360 Degree
A 360 Degree assessment is any tool that gathers ratings on someone's behaviour from multiple angles - manager, peers, reports, sometimes self - so a leader sees a fuller picture than the view from their own desk.
Four viewpoints ring around the same person, each rating what they see from where they sit.
Reach for this when…
- A leader is convinced they're approachable and their team quietly disagrees.
- You're choosing between assessment types and need to know what '360' actually means.
- A promotion decision needs more than one person's opinion on someone's leadership.
How to run it
- Decide who counts as a rater: manager, peers, direct reports, sometimes clients.
- Choose or build a questionnaire covering the behaviours that matter.
- Collect ratings confidentially so people answer honestly.
- Compare the ratings against the person's own self-rating.
- Debrief the gaps, not just the scores.
A worked example
Situation. Mona El-Sayed led HR at Nile Steel Works, a manufacturing firm in Cairo, Egypt, where a plant director was up for a bigger regional role and the board wanted more than his own account of his leadership.
Applied. She ran a 360 covering his manager, five peers and eight direct reports, then sat with him as the ratings came back next to his self-rating.
Result. He'd rated himself high on listening; his reports rated him lowest there of anyone in the file. That single gap became the entire development conversation, and the one thing he worked on before the board decided.
The catch
'360' describes the shape of the data collection, not a fixed instrument - quality swings wildly with who wrote the questions and how well the debrief is handled. Raters soften their scores if they fear being identified, especially direct reports rating a manager. A flood of scores across many competencies can bury the two or three that actually matter.
The gap between self-rating and others' rating is the finding. The absolute scores rarely are.
Origin: Various (CCL, Korn Ferry, DDI)