Gobbledygook and 360 degree appraisals

Whether you are a manager or junior employee, you may be forgiven for failing to understand the gobbledygook of 360 degree appraisals.

Your manager happens to be an obnoxious bully but you know management believes she gets results.  So what do you do when you are asked to make an appraisal of your immediate line manager as part of a 360 degree feedback?

You give what you consider to be a fair and frank appraisal and then the form is passed to your manager for her comments.  How does she react when she reads it?  Then you run the risk of how more senior managers may react when they read it.

Of course, it could be that senior managers are taken completely by surprise when they read your comments.  Perhaps this is conduct they would not tolerate if they knew about it?  But if they didn’t know about it, why didn’t they know about it?  Are the senior managers managing the managers or what?

In the words of Kipling, could you “bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”?

This all seems rather career limiting, doesn’t it?  Alternatively, you may take what you consider to be the safe route and make only bland but safe comments about your manager.

Then, months down the line, an incident blows up as a result of the manager’s bullying and all is revealed.  Then you are asked, “Well, why didn’t you mention this when you were asked to give your views in the 360 degree feedback?”  It still seems a bit career limiting, doesn’t it?

But it appears that 360 degree appraisals are here to stay.  They are part of HR/management speak that we should all be dropping in to conversation alongside the latest vague, commercial buzzwords and vacuous phrases like “blue sky thinking” which are incapable of precise definition.

Ultimately, managing is for managers top down.  It is for the CEO to manage her board, for the board members to manage their respective departmental heads, for the departmental heads to manage their managers and so on and so forth.  If the organisation isn’t performing, go to the top and work down; you won’t get to the truth by starting at the bottom.