the conversation, do it in private.
• And do it sensitively, because there may be other things going on.

2. My coworker thinks they are my boss

There’s all kinds of reasons for this. 

Sometimes in a team it’s really ambiguous who is leading and somebody might decide to take it on themselves: maybe they’re more forthright, or they’ve been there longest, or maybe they’re more extroverted. 

Perhaps your boss asked them to do it. Perhaps actually they’re unaware they are doing it.

If it’s bothering you, you need to find a way to bring it up. You might be afraid of potential conflict here, but that fear might be all in your head and may not be justified.

To get some clarity, try raising the issue in a non-confrontational way, using an ‘I Statement’ – a way to say something without being threatening ie say how you feel without blaming the other person. 

An example is to say something like, “John, when you set the agenda for meetings, then talk first, and ask me to report to you, I feel that I have no autonomy and that you’re my boss – which you aren’t. I feel angry and I don’t want to feel that – could we find a way to communicate differently? It would be good if we could do X, Y, or Z.”

The I Statement frames it in a way that’s not blaming or aggressive, it’s about their behaviour and how you feel as a result: your feelings cannot be denied.

In this instance the X, Y or Z processes to put in place for how you do things going forward could include things such as democratising meetings or rotating the leadership of meetings. 

You could also do an exercise to clarify how you each see things: separately, you both write down what your roles are, what each of you thinks the other’s areas of responsibility are, and who you’re each accountable to. And then compare to see if they’re similar. That will lead to a fruitful discussion and bring role clarity.

It’s also worth looking at the flipside: why are they behaving like that? Is there something about your own behaviour? Are they anxious that you are not managing your work effectively? Are you missing deadlines? Are you being too passive? 

In any case you won’t know until you have the conversation.

3. One of my coworkers is too passive-aggressive

Passive aggression sits on a broad spectrum: from badly judged banter to outright bullying and gaslighting. None of it is pleasant and no one should have to put up with it. 

There was a time when someone I know was behaving in a passive-aggressive way with a peer. He admitted to me that he was acting out of the frustration he was feeling about something the colleague was not doing. Rather than talk to them about it, he was bottling it up and being passive aggressive in the way he spoke to them. His colleague was hurt and confused and ended up treading on eggshells around him. A pretty difficult situation for both of them. 

In an ideal world he would have bitten back his unhelpful comments, sat down with his colleague and explained his concerns. He might not have got what he wanted but at least the issue would have been clear and weeks of painful interaction might have been avoided. 

Or if his colleague had come back and asked to have a word, maybe my friend might have felt able to talk about the issue and they could have found a way through it. 

Conclusion

You may have other difficult issues to feedback on, but if you follow the approaches to giving feedback shown above, you’ll find thoughtful non-threatening ways to help you and your colleagues have better relationships, your team to do better together, and make your own experience of work a more pleasant and enjoyable one. 

To find out the hardest things to give feedback on to your manager, and how to do it – click here.

One way to make giving feedback easier is to run a 360 review. If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation: have a look at tools like AdviceSheet.

The post How to give 360-degree feedback to a colleague (with examples) appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Focused conversations – whether online or face to face – between leaders, colleagues and co-workers – are integral to making decisions, solving problems and moving work forward.

But many people feel overwhelmed by meetings, and no wonder: meetings are taking up more and more of our time. On average, managers spend 35% to 50% of their time in meetings – the more senior the more time in meetings, while 67% of employees complain that meetings hinder productivity.

The reality is meetings demand our attention and take our focus away from work we’d like to be doing.

What’s more, meetings are often poorly timed, badly run, and can be psychologically unsafe places. Unsafe because they exclude people in all kinds of ways that people don’t even notice, unless you’re the one being excluded.

This can show up as the same handful of loud and enthusiastic people dominating the conversation, so that quieter people can’t get a word in. Which means you don’t hear their contribution. You don’t see their questions in the chat. The quieter voices end up feeling that their opinion doesn’t matter, so why bother.

Or bias and power dynamics in the room mean people don’t feel empowered to challenge or speak up when they disagree with proposals or plans.

For example, amongst our university clients there’s a lot of deference to academics. The experienced but non-academic faculty managers can feel their opinion isn’t valued. So they don’t volunteer their thoughts and opinions – and they’re often not asked – because the dominant culture is that they’re there to serve rather than to lead.

The impact of unsafe meetings

Not feeling empowered to contribute in meetings means that potentially great ideas, solutions and insights are not getting to the table.

It also impacts on whether your team can perform well – because if people feel excluded, they won’t feel valued or trust their colleagues, and if team members don’t trust each other, they can’t be vulnerable and you can’t explore disagreement and conflict.

If you haven’t got a safe space where you can explore conflict, it’s very hard for a group to really gel – and you don’t get the diversity of opinion that is needed to find the best solutions.

An example

A manager we work with was very frustrated that members of his team weren’t performing to the standard he expected. He had meetings with his team and thought he had been pretty clear about what he needed: “Please can you do this analysis and get back to me telling me what’s going to happen.” Everyone said, “yes,”… and then did nothing about it.

Three weeks later, the manager discovers that the work hasn’t been done and calls a new meeting to ask again. He feels very frustrated, which he doesn’t contain. People respond with defensive behaviours, and he becomes even more agitated.

The root of the issue? The team is overwhelmed by work. They’re incredibly busy. They find it very hard to prioritise. They’re not doing the most important things. They actually feel very vulnerable: they don’t know how to do what their manager is asking, and they don’t feel safe enough to ask.

In the next meeting with their manager, things feel clear and they again say yes to what is needed. But afterwards life and other work gets in the way. They are overwhelmed again – and the work the manager wants doesn’t get done.

Meanwhile the manager becomes more frustrated, that frustration carries over into his behaviour, making meetings even less of a safe space.

In situations like this, the harder you push, the less safe people feel and the further away they get from being able to do what you want. People should be able to do X, Y, and Z for you. But they can’t right now. Or they’re not capable.

Pushing them harder isn’t going to work. You need a different strategy.

So how do you create a safe space to resolve situations like this? How do you create the conditions where people feel safe enough to speak up and contribute honestly and authentically in meetings?

Here’s our guide to running psychologically safer meetings.

9 ways to run psychologically safer meetings

There are several ways you can make meetings a safer space for all participants.

1. Split the roles

Typically meetings have a chairperson. This makes for a very hierarchical structure. There’s also an awful lot for one person to do as the chair of a meeting:

• running through the agenda
• making sure everybody gets heard
• directing the conversation to a focal point
• making a decision
• keeping the time
• note taking.

And in the process of running a meeting, chairs are often so busy or not skilled enough to think about the climate of the conversation, ie how people are feeling (creating safe spaces is all about feelings and emotions.)

What to do

There are various roles in a meeting, so split them up and ask different people to do them:

• Chairperson: their job is to get through the business of the meeting,
• Timekeeper: keep track of time and hold the whole room to account on time
• Note taker: take notes in the meeting and circulate after.

Climate: responsible for monitoring the emotional climate, and to help the meeting be more inclusive for quieter voices. *

* examples of things the ‘climate’ person could say and do:

• “I can see that so and so is trying to say something and they haven’t had a chance, perhaps we could go to them.”
• “I can feel that there’s quite a lot of anger here. Perhaps we should pause a minute, check how everyone is feeling and try to understand what the issues are.”
• Teasing out things that the chair might be missing, specifically how people respond and what their emotional position is in that meeting, in order to make it easier for disagreement to surface.

2. Check-in at the start

At the start of a meeting, take 10 minutes to go round to find out where people’s heads are at by asking how they are feeling and what’s going on for them – inviting people to go a little bit deeper by modelling it yourself.

Sometimes people will share insights from their lives, you’ll start to see the person not the role – building connection and going beyond the task. There’s a richness to that which is appreciated. It builds trust and facilitates effective working.

3. Make sure everyone is included

To avoid the same people always talking, invite people in the room to speak one-by-one in turn and share what they think on a topic.

For example, “here’s the topic of discussion, we need to make a decision. You’ve already read the report, let’s go around each of us, one-by-one, starting on my left, everybody will have one minute to say what they think.”

4. Use the 1-2-4-all tool

Another good way to make sure everyone is included.

• Break the meeting up into small groups
• First of all, ask people to make some notes on their own (the “1”), and then have a chat in pairs (the “2”).
• Then depending on the size of the group they might go into fours (the “4”).
• The four report back and feed their discussions into the rest of the meeting.

In this way everybody is included in the conversation, particularly if it’s a big meeting, as opposed to all sitting around a table trying to have a conversation between all of you.

5. Gamify interactions

Here’s two tools you could use to make it easier to hear different perspectives:

i. The challenge card
This is a good meeting tool used by US Naval submarine commander David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around! Marquet designed tools and tricks designed to stop people blindly following the rules. This is one:

• Prepare some playing cards – all of them black cards, apart from one that is red.
• Shuffle the cards and dish them out in the meeting.
• The person who has the red card has a specific job in the meeting: to challenge everything. Even if they agree with the proposal, they have to play the role of doubter.
• Their job is to say, “hang on a minute, what about X?” (Try it. It’s amazing how many other people then chip in with, “Yes, and what about Y?” )
• Otherwise a group will often just find consensus around the strongest voice or the most powerful person in the room, and won’t actually have expressed any concerns or doubts, so missing all that richness. That’s not to say you don’t do the thing, but at least everyone is clear about the risks.

ii. Six Hats

There is a version of ‘the Challenge Card’ tool that is more complex: Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.
In this tool, there are 6 different perspectives or hats to adopt:
1. neutral and fact-based
2. logical-negative
3. lateral creative thinking
4. emotion
5. logical-positive
6. encompasses everything and is in control.You either give people a different hat, and they have to contribute from that hat’s perspective. Or you do it in rounds, with one hat per round – so that everyone’s looking at the question from a logical point of view, or an emotional point of view and so on.

[We like the Challenge Card tool. It’s simple and it’s just focused on the bit people find difficult, which is bringing any dissonance into a conversation.]

6. Good chairing

Good chairing is a staple for running good meetings. Here’s best practice for good chairing:

• Signalling what’s going on
• Replaying what the decision or action points are
• Clarifying who’s going to be responsible for each of those things
• Making sure that the work is distributed evenly. So it’s not always a small handful of people who do all of it – which can often lead to resentment either from the person who’s taken on all the work or others who feel they haven’t got a chance to contribute.

7. Things to do outside the meeting

Making a meeting safer is not only about what happens in the room. It’s also what happens before and after the meeting:

Before the meeting

• Make sure that everyone’s had a chance to read all the materials and the agenda has gone out in good time.
• Invite people to add to the agenda.
• Request that people contact you if they have accessibility needs – do they need support to access this meeting and how could that be accommodated? (For example by producing documents in ways that can be read by screen readers.)
• Invite people to write to the chair beforehand with any concerns that might be coming up.

After the meeting

Get the minutes out quickly and invite people to edit them to make sure that they feel they have been represented fairly, as often the minutes become important documents.

If someone feels that their point hasn’t been reflected, this is an opportunity for them to get it in. Otherwise it’s not uncommon for people to summarise meetings in ways that are unconsciously advantageous to their point of view and other people can feel misrepresented.

8. Acknowledge people’s roles in the meeting and why they’re there

Another thing you can do to include people, to help them feel relevant, valued, and that they belong in a group is to acknowledge their role in the meeting and make clear to others why they’re there – for example, someone might be there to represent an interest group or contribute in a specific way.

This might require the relevant person to be clear about what they’re not there to do. For example, someone told a story about how she was the only woman in the meeting. She was expected to speak for all women, including women who had different job roles to her. She was able to stick up for herself and say, ”I can’t do that. I’m here in my professional capacity. And I’m here because my skill set and area of responsibilities are X, Y, Z and if you need an opinion on A, B, C you should go see this person”.

9. Check-out at the end

Similar to the check in at the start, have a check out at the end. Ask: “How was the meeting? Was there anything about the meeting you found difficult or frustrating? Let’s have it out, let’s get used to giving each other feedback.”

If the feedback is that the meeting didn’t work – that may be uncomfortable to hear – but you can reflect and think about how it could be changed, or how other people could get involved and take on some of the roles.

NB Safe spaces are not about avoiding conflict

The thing about safe spaces: they aren’t about avoiding conflict. If someone gets emotional or is really strong in a challenge, you could feel embarrassed and you might want to pass that off or smooth it over. Actually creating safe spaces requires you not to do that.

Because if you avoid the discomfort, you’ve left that person feeling unheard and unacknowledged, you’ve signalled to other people that ‘we don’t do that’ and that if you are awkward or your opinion doesn’t conform, there’s no space for you in this meeting.

It’s important to make meetings a place where you can have conflict, and when there is that you don’t get judged for it. If you can do that the work you do will be more powerful, more effective, and will go deeper.

How 360’s can help create safe meeting spaces

It’s often difficult for people to tell their colleagues or their boss what they’re thinking, because people are really frightened of giving feedback. It doesn’t feel safe – the recipient will likely get defensive, and it might get awkward and a bit emotionally charged, and who wants to go there?

Having an environment where it is possible to give feedback in person, and it is easy to say, is rare and requires quite a lot of work. Unfortunately teams usually feel they don’t have the time to do that work.

Fortunately 360s can help. A 360-degree review creates a parallel space that establishes feedback safety in a number of ways:

1. it’s not confrontational, because you’re not physically present when you’re doing it,
2. it’s anonymous, making it possible to say what you’re thinking without fear of retribution or recrimination,
3. good 360s encourage you to really think about your feedback. Bashing something or someone isn’t that helpful, but answering nuanced questions requires you to be thoughtful about what’s going on.
4. In a good 360 the questions are framed in an open way so that you can get both the good and the bad across – there’s very rarely all of one and none of the other.

Once a team gets more comfortable with giving and receiving feedback, this makes it a lot easier to speak up and be honest in meetings.

A note about participating in a 360

Being the subject of a 360-degree review can be an extremely alarming experience. You may be keenly aware of your weaknesses, and think everyone is going to hone in and amplify them and destroy your self esteem. But that doesn’t really happen. People see your strengths too.

So having a safe space to review the feedback is really important. We don’t recommend reading a 360-feedback report on your own, we recommend looking at it with somebody who can create some balance against your catastrophizing. Ideally in person.

And don’t read it three weeks before that meeting and then dwell on it, losing sleep every night. Read it on the day. Recognise that it’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be, it’s usually really positive.

Our 360 degree reviews

A 360 degree feedback review can be a useful part of a feedback culture. If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation, and removes the complicated admin that can accompany 360’s, use a tool like AdviceSheet, it is really that simple.

AdviceSheet has:

• Transparent pricing
• Automates the process
• Anonymous participants
• Confidential reports
• Free from meaningless metrics
• Questions that stimulate insightful answers

Read more of our 360-feedback review guides here.

The post Creating psychologically safe meetings for your team (and how 360s can help) appeared first on ThenSomehow.

And in the US, half of employees say they have left a company because of a bad boss.

Your manager may not be ‘bad’ or display those behaviours, but what happens when they behave in ways that undermine you or your work, or put undue pressure on you?

So if you’ve been asked to give 360-degree feedback on your manager, do you try to honestly answer the questions or sidestep them?

It might seem really dangerous to start talking about how you experience your manager or their weaknesses, so here’s some examples of 360-degree feedback you can use to give your manager or your boss feedback on a range of issues, including when:

• You’re being micromanaged.
• Your boss can’t say no to new work.
• Your boss doesn’t respect you.
• Your boss doesn’t listen to you.
• Your boss only ever criticises you.

Your manager is probably the most important person you work with. A good, healthy, respectful relationship with them can boost your productivity, your morale and your career. But working with your manager can also bring up tensions, fears, and dislikes that can get in the way of doing good work.

Giving your manager feedback when they’ve crossed the line or if they’re not supporting you can be tricky especially if it puts your job or your relationship at risk – you may be worried about how honest you can be without creating tension or making it worse.

The thing is they may not realise the impact they’re having or how they’re being received. They may not have stopped to reflect on what they’re doing.

If done well, upward feedback can not only improve your working relationship but will also help your boss. So the important thing is to talk to them.

The hardest things to feedback to your manager on, with examples of how to do it

Here are examples of how to give constructive feedback to your boss on some of the hardest issues:

• You’re being micromanaged.
• Your manager can’t say no to new work.
• Your boss doesn’t respect you.
• Your manager doesn’t listen to you.
• Your manager avoids difficult conversations.
• Your boss only ever criticises you.
• Your manager has favourites, and you’re not one.
• Your manager can’t see you’re drowning.
• Your boss talks too much in meetings.

With some general principles – use the approach to give them feedback in a conversation or 360-degree feedback review.

There are 4 general principles for how to give feedback:

• Focus on the behaviour: be explicit about what your manager did and how they did it. Don’t make it personal.
• Explain the impact: what effect your manager’s behaviour is having – on you, on the work.
• Speak for yourself and not for others.
• Suggest a solution: make an offer and be open to talk about it. You may not like the behaviour but there might be a reason that’s driving it.

1. My boss is micromanaging me

This is a common problem.

It might help to reflect on why they are micromanaging you. What’s going on that makes them feel that they need to get into the details with you?

It may have nothing to do with you. It may be because they are getting pressure from above. It might be because they used to do your job and only recently became a manager. Micromanaging could be more comfortable than working out how to support you and help you grow.

The real issue is that you don’t know, and you also don’t know how to change so that they will get off your back and give you space to get on with it.

It may be hard to have this conversation – your best way in might be to phrase your feedback like this: “I sometimes get micro-managed. I feel frustrated and resentful when this happens because I know how to do my job. I’m curious to know what I could do differently to help you have more confidence in my work so that they feel able to leave me to it. If there is something I need to learn I’d be grateful to hear it. I would welcome a conversation about this.”

2. My manager never says no, which puts me under a lot of pressure

I remember consulting on this issue with a small team. They were feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks and projects their manager had taken on.

How do you give feedback to your manager about this? One option is to communicate clearly and regularly with them about all the things that you have on. Make sure you do some upfront thinking about what is required for each ie how long is it going to take and when you can do it. Then schedule all that time in your calendar.

Pretty quickly that’ll flag up that there’s no way to get everything done in the available time.

If you’ve done this upfront thinking you can show your manager your calendar and say, “Look, I’ve put all the work in, but I can’t do it all. Can you help me determine what the priorities are?”

Your boss or manager might respond by saying, “You do need to do it all, but you don’t need to do all of it to the standard that you think you do. Let’s talk about what the output should look like.”

That will help.

You could also model good behaviour by saying that you can do everything that is being asked – you have the capability – but you don’t have the capacity right now. You can use that as a respectful way of saying no to new work, until you do have the capacity.

You could also suggest a “big board” that maps all of the work of your team, showing what’s coming up and who’s working on what. (You could use an online tool such as Trello.) By making all the work visible, you have a guide for what’s on and can use it to say no collectively, which is a way of supporting your manager without patronising them or challenging their authority.

3. My boss doesn’t respect me

This can be really disconcerting, and hard to know how to engage with.

First of all, what is it that makes you feel they don’t respect you? What are they doing and how are they behaving? Be specific because that is really useful feedback.

If they don’t know how you are feeling they’ll continue to behave in these ways, quite possibly causing anxiety without realising or intending to.

Of course it may be that they are being pointedly disrespectful. Disrespectful behaviour is not okay and is never an appropriate response in a workplace. Making them aware that the behaviour has been noticed might be enough to stop it.

When you give feedback, be explicit about the problematic behaviour without making a judgement about the person. For example “when you do X or Y, I feel disrespected. I would rather you did X if there is a concern or issue so that I can deal with it. When I feel disrespected I find it harder to do Z so it would be great if we could break this pattern.“

The point is: if you make it about them rather than the behaviour, you’ll get a defensive reaction.

Alternatively, if it is actually about the way you manage or there has been a specific incident or a clash of personalities it would be really helpful to understand that.

You could use a 360 review on yourself to explore this – ask trusted colleagues or even your friends (who know you best) if there are things about you that might lead to a disrespectful response. That might feel uncomfortable, but if it was me, I’d rather know so I could do something about it, or be clear about the consequences of continuing in the same vein.

A 360 is a safe way to broach this issue, but it’ll be better and faster if tackled through a conversation with the person concerned.

4. My manager doesn’t listen to me

This is a tricky one, so you have to find a way of making sure your manager knows how you feel.

Firstly, can you identify the situations when it happens? For example, how do you know your manager isn’t listening? Do they look away? Do they ignore you and do the opposite of what you say?

We would always recommend embracing the fear of conflict, and trying to have a chat about it in a one-to-one.

If you can ascertain what it is about their behaviour then when you speak to them you can make sure your feedback to them is specific: “You’re not listening to me,” is not as helpful as, “I feel that you didn’t listen when I was talking about XYZ because you interrupted me three times before I finished my thought.”

Once you’ve explained to them how you feel when they don’t listen to you, it’s a good idea to make a clear request for what you need: avoid vague phrases like “I think we should talk more often in the future,” because that doesn’t tell anyone anything specific or actionable. Instead, say something like “Can we set up regular check-ins every two weeks so we can stay on top of this?”

5. My manager avoids difficult conversations

Many people manage uncomfortable conversations by avoiding them, but putting them off can make matters worse. So if your boss or manager is avoiding difficult conversations and for example, poor behaviour is not being challenged – that is likely to be having an impact on team performance and culture, as well as how you feel.

Knowing this doesn’t help if your manager is frightened of difficult conversations. However you do have some options for influencing them:

Talk to your manager about it

Be specific: instead of making general statements, give examples of when your manager avoided a difficult conversation or when poor behaviour from a colleague went unchallenged. Keep it personal and use an “I” statement, this will avoid your manager feeling defensive. For example, instead of saying “You always avoid difficult conversations,” you could say, “I noticed that when Joe cuts Karen off in meetings, you avoid saying anything about it.” Then focus on the impact that it has on you. For example, you could say, “when you avoid that conversation, it means Joe can carry on doing it, Karen feels really bad, and I don’t feel safe to share my thoughts in meetings either. It’s having an effect on my morale and my productivity.”

Call it out when it happens

You could call it out when it’s happening. For example in a team meeting, you could say, “Can I just say something? When you speak like that in a meeting, I feel really anxious and I don’t feel safe to say what I’m thinking. Maybe it’s only me that feels this way, but perhaps other people feel the same. And that’s really not helpful for us as a group. Could we talk about it?” In hierarchical organisations you’d expect your manager to do this, but if they’re not, you could do it. Other people might pile in and say, “actually, yes, I’d like to talk about it too.” And the group could fix it, which is what every manager really wants, for their team to be self-led.

6. My manager never recognises my good work, and only criticises me

That’s really hard.

What’s going on here for you? What is it that you need? Quite possibly you just need somebody to tell you you’re doing okay. We all need that kind of recognition. Even a simple, “Thank you,” can make us feel really good.

If your boss or manager is only ever criticising you it’s clearly easier for them to find fault. Perhaps they have forgotten or didn’t know that you can also build esteem with positive reinforcement (as any parent or teacher will know.)

One of the ways you could give feedback on this, is to say to your manager, “oh, could we have a chat about what’s good about this [piece of work], and what you like?” Or you could say, “thank you, it’s really helpful to have feedback on those areas for improvement, but it would also be really helpful to understand the bits that you like [about the document] because I find myself obsessing a little bit on the negative things when I think there might be some good stuff in there too. So could you clarify what is good?”

This is asking for feedback in a directive way. Another option is less direct and more about modelling those behaviours yourself: if you need good feedback, how are you giving it to other people? How are you celebrating success with others?

7. My manager has favourites and I’m not one

Inequitable behaviour is a real trigger for lots of people. So if there is favouritism and some people are getting better treatment or privileges, it’s going to bring up powerful emotions for people who’re witnessing it and missing out.

Can you influence this situation? Well, the most influence you have is over yourself. Which means recognising why you’re upset, and doing other things that are in your sphere of control that might make you feel a bit more resilient.

Yes, that is colluding with the situation, but if you have no other choice, looking after yourself is always in your power.

The other thing you can do is to go to your manager and say, “I noticed that so and so has the opportunity to do X. I would like to know how I could have that opportunity, because it’s an area of development for me.”

You can make an observation about the fact these opportunities exist, and you can make a request, saying: “I would like some of that,” in a way that’s not a demand, not a threat, and not judgmental.

It’s not a good idea to say to your manager, “it’s easy to see you’ve got favourites” – that is unlikely to play well. But you can say, “Is there a way that you can make it clear how I could qualify for that? Can you explain how I might have that opportunity?”

What you really want is the same opportunity to develop. Once you know what you need, you can go to your manager and say, “I’m feeling a bit left behind, I want to be able to grow and develop, can you give me some guidance as to how I could have that opportunity myself?”

8. My manager can’t see I’m drowning, when I tell her she thinks I lack commitment

What’s critical in these situations is being as really clear as you can about what you’ve got on your plate, because that might not be clear to the people around you.

One of the ways you can do that is to write down all of the things that you are doing. All the tasks and all the projects. Map it all out – using cards, or post-it notes, or lists – identifying how much time you are spending on each thing. Then work out what it is that you think needs to happen next on each one, and what is blocking or enabling those next steps.

If you are drowning, you’ll be feeling out of control and be worrying that you’re missing something. You probably will be missing things, which will just make you feel even worse. You’ll probably be working in a really reactive way just shooting after the latest crisis. You’re not solving the problem.

Stopping and doing a helicopter view of everything that you’ve got on would be really good for you, never mind your boss.

Having got everything out of your head, it will help you feel better. And then you can prioritise: what are the most important things that you have to do? How much time is it going to take? And when could you do them?

Then get your calendar out, and start looking at when you can do things. That is beginning to take some control over this.

You might feel immediately better and think, “I can do these things.” Or you might realise, “there is just not enough time in my week to do all this stuff. I’m back-to-back. I’ve got no time to think. I’ve got no time to answer email. I’ve got no time to go for a wee. So it’s not going to work.”

Once you’re clear on this, you’re ready to go to your manager.

You can then say to them, “I’m feeling completely overwhelmed and anxious. Look at all of my work. I think these are my priorities, but they don’t fit into the time I have. What I need is some of this work taken away or additional support.”

If you’ve done the prep work, then it should help your manager see what’s going on. They might say, “You’re doing X, Y, Z that are not important, I don’t need you to do those. Stop doing those. A, B, C are the most important things.”

Or they’ll say, “Okay, I can really see that there’s a lot there.”

That’s how we would recommend approaching it – with some evidence, which requires you to do some preparation.

9. My boss talks too much in meetings

This is another opportunity to give feedback to your boss.

You’re probably feeling disenfranchised, that you haven’t got any agency and that you’re not being listened to. You may not feel safe to speak up.

However bosses and managers often say they feel frustrated when people don’t speak in meetings and because they hate the silence, that can be one reason why they speak a lot.

The question I would have for you is, why don’t you speak more? Is it because you’re frightened? Is it because you can’t get a word in edgeways? Are you new to the team? Is there another dynamic that affects your confidence to participate?

And is it just you? Are you being overlooked every time? Maybe you’re a woman and you can’t get a word in because people always talk across you, or worse, someone else mansplains what you’ve said and takes all the credit.

It’s not entirely your boss’s fault, but largely it is.

To address this, you could give feedback to your boss as part of a 360-degree review, or you could look for an opportunity to have a one-to-one with them. I’d say something like, “I noticed that not everyone is speaking in meetings and you’re speaking a lot. I would like to speak but I don’t feel I get a chance. I wonder if you’ve noticed that?” …and see where that conversation goes.

It could be an issue about how meetings are chaired, perhaps there are some deeply entrenched patterns about loud and quiet voices in the group.

In that case, you might be able to propose different meeting formats. For example, you could say, “I’ve noticed not all of us speak as much as others. I was wondering if we could try some different techniques?”

One technique you could try is a round: a really simple idea where you go round the table and everyone gets to say what they think, one after the other, without interrupting each other.

Another technique if people are frightened to talk because it’s a big meeting with lots of power around the table, is to split the discussion into smaller groups. The way to do this is to first ask everyone to write down what they think and then chat in pairs before feeding back to the whole group. If it’s a big group, from pairs you go to fours, the fours discuss it and swap notes and do a bit of calibration. And then one person from each four feeds back to the whole group. You’ll get more collective input in that way.

—-

You may have other difficult issues to feedback on, but if you follow the approaches to giving feedback shown above, you’ll find thoughtful and non-threatening ways to help you and your manager have a better relationship and make your own experience of work a more pleasant and enjoyable one.

To find out the hardest things to feedback on to your colleagues, and how to do it click here.

One way to make giving feedback easier is to run a 360-degree review. If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of the people in your organisation: have a look at tools like AdviceSheet.

AdviceSheet has:

• Transparent pricing
• Automates the process
• Anonymous participants
• Confidential reports
• Free from meaningless metrics
• Questions that stimulate insightful answers

Read more of our 360-degree feedback guides here.

The post The hardest things to give feedback to your manager on appeared first on ThenSomehow.

If you are a good manager you’ll help your team members to thrive individually and as a group. That’s not always easy. Your team consists of diverse individuals with differing strengths, weaknesses, ideas and communication styles. It’s inevitable that they’ll squabble and argue from time to time.

In fact, research shows that 60-80% of all difficulties in organisations come from strained relationships between employees, not from failings in an individual’s skill or motivation.

And the typical manager spends 25-40% of their time dealing with workplace conflicts. That’s one to two days of every work week.

[Washington Business Journal, May 2005.]

If you’re wondering how to better support your team, smooth out conflict, and deal with the issues they’re facing collectively then you might need to think about how to help them develop as a group and as individuals (spoiler alert: 360-degree feedback is one tool that can help with this).

There’s lots of research into the way teams develop, including Tuckman’s well-known stages of team development – the forming storming, norming, and performing model. There are other models, such as by Agazarian and Wheelan that have similar stages but use different names. You may also have heard of Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

What all the models agree on is that there are some definite phases to team development.

One of the key phases is at the beginning when people join or form a group or team. At first they don’t really know how they’re supposed to be. The essence of this was captured by former MIT professor, Edgar Schein, who said that everyone shares the same fundamental questions in any new group situation:

• Who am I in this group? (ie what’s my identity here?)
• How much control/influence will I have?
• Will my needs be met? (ie am I going to be heard? Am I leading or following? Am I going to be able to address the things that I want?)
• What will the levels of intimacy be? (ie is it gonna be very formal? Am I going to be able to explain how I feel? How much of myself am I allowed to reveal?)

In this team forming stage, everyone starts off by being polite, by being careful about what they say, and doing all the things that our society has taught us are the ways not to offend, and to rub along. We’re very good at that. In that space, it’s not good manners to talk about how you feel, it’s not good manners to disagree with one another. It’s not good manners to challenge, because it can be seen as disrespectful, because you just don’t know each other well enough yet.

However what the models also recognise is that unless you can get past this ‘good manners’ stage, and actually invite disharmony, disagreement and conflict into the group (we don’t mean physical conflict) – for example by being able to say that you’re not happy with the way things are going – it’s very hard for a team to really gel and move forward.

So in fact, healthy conflict is a good thing.

This is because people tend to bottle up the small things that are bugging them, and don’t articulate that they’re feeling frustrated or that their needs are not being met.

So if you pay lip service to what is being discussed and agreed, and are polite instead of being honest, you won’t really be able to commit to the group and the work it’s trying to do.

If you carry on doing this, after a while you will probably stop showing up – literally or figuratively. You might say that you’re too busy, or you might lose interest – but in reality it’s to do with not getting your needs met.

So if as a manager or team lead you can start exploring what people are feeling – by bringing healthy conflict in, safely – and get comfortable with that, then you will understand each other’s edges and each other’s needs, and everybody can feel heard, and then you can start to be yourselves a bit more in that team.

And if you can do that, you can start committing to a shared endeavour.

A real example

A working group was formed at a large organisation to develop a project that tackled a specific issue with their culture, and then prototype it. At the end of one of the first meetings, someone expressed a pessimistic view about the potential of the project the group had decided on. They added, “I was thinking of lying, but I didn’t.” Thank goodness they didn’t otherwise we’d continue the charade and that would mean making no progress until they likely got bored and stopped showing up!

Shifting your team into high performance

The forming and storming stages of team development (these stages include both fight (arguing) or good manners (flight)), can however be quite hard to shift out of. There are things in organisations and within teams that affect this: formal and informal power, deference to hierarchy or status, or perhaps bad behaviour – we’ve all met grumpy people who you have to walk carefully around – are all reasons why you might stay stuck in a stage, and you can’t get beyond it into starting to really build deeper connections with people and feel able to work with them.

As a manager, one of the things that you can do is to make sure that in your time together in meetings that you properly include people so that everybody is able to share and be heard.

Also bringing in people’s needs and feelings into conversations and not glossing over them. Because feelings go really deep – take a look at the iceberg model – if you just focus on task and process, you won’t be acknowledging what’s going on underneath, the hidden things that affect people’s commitment to the work. And you won’t build trust.

As a manager, a further way to build trust is to invest time in people and show an interest in them. These three important questions should be clear for you:

• What’s expected of this person?
• How are they doing?
• Where are they heading?

That’s about committing to your team, it’s about being clear about expectations, it’s about being robust in your feedback, in a constructive and helpful, supportive way.

How 360-degree feedback fits in

One of the reasons that a 360-feedback review is useful in this process of developing a team is because it creates a neutral and a safe space for people to articulate what they might not be able to say in person about what their experiences are, without exposing themselves in a dangerous way, for example, when there are power dynamics at work.

In addition, 360s’ are designed to invite constructive feedback through the way the questions are written and to be balanced: they’re an opportunity to talk about strengths as well as weaknesses and to feel valued and appreciated. Knowing that you are valued makes it easier to hear about things you could improve.

From a subject’s point of view, it gives you multiple perspectives. You very quickly discover that there isn’t a single truth about you, that people experience you differently. And that gives you choices.

Very importantly, willing to be the subject of a 360 sends a signal out to everybody else that you’re up for listening, that you’re up for learning, that you’re up for adapting and improving. And that you’re not frightened of looking at this stuff.

For example, for a manager, bringing your team on board by modelling being the subject of a 360 yourself makes it okay for other people to think about getting better and ask permission for feedback. That’s really important

As a manager, if you ask for input on yourself, it makes it okay for you to say to a team member, “could I give you a bit of feedback?… I’ve noticed you’ve been doing these things. And I wonder whether I should be clear about my expectations with you? Because I’m not quite seeing what I thought I’d see in this area. What I would really like to see is this, this and this. You’re almost there, but not quite. And if you did X, Y, and Z, I think you’d be there, which would be great. Particularly considering what you want to do next.”

What happens after a 360

Once 360-degree feedback is in, those tasked with the coaching will have a confidential conversation with each subject. If the 360 has been run with the whole team, everybody will have participated in the process. They’ll have got things off their chest, and been able to share them – privately and individually – in a neutral space.

Afterwards everybody re-enters the team space with a slightly altered perspective, often with greater confidence because they’ve had their strengths articulated to them. And that empowers them to contribute more fully.

They may for example have had a bit of their impostor syndrome chipped away, so they feel more confident.

Occasionally people feel a bit bruised because they’ve heard some things for the first time and understood that they might be causing harm or discomfort for colleagues in ways they may not have realised.

That’s really hard. But it gives them the opportunity to modify their behaviour. It gives them an opportunity to apologise for it. And to invite ongoing feedback and be more inclusive of people.

Where there are bumps in a group, it is really important to be able to bring those things out.

Putting a whole team through a 360 review will by no means definitely solve a team’s problems, but it certainly equips a team to be better able to deal collectively with the issues they’re facing, by giving the individuals in the group a clearer understanding of what’s going on, and giving them increased confidence in their work and being able to talk more honestly with colleagues.

Our 360 degree reviews

A 360 degree feedback review can be a useful part of a feedback culture. If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation, and removes the complicated admin that can accompany 360’s, use a tool like AdviceSheet, it is really that simple. Read more guides here.

The post How you can help your team work together better appeared first on ThenSomehow.

We’ve all experienced it. Colleagues who don’t work well with others, who are resistant to change, who shout at people, are critical and always negative, or who don’t do the work you’re expecting them to do, never take ownership, or even some who are casually sexist or racist.

Sometimes it is a member of your own team who is difficult and hard to work with, disrupting team cohesion, derailing projects, and destroying trust.

Maybe they behave in ways that upset other people, or maybe they cut people off in meetings, saying for example, “No, tried that, doesn’t work,” or, “crap idea,” or something equally unhelpful. Behaving in a way which feels quite belittling for others, and shutting them down.

Few people like conflict and often these kinds of aggressive behaviours go unaddressed. Everyone just walks away and licks their wounds. People might talk about the problem in small groups, perhaps they’ll talk to their manager, but no one has the courage to address it with the individual concerned in case they get their head bitten off.

Problem staff are the dread of every manager.  Research by the Center for Creative Leadership in the USA shows that problem employees can cost an organisation up to $8,000 a day by eroding trust, reducing output and innovation, and lowering the motivation and cohesion of their work group.

Surprisingly this happens quite often in organisations. Research shows that 60-80% of all difficulties in organisations come from strained relationships between employees, not from failings in an individual’s skill or motivation.

But what if it’s your boss or a senior team member who’s the problem?

Here are some examples:

• Your boss is spiky and a tyrant
• A senior colleague always cuts you off
• Your manager is often like a bear with a sore head
• A director shouts at you and humiliates you in front of everyone

This is hard to resolve, especially if you’re a junior member of staff, as power dynamics are not easy to overcome. Left unaddressed these behaviours affect a team’s performance and can make the workplace feel unsafe and an unpleasant place to be.

Guide to using a 360 to deal with a difficult boss 

These issues are best addressed by having a difficult conversation with the person concerned, but in case that’s not possible or if you’re scared to do that, here’s how to deal with a difficult colleague, with examples, including how and why a 360 creates a safer space to give constructive feedback that can help you, your colleague and your team develop and grow together instead.

Here are a couple of scenarios that might feel familiar…

1. Your boss is a tyrant, they can be really spiky and unpredictable.

Your boss behaves like a tyrant. Sometimes they’re a benevolent tyrant, ie you fundamentally like them, but every now and again they behave in volatile, unpredictable ways. Not physically violent, but verbally violent. 

You may have seen or heard of cases of this, for example where a director comes into an open plan office and in front of everyone shouts something like: “I’ve just come out of a meeting, and I have never been so humiliated! How could you give me a bunch of figures like that?! They were out of date! I was unable to answer the questions. What you did was not good enough!” 

The recipient of the tirade is likely to be thinking and feeling things such as, “This is so unfair! How could I have predicted that? This report is what we always do. You didn’t give me time to have a conversation. You didn’t ask me for that… I’ve just been broadsided out of nowhere, and everybody saw me get humiliated. That was a horrible experience.”

Get shouted at like that more than once or twice, and actually that is bullying behaviour.

And it doesn’t just affect the person who was on the receiving end. Everybody else who heard it is thinking, “Gulp. That could be me. I need to watch my back,” which leads to all kinds of back-covering behaviours, including:

• the rise of multiple CCs on emails.
• people not willing to take responsibility because they don’t want to take the flack.
• asking the ‘tyrant’ to check everything, leading to bottlenecks.
• the curse of paranoid perfectionism – where epic effort goes into producing the perfect document or report without getting feedback on it early enough, for fear of being branded unprofessional, so the output ends up being ‘wrong’ anyway.

The question is: how do you address this stuff?

Firstly, understand why your boss may be behaving like that. 

Most people know how to behave in organisations, and have good manners. Aggressive people in the workplace usually have something else going on. They may be feeling vulnerable, afraid they might be judged or come under attack, or lose their job in some way. They definitely don’t feel safe. 

This is not to excuse their behaviour, but it’s always more complicated and messy than it first seems.

2: Your senior colleague behaves like a bear with a sore head

Perhaps your aggressive colleague’s difficult behaviour has a different source. 

One of the managers we work with was deeply bruised after being seconded out to a project that went horribly wrong. They were left on their own without any support and felt very exposed. It was incredibly stressful for them. When they came back, their distress was not addressed or dealt with. They were burned out by the other project. And yet here they were back in the office and the previous situation didn’t seem to matter to anyone. 

They started acting out: cutting people off in meetings, and putting people down. They behaved badly and treated peers and colleagues poorly.

No one felt able to say anything.

Their manager came to us and said, “I’ve worked with this person for many years. They’re my friend. I’ve tried to talk to them about how they’re behaving. They’re not willing to listen to me, they lash out at me for bringing it up. If I keep pushing it, I’m going to lose the friendship. Nobody else feels able to speak to them about it.”

More examples of hard things to give feedback to your boss here.

How to use a 360 in these situations

Where people feel unable to address these kinds of behaviours head on, usually because of a fear of conflict, you can use a 360-degree review to create a neutral space where peers, mangers and reports are able to give feedback on the individuals concerned, anonymously, safely and in a really balanced way. 

As a safe way to approach this, in both the above real-life situations we ran a 360 with the difficult people and went through their 360 feedback report with them in coaching conversations. 

Helping the angry manager work out what is really going on

In their 360 feedback, this manager’s colleagues articulated how they were frustrated by the way the manager was behaving. However the feedback was also very, very balanced. They said this person is the most experienced member of the team, they are an invaluable source of advice, they are incredibly generous with their help and kind with their input. 

“But they can be really difficult to be around and can shut you down in meetings and can make you feel one millimetre high. One minute they lift you up and the next minute crush you down. It’s really, really hard to work with them.”

“There’s two versions of this person: there’s the one we want. And the one that we’re really scared of.”

In the ensuing coaching conversation, the manager concerned had a moment of clarity that led to an epiphany: all her problematic behaviour was a result of what happened when she was away doing the other project. She was exhausted and fed up. She said, “Everything here reminds me of the difficulties I had in the other project. That’s what I’m bringing into the group and not acknowledging.”

She said “This can’t go on. I can’t continue to be stuck in this rut and take it out on my colleagues who I really like, and who I’m now harming. I need to do something about this for them and for my own well being.”

She decided she needed a complete change, to leave and start over, freeing herself and her team to move forward.
[editor’s note: It was certainly not our intention for her to think about moving on…]

Soothing a benevolent tyrant

In the other example, we worked with a leader who could be tyrannical. They were in fact a deeply caring person, yet from time to time they would lose it in ways that were unhelpful. 

This would happen when they felt at risk and exposed, and they would start shouting at people in public. 

They knew they were doing it but didn’t stop, “I get frustrated because team members are not stepping up to the mark,“ they said.

They would always apologise afterwards, but the damage was done: people felt less confident and less able to step up in case they got shouted at.

The whole team agreed to run a 360-degree review, in part motivated by wanting to find a way to address this, because although everyone recognised it was holding them all back, they were afraid to talk about it directly. 

The leader was worried about what might come up in their own 360. “I shouldn’t have done these things,” they said, “but I’m really worried that everything’s going to be about me. And nobody’s going to take responsibility for not stepping up. I know that I’m not helping by doing those things, maybe this is an opportunity to address it.”

The 360 review created a space where everyone in the team received a mixed bag of feedback, and different perspectives. People were able to be frank because it was a neutral space, and they could articulate what they were experiencing. 

For the leader with the problematic behaviours, it was an uncomfortable and tearful experience. To have more than one person say, “that thing you do, it isn’t okay. And I really wish that would go away because all this other stuff you do is amazing. And that’s the boss I love and want more from.”

When they read this, the first thing that the leader told their coach was, “I’m going round in loops, alternating between hating myself and then hating everybody else, and being really angry about how unfair it is.”

Once they calmed down and could accept the positive as well as the hard-to-hear feedback, they were able to work on changing:
1. They became more aware of their behaviour and its impact.

2. They shouted less but occasionally relapsed, it got better over time.

3. They worked out what triggered this behaviour and tried to be clearer in setting expectations.

4. They discovered that working from home really helped and they boiled over less readily: shouting at a screen just didn’t seem to happen in the same way. 

Why 360’s are good, how they help

Putting a whole team through a 360 review will by no means completely solve a team’s problems or fix a problem colleague, but it certainly equips people to be better able to deal with the issues they’re facing, by giving the individuals in the group a clearer understanding of what’s going on, and giving them increased confidence in being able to talk more honestly with colleagues.

Once you start talking and giving feedback, it becomes easier to give each other feedback more often, which enables a group to develop together and ultimately become a higher performing team.

A 360 degree feedback review can be a useful part of a feedback culture. If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation, and removes the complicated admin that can accompany 360’s, use a tool like AdviceSheet, it is really that simple. 

AdviceSheet has:

• Transparent pricing
• Automates the process
• Anonymous participants
• Confidential reports
• Free from meaningless metrics
• Questions that stimulate insightful answers

Read more of our guides to using 360-feedback reviews here.

The post How to use a 360 to deal with a difficult colleague (with examples) appeared first on ThenSomehow.

Regardless of whether that’s telling a client (or your boss) that their request is unreasonable, holding a colleague accountable for a missed deadline, or confronting a team member about their poor work or disrespectful behaviour, these conversations feel stressful and uncomfortable because we’re frightened of where they might go.

Most people find the challenge too hard and manage uncomfortable conversations by ignoring or avoiding them. Research shows that 70% of employees avoid difficult conversations with their boss, colleagues, or direct reports, and 95% of staff struggle to speak up about a concern.

However, whilst having a difficult conversation with your boss or colleague may be extremely daunting, putting it off – perhaps in the hope that things will miraculously improve – can make matters a lot worse.

Not telling someone about a delay could cause bigger problems further down the line. Keeping quiet about concerns or not sharing a different view in a meeting can lead to projects failing. Challenging behaviours and rudeness can blow up if left unchecked, and small disagreements can turn into unhealthy conflict and have a big impact on your team’s performance and culture.

When avoiding a difficult conversation is a problem. A real life example

One of our clients recently took up a managerial post at a large organisation and discovered that the most senior person on their team had also applied for that post. They had been passed over for promotion and were now holding it against our client in all kinds of micro-aggressive ways. They said things like, “you are undoing all the work we have ever done here,” questioning every suggestion and proposal to the point of destruction, exhausting our client and everybody else on the team.

Reluctant to have a tough conversation, our client tried being understanding and accommodating, and overlooked the behaviour. Unfortunately it didn’t work. The person concerned continued to sabotage everything, holding the team back and keeping everyone stuck in pointless conversations that went on for weeks.

What our client needed to do was to tell this person – in a clear and respectful way – that their behaviour was not okay and had to stop. They needed to say that it was affecting them, the work and everyone else too.

Unfortunately they didn’t – instead they effectively adopted a ‘do nothing’ strategy, something that is more common than you might think. Our fear of conflict will see us putting up with a great deal. In fact, Fierce Conversations found that the number one response to coping with toxic employees is to ignore them, with 44 percent of respondents noting this was their preferred approach.

According to a survey by Vitalsmarts, the top five most common difficult conversations that people tend to put off, ignore or avoid are:

1. Prickly Peers: Failure to confront rudeness, aggression, bullying, harsh language or resistance to feedback.
2. Ticking Time Bombs: Failure to speak up when proposals and procedures are riddled with inaccuracies or faulty thinking.
3. Incompetent Colleagues: Failure to talk to peers and direct reports about poor work or lack of engagement.
4. Abusive Bosses: Failure to openly discuss the damage done when people in power resort to control or rely on their position to push their own agenda.
5. Management Chaos: Failure to get clarification when people feel uncertain around roles, responsibilities, and timelines.

The hidden cost of unspoken conversations

The study by Vitalsmarts also highlighted what happens as a result of avoiding a difficult conversation – the impact affects the work that people could be doing as well as the workplace atmosphere:

• 61% ruminated about the issue
• 41% complained to colleagues
• 32% did unnecessary work to avoid dealing with it
• 24% talked around the topic

And their research into the financial cost of a delayed conversation:

• 35% estimated the delay cost their employer between $100 and $1,000 for each conversation avoided,
• while 19% put that cost at up to $5,000.

The upshot is that however bad the news or sensitive the problem, the best strategy all round is to tackle it as early as possible and to have a conversation with the person concerned, however difficult.

In the example of our client, after discussing different ways to challenge their difficult colleague, they grasped the nettle and calmly explained to their colleague how the behaviour was making them feel and the impact it was having on them personally. The response was dramatic: shock, horror and guilt. There was an apology and a frank and open conversation about the colleague’s frustration. The behaviour did improve and ultimately the difficult person made the decision to find a new role, as their frustrations were with the organisation rather then our client. Our client was able to support them in securing a new role.

It is often the case that embracing the conflict like this leads to good things. When you are avoiding conflict, rather than think about the worst that could happen, think instead about what is the best that could happen.

Building your courage and your ability to have frank and difficult conversations is a useful skill for any manager. By increasing your awareness and experience of how to approach tough conversations you’ll learn how to manage situations with respect and honesty – and get better outcomes.

Here’s how to have difficult conversations

So how do you approach these kinds of conversations and find the right strategies to handle the interactions so that they go smoothly and better than you were hoping?

Having a framework for those hard conversations will help you get better at them and as you practise, your confidence will grow.

Here’s what to do:

1. Face the situation head on
2. Consider what is going on for the person
3. Use an I-Statement
4. Use the FONT tool
5. Respond in a different way

We go into more detail about each of these steps with examples below:

1. In the first instance, face the situation head on and talk about it.

Talking to your boss or employee about a sensitive subject can be an anxiety inducing prospect. You may worry that they are going to be defensive, or that they’ll be angry and aggressive. They might not listen. These are all certainly possible.

But if you don’t try to have the conversation, you can’t make any progress at all. You’ll just be stuck in a difficult situation.

The truth is that when you have the conversation, it’s usually not nearly as bad as you fear.

2. Prepare for the conversation by reflecting on what might be going on for them

There could be many and various reasons why someone is behaving in a particular way. If they are delivering poor work, they may be struggling but feel unable to ask about it. If they are not engaged, they could have issues at home. If they are being rude they may be feeling aggrieved by unjust treatment.

Try putting yourself in their shoes before you start talking to them.

In the example above of the person who was passed over for promotion and didn’t get the job – their confidence or self esteem will definitely have taken a knock.

As a manager, your top aim should be to help this person to be a useful contributor again whilst making it clear that they can’t carry on behaving like that.

3. Use an I Statement

An I-Statement – literally a statement you make that starts with the word “I” – tells another person how you are feeling in a clear, effective, and truthful manner.

I-Statements are a tool for holding a difficult conversation in a respectful, productive way. They are a powerful way to help you express your point to someone else without immediately causing them to feel defensive or aggressive, which allows them to respond rather than react.

The way to do it is to start with “I” and to structure what you say like this:
“I feel X when you do Y, and [how their behaviour affects you].”

For example, “I feel upset and angry when you say things like that, and it is affecting how we work together.”

If it’s appropriate you can add in – “I would prefer it if you didn’t do that, and if you did Z instead.”

Be as truthful as you can because your true feelings are undeniable. And then it will be much more likely that you are able to have a real dialogue with them.

In contrast to an I Statement, if you start the conversation with the other person’s actions, or say “you make me really angry when you do X,” you’re sending the message that you’re blaming them and that they’re the problem.

An I-Statement is not blaming, it’s the opposite of making someone feel they are intrinsically bad or wrong (which is more likely to put them on the defensive), instead it’s about the consequences of their behaviour and makes space for the possibility that they could behave in a different way.

NB I-Statements can take a bit of practice as you can feel a little vulnerable when you use them, but they do work, so do persevere. Also be careful not to turn one into a ‘blaming you’ statement pretending to be an I-Statement. Eg “I feel that you are passive-aggressive,” is not an I-Statement.

4. The FONT tool

The FONT tool is a way to decode and focus the conversation so that you can discover what’s really going on for people.

FONT is an acronym for:
F – feelings
O – observations
N – needs
T – thoughts

The way to use it: whenever you’re having a tough conversation with somebody, observe what you notice both about yourself and what you sense from them, within the four FONT categories, so that you can break the conversation down into something that makes sense and helps you handle it better.

For example, I might be observing your body language and notice that you’re looking away. I might think about what that might mean and realise that, “she’s not listening to me.”

Or I might notice that you’ve become defensive. I might start thinking, “This is going to end really badly. We’re going to start shouting and she may storm out.”

With that information, I could change my behaviour. I could stop trying to tell you something, and instead ask a question: “I noticed that you raised your voice when you said that. What’s going on for you? How are you feeling?”

The ultimate aim of the FONT tool is to increase your awareness of what might be going on emotionally for the other person – their feelings and needs – and to bring those into the conversation. If you can do that, you are more likely to have a much more valuable conversation.

If you just stick to actions, decisions, communication and results (ie the bit above the waterline in the iceberg model [see image below]), it’s more likely that you’ll get a defensive response.

Our experience suggests that most people don’t bring feelings and needs into the professional domain and yet they’re so important. If you try to address an awkward relationship with all its difficult context without talking about emotions and needs, you’ll have very limited leverage to affect change.

The more you practise, the more you’re able to do it on the fly.

Five core emotions

To help you identify what people’s feelings are, this is a helpful shortcut to use with the FONT tool – the five core emotions:
MAD (Angry)
SAD
GLAD
HURT
SCARED

Arguably all emotions are a variation on these five.

If you can find a way for the person to tell you how they’re feeling, for example they might say, “I don’t feel safe. I’m feeling a mix of anxiety (scared) and anger.”

Then you might be able to understand what their needs might be, you can empathise with them and try to find a solution.

If their needs are for esteem, acknowledgement and feeling valued, then you can find things that you can praise in this person to help them feel more valued, and look for opportunities to acknowledge them. That might be a way to decode the tension in the relationship.

There are two ways to work with FONT:

i. In the moment

Use it to steer a conversation into what’s really going on. This often leads to an amazingly releasing conversation. It requires a certain level of skill, and there is some risk. Even if it doesn’t succeed the first time, the attempt won’t necessarily end in disaster.

ii. Reflecting after the fact

Review the conversation and re-run it using FONT to help you understand what was going on. What did you see? What were you thinking about? What might they have been thinking? What might they have been feeling? What needs could be driving them?

Even if the situation crashes and burns at the time, spending a bit of time afterwards thinking about what you could have done differently will help for next time, when you’ll be better able to recognise what is happening and try something new because you’ve done the prep work.

In either case you might not get it 100% right, but at least it gives you a working hypothesis that you can try out to see if it makes a difference.

Being able to say to someone, “I can see you might be getting upset. How are you feeling?” can go a long way to resolving the situation. If they can be honest about what they’re feeling, then you can say, “Okay, let’s just talk about what you need.”

Examples of needs

The Center for Nonviolent Communication has examples of needs to help give you some clues about things that people might need.

5. Respond to a difficult conversation with the opposite

This is an approach that’s helpful if someone is either very emotional or very factual:

• If somebody hits you with facts and figures, you respond with feelings and emotions.
• If someone is very emotional, you respond with facts and figures.

Imagine an awkward conversation with a colleague who’s delivered some poor work, they start listing all of the facts and figures about how such and such is wrong and it’s not their fault. While they’re stuck on the facts and figures, they’ll be building a metaphorical wall around them and you won’t be able to move the conversation forward. If you introduce feelings and emotions, you can change the dynamic of conversation and shift it into a space where you might be able to have a transformative chat.

Or perhaps the opposite happens and the conversation goes the way you were frightened it could: they become very emotional. What happens if they start crying and say, “Oh my god, I’m useless…” or alternatively they become really angry? A way to respond is to, firstly, acknowledge and bring empathy to all that feeling. Then bring in some facts and figures to try and get back into a conversation.

This can be quite a useful tool if you find yourself stuck because it’s easy to remember:

• If it gets really messy, stick to facts and figures and try to build the communication back up from there.
• If it’s too ‘facts and figures’, bring emotions in and start a dialogue around those things.

Three examples of situations that are likely to involve difficult conversations and how to deal with them

These are examples of scenarios where difficult conversations might become dysfunctional, and where people can easily become defensive:

• There’s a restructure and your job is at risk
• “You’re not doing your job”
• Offensive behaviour

i. There’s a restructure. People are at risk of redundancy

If you have to restructure your team, some people’s jobs are likely to be at risk. They might need to change jobs, or maybe there will be a cut in the number of posts. People often come into restructuring conversations with a lot of anxiety. The minute you say, “This is happening, and everyone’s going to have a one-to-one meeting with me about their role,” people’s stress levels shoot up. They will start to quietly panic and worry about their mortgages.

Sometimes this is unwarranted, they may be at less risk than they think. But because they’re terrified, they might become really belligerent, and for example might threaten to bring their union rep in.

Using the FONT tool, you can reflect on what is going on for them – likely you’ve put them into absolute turmoil, so what do they fundamentally need?

You might observe that they’re agitated, their voice is raised and they’re being quite aggressive. You might also be thinking, “this is terrifying,” and you might become defensive yourself. If the conversation starts spiralling out of control, the advice is to stop, identify what you’re observing, and try to inquire what their feelings are.

If they’re feeling angry because they feel threatened and don’t feel safe, you can calm their feelings by talking about what the options are for them.

This could be, for example, “the first option is that we redeploy you and there are a number of roles that you should definitely consider applying for because you’d be really good at them… these are the opportunities…”

Then communicate what the scale of the risk to them is:
“Even if there are not quite enough posts left after the restructure, there are some people on the team who want to leave and who are going to be quite happy about that.

“So actually, you’re a lot less at risk than you realise. Maybe this is an opportunity, because in the new posts there are more opportunities for development. You could expect to get a pay rise quite quickly.”

If their original reaction to the news was: “This is outrageous, I am so angry because of the way this was communicated.” Their need is acknowledgement that the process was a dog’s dinner, and perhaps an apology and a recognition of the harm that’s been done. By addressing that need, you can move the conversation to a different place.

ii. “You’re not doing your job”

Someone you are managing is not doing their job and is performing badly. You need to have conversations with them to try to improve.

You might have a ‘you need to improve’ conversation with a simultaneous thought at the back of your mind that, “this is going to end in a formal performance management process, which is going to be horrible,” which can lead to the conversation being a clumsy one.

The formal process happens when you’ve told someone that their work is not up to scratch and they haven’t improved it. You’ve talked about it on three occasions, and you’ve given them three months to change, but they haven’t and in this formal process if you don’t see improvement their job will be at risk.

It’s a challenging and uncomfortable process for the person concerned and usually you destroy the relationship in the process. They end up leaving anyway which may be what you really wanted, but they’re miserable and you’re miserable.

Often it’s avoidable – if you can intervene early enough.

If you’re able to talk to them early, use The Three Key Questions [link to TSH post] to help them understand what you need and how they’re measuring up:
• Does this person know what’s expected of them?
• Do they know how they’re doing? and
• Do they know where they’re heading?

In that conversation you be really clear about what is expected of them. Then you can monitor how they are doing, and you can identify what help they might need to do it. They’ll (hopefully) improve and you’re more likely to avoid the whole performance management process. Win.

iii. Offensive behaviour

Here’s a scenario. John has made a complaint about Sharon. He’s quite upset about something that happened last week. You’ve only heard John’s side of the story and you’d quite like to know what happened from Sharon’s point of view.

That might be a difficult conversation where you’re trying to find out the facts about a disagreement.

In this case, use the FONT tool to help you decode what actually happened and find choices about how to interact.

Sharon says: “We were in the kitchen. John came out having left his used lunch bowl and dirty coffee mug on the side. I just lost it. I swore and shouted at him and I might have called him a nasty name, because I always do the washing up and no one ever says thank you and no one does it.”

Manager: “Oh, I notice you’re raising your voice even when you’re talking about it now. It seems like you’re getting quite angry and upset. Can we just cool it down? How’re you feeling?”
Sharon: “Yeah, sorry. It just made me feel really angry.”
Manager: “What do you need?”
Sharon: “I just need not to be the only one that cares about this stuff.”

Manager: “Did you know that actually John had gone in to put stuff in the dishwasher and it was full and badly stacked and so he had to reorganise it. And there were some bits that didn’t fit in. So he put them to one side and put the dishwasher on, fully intending to come back later and load the dishwasher.”

Sharon: “Oh… I didn’t know that. I’ll go and apologise to him and try not to react without checking in future.”

Manager: “Yes, that sounds good. Thank you.”

Conclusion

Hopefully having read this you have a better understanding about the cost of avoiding difficult conversations and have some tools that’ll help you face them, have better dialogues that’ll lead to better outcomes.

The more experience you have of difficult conversations, the better you’ll get at them, and then they might not feel so difficult.

360 degree reviews can help

A 360 degree feedback review can also be a useful tool here, because it creates a neutral and a safe space for people to articulate what they might not be able to say in person about what their experiences are, without exposing themselves in a dangerous way, for example, when there are power dynamics at work.

In addition, 360s’ are designed to invite constructive feedback through the way the questions are written and to be balanced: they’re an opportunity to talk about strengths as well as weaknesses and to feel valued and appreciated. Knowing that you are valued makes it easier to hear about things you could improve.

If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation, and removes the complicated admin that can accompany 360’s, use a tool like AdviceSheet, it is really that simple.

AdviceSheet has:
Transparent pricing
Automates the process
Anonymous participants
Confidential reports
Free from meaningless metrics
Questions that stimulate insightful answers

Read more of our 360-feedback review guides here.

The post Difficult conversation? Here’s how to do it. appeared first on ThenSomehow.

• Why is a feedback culture important?
• Why people find it hard to give and receive feedback
• Why feedback is good for your organisation
• What you can do to build a good feedback culture

Why is a feedback culture important?
If you’ve ever started a small business or organisation you’ll know how easy it is to feel connected and coherent as a group, at the start. There’s an intoxicating energy that comes from working in a team where everyone feels a strong sense of camaraderie and purpose, and everyone has to muck in, because it’s the only way to get stuff done.

As a small group you probably sit around the same table, and the ideas and conversations flow, you share the wins and the losses… it’s emotional and exciting, and then you grow.

By the time you get to five or six people, suddenly communication isn’t something you can take for granted, you’ve got to start working at it. Once you get to 10 people you’ve got a small organisation, and it’s amazing how those extra people require you to communicate better.

When we consult with organisations of all shapes and sizes we usually find communication high up on the list of the things people would like to be improved because, well, it’s hard.

It may be that people don’t hear what you thought you said, or you write it down and people interpret it differently or they don’t have time to read it (which is why there are simple tools out there like ThenSomehow’s Replay tool).

Throw into this mix the fact that human beings are conflict averse. We like to get along, and we don’t choose conflict voluntarily – people often think that if they give someone some feedback, they might be offended. Or they might shout. Then you’ll be in conflict, and you don’t want that.

So why risk giving the feedback in the first place?

In a workplace team you might find people play nice with each other, but the group will not go where it’s emotionally dangerous, because they don’t know how to handle it, and they haven’t got depth to their relationships.

The trouble is that if you don’t get into conflict you never get past the storming phase in the stages of team development, which likely means a team will underperform because they’re not comfortable to challenge each other (in a healthy way).

We see it a lot with clients – on the surface everyone in a team is getting on well, but they’re stuck and usually only because they’re not practised at healthy conflict.

And if you’re in an organisation where conflict is a bit scary, teams will feel limited in their autonomy, their ability to make decisions and their ability to deliver.

How does a feedback culture help? 

If you were to create an environment where it is normal to ask for feedback and it is normal to give feedback, then it becomes like a trust muscle – as you stretch that muscle it becomes stronger, and you can then deal with real conflict when it happens because you’re used to it.

In a feedback culture you might say, “Jon, may I give you some feedback on that?” And Jon is able to say “Yes, I’m ready for it.” And then you say to Jon, “I thought this was really good. And these things need improvement. I notice that this happened, that happened, and you might want to think about that.”

And Jon might say, “Thanks, I really appreciate you telling me.” And Jon can modify his behaviour and develop himself and his work.

The theory is that if you practise this kind of low level feedback, when things get tougher you’ll be able to cope because you trust each other: then when you’re given some difficult feedback you might think, “okay, that might be really hard to hear, but I trust you have my best interests at heart. So yes, let’s talk about it.”

Then you can get into a much more constructive form of conflict.

If you’re not used to giving feedback, then you’re probably not going to get down to the nuts and bolts of what’s really going on that’s causing things to go wrong or people to not perform at their best.

Having a feedback culture as a basis for this is really good.

A feedback culture leads to better work

Once you’re more practised and you learn how to give constructive positive feedback – it turns out this is important for creating better work. One study involving a design experiment showed that where one group was given negative feedback on their design and another group received positive feedback – in response the positive feedback group focused on their strengths and came up with a much better design, whereas the negative feedback group didn’t advance their design, they just tweaked the negatives.

If you can build a feedback culture where people are actively looking for ways to get better at what they do, then you’ll boost their levels of autonomy, responsibility and their ability to perform in their roles for your organisation.

How to bake feedback into your culture as you grow

Here’s some ideas for how to embed a feedback culture into your workplace:

1. Pause at the end of each project to reflect with your team on the lessons learned and what could have been better. If you don’t do that you’ll continue to repeat the same mistakes.

2. Learn from software teams who use an Agile approach – and at the end of each project or two-week period, practise talking with your team about the work, how you do the work, and how you feel about the work. It will take a few times doing this to build enough trust to enable your team to go deeper with this.

3. At the end of each piece of work, formally review not just the outputs, but the way you worked, and bake it in so that a project is not complete or signed off until you’ve ticked that review box.

4. Encourage your managers or meeting chairs to ask ‘how was this meeting?’ at the end of each one. You could all do a thumb rating on it and then discuss ‘how can we improve this meeting going forward?‘

5. For the individual, it’s very hard to commit to an organisation if you’re not sure how you’re doing. If you’re not getting feedback, then you might be confused about what’s expected of you, and how you’re performing against those expectations. So aim to build in these three questions into performance and development reviews:

• What’s expected of you?
• How are you doing?
• Where you are heading?

6. As a manager you could regularly ask your team: How am I doing? Are you getting what you need from me? Are my expectations of you clear? By modelling feedback it’ll make it easier to create a structure for feedback in your review and development conversations, so people know they’re going to get some feedback.

7. Use 360 feedback reviews to invite a group to feedback on each other. Model that yourself first before you ask other people to do it. After a 360, thank people for participating and giving you the feedback and tell them what you’ve decided to take away from it, and what you will be doing as a result – so there is some accountability.

By introducing these mechanisms for giving feedback and clarifying and talking about how you’re all doing, your values will become established, people will become clearer and they’ll get used to giving each other feedback, which will help you all as you grow.

360 degree reviews

A 360 degree feedback review can be a useful part of a feedback culture. If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation, and removes the complicated admin that can accompany 360’s, use a tool like AdviceSheet, it is really that simple.

AdviceSheet has:

• Transparent pricing
• Automates the process
• Anonymous participants
• Confidential reports
• Free from meaningless metrics
• Questions that stimulate insightful answers

Read more of our 360-feedback review guides here.

The post Why you need a feedback culture as you grow appeared first on ThenSomehow.

The Challenge

GambleAware are the leading independent charity and strategic commissioners of gambling harm education, prevention, early intervention and treatment across the UK.

Over the last few years they have been operating in a very complex, fast changing environment under a great deal of scrutiny from the gambling industry, government, service users and providers. They have grown in size significantly and successfully adapted their work to maximise their impact and take advantage of new opportunities (often at short notice).

Like many fast growing and fast-paced organisations, opportunities for detailed feedback and reflection have been rare and individuals’ experiences of line management and culture have been varied.

In an effort to rectify this, encourage continuous improvement and demonstrate their commitment to their people, GambleAware decided to invest in an AdviceSheet 360 feedback review with the aim of creating the conditions for everyone in the organisation to feel safe in asking for, giving, and receiving feedback.

A 360-Degree Feedback Solution

Sarah Johnston, one of our consultancy and coaching partners worked with GambleAware to develop a bespoke implementation plan for AdviceSheet designed to minimise disruption and maximise impact.

The 360 feedback survey was rolled out to 60 people in three tranches, managed and supported locally by an HR assistant. By mixing up levels and directorates in these tranches, the rollout was designed to not disrupt any one part of the business too much.

In addition we set the survey reminders to an acceptable level for the organisation’s culture – to match their ways of working.

As part of the process we provided comprehensive support which included all staff briefings, FAQs, guides, technical support and top tips and had a team of coaches and facilitators available to provide guidance to individuals on demand about the purpose and value of feedback. And in some cases to encourage people to seek external feedback.

As a result, no one felt excluded, or left behind, and the whole process was completed for everyone within a few weeks.

Coaching conversations gave the 360 an action focus

Once the surveys were completed, to help individuals process their 360 reports, facilitated feedback and coaching sessions were provided by the coaching team, and much appreciated. Facilitated feedback conversations prevent subjects from over focussing on any negatives, which can happen when people read their reports. It helps put things into perspective and create clarity about options for action.

The coaching sessions also helped people feel valued and gave the 360 an action focus: everyone was encouraged to commit to up to three things that they were going to stop/start/continue/try.

None of these conversations were shared with HR or managers, although participants were encouraged to share their commitments in their 1-2-1’s with line managers, peers and teams – where appropriate – so that they could be supported in their actions.

Results and Outcomes: a cultural change

Through the AdviceSheet 360 feedback process, GambleAware recognised the value of reflection and feedback both in terms of creating opportunities for improvement and improving staff engagement and buy-in. This was a big cultural change for the organisation.

The developmental and conversational focus of AdviceSheet created a less intimidating environment for people to give honest feedback.

Individuals at every level got the opportunity to reflect, as well as give and receive feedback with their colleagues. For many this was the first time this had happened and they found it incredibly valuable. They felt both challenged and supported to identify what was important to them individually, their colleagues, and the organisation and every individual participant made a commitment to stop, start or continue actions as a result.

The process was instrumental in building connections between different parts of the organisation and breaking down silos – helping people feel part of something bigger and to consider others’ feelings and motivations.

It encouraged people to look beyond hierarchy and work more with peers, and lots of offers and asks emerged in the feedback.

In terms of added value, although individual results were confidential, the coaching team were able to identify themes across the organisation to inform future work.

These included: working across boundaries (reducing internal silo working), involving colleagues earlier, using the whole organisation as a sounding board, thinking about the consequences of things for other teams and/or the organisation as a whole, and acting in the interests of GambleAware rather than the individual teams or directorates.

The Impact

Although initiatives like AdviceSheet are often seen as soft and fluffy they make a real difference to an organisation’s ability to achieve its outcomes.

As a result of the 360 feedback process, individual teams and directorates made commitments to build more feedback loops into their work, there was more cross organisational working and people reported improved levels of patience and understanding – people realised they were not alone in being busy and rushed, and others were also trying hard to do their best.

As a whole, the organisation was able to have more honest conversations, and give consideration to different perspectives.

Testimonials

“Organising AdviceSheet for the whole organisation was very straightforward, any issues were dealt with quickly and we felt supported by Sarah and her team.”
Fiona, HR Officer

“AdviceSheet was of huge benefit to the organisation and great value. It really helped us build engagement and made people feel valued. It also challenged individuals on what they could do differently and helped break down silos across the office.”
Sonal, Head of People and OD

“As a result of the AdviceSheet I am creating more time and space for my relationships with others as well as dedicated thinking time within my team (‘Wondering Wednesdays’). I’ve also introduced the practice of beginning team meetings with everybody saying one thing that they are thankful for, to foster a positive atmosphere amid a challenging backdrop.
The process prompted thinking about culture, and the impact that I want to have on the organisation. As well as landing the importance of culture, I am also embedding and role-modelling the behaviours that embody the values I want to promote. For example, being ‘nosey’, inviting challenge, normalising asking for support and trusting each other are important behaviours that my team has rapidly adopted. Going forward, I am focusing on being intentional as a leader. This means continually asking how I approach situations as a leader, and how I am going to impact positively on organisational culture and strategy.”
Haroon, Director

“Undertaking the 360 process across the whole organisation was hugely beneficial. At the most basic level, if provided a shared experience that provided the basis for conversation across the organisation however, a year on from undertaking the process there has been a radical transformation in how teams work together. There are many more honest discussions between teams and within teams about how they work together to ensure that they everyone draws on the collective expertise and knowledge that we have across the organisation. There is a much greater focus on relationships rather than the task in hand and when things don’t go well people are much more confident in having the conversation in a way that feels constructive to all parties.”
Chief Operating Officer

“I did not realise anyone was interested in the work that I do or that they had expertise in this area”.
Anon team member

360 degree reviews can help

A 360 degree feedback review is a useful tool, because it creates a neutral and a safe space for people to articulate what they might not be able to say in person, for example, when there are power dynamics at work.

In addition, 360s’ are an opportunity to talk about strengths as well as weaknesses and to feel valued and appreciated. Knowing that you are valued makes it easier to hear about things you could improve.

If you’re looking for good 360 review software that supports the growth of your employees and your organisation, and removes the complicated admin that can accompany 360’s, use a tool like AdviceSheet which has:

• Transparent pricing.
• Automates the process.
• Anonymous participants.
• Confidential reports.
• Free from meaningless metrics.
• Questions that stimulate insightful answers.

Read more of our 360-feedback review guides here.

The post GambleAware 360 degree feedback case study appeared first on ThenSomehow.