The Strange Confidence of 360 Degree Feedback

360 degree feedback promises that it will offer truth in all directions. It will illuminate blind spots, reveal the development areas people couldn’t see before and unlock potential they didn’t know they had. It promises, above all, to make honesty safe, offering confidentiality and anonymity for the people with less power, so they can finally tell the truth about the people with more. It is an appealing set of promises, but whether it can keep them is another matter.

The Murky History of 360 Degree Feedback

Let’s just clarify first what we mean by 360 degree feedback. Generally, the term refers to a process of gathering feedback about an individual from the people around them, perhaps their manager, but also peers and direct reports, hence the full circle – 360 degrees. This is ostensibly to support their development, to feed into an appraisal, or both. Responses are typically anonymised, often pooled in groups of three or more so that in theory no single rater can be identified (although that’s rarely watertight in practice).

So where does this popular practice actually come from? Rumours abound. I once heard a version involving a KGB sabotage manual, which I’d love to believe as it would make a great story. Unfortunately, I’ve found no evidence for it. The more likely history, referenced widely online, traces an early version to officer selection in the German Reichswehr around 1930, under a military psychologist named Johann Rieffert. Nobody called it 360 degree feedback, but multiple observers would feed into a single judgement about who should make the cut.

The name “360-degree feedback” was coined in the mid-1980s by an assessment firm called TEAMS Inc, who registered the phrase as a trademark, and then spent years trying to enforce their ownership of it until the company was sold. There has always been money in this, and attempts to trademark concepts and practices should always raise an eyebrow, if not a red flag.

None of which stops 360 degree feedback being treated today as a solid, almost scientific HR default. For a practice this murky in its origins, that’s quite a leap, and as we’ll see, neither the evidence nor people’s experiences of it seem to justify the confidence.

Experiences of 360 Degree Feedback

I’ve worked in organisations running 360 degree feedback processes, and I know the anxiety of waiting on anonymised comments, followed, almost always, by one of two deflations:

1. You’re handed some critical but cryptic line, spend an unreasonable amount of energy trying to guess who wrote it and have to actively resist the urge to go and just ask them what they mean, or: 
2. You get the other thing entirely: bland, school-report style platitudes about being a great colleague, which are technically positive, but don’t really say anything at all.

Both versions arrive by the same route. The 360 degree feedback process tips into a tick-box exercise, and once it has, it doesn’t just fail to start a constructive, developmental conversation; the anonymity built into it often makes sure that conversation can never happen at all.

None of this is unique to me. I have these conversations regularly with clients, people in mid-sized and large organisations where 360 degree feedback has become so completely entangled with performance management or appraisal that all ideas of feedback get drawn into this dreaded annual cycle. It seems like once an organisation has a formal annual mechanism for feedback, that mechanism exerts a gravitational pull over all other feedback instances. The ordinary, day-to-day, low-stakes, useful versions of feedback – like a quick check in after a meeting or small flagging of a blind spot – start to feel like something to save up rather than say now. People batch it all up for judgement day and the process that’s designed to surface feedback ends up suppressing many more useful, and low-threat, day-to-day exchanges.

And then there are the others, the ones just starting out on their 360 degree feedback ‘journey’, asking important questions before they commit: why are we doing this, and what is it actually going to do to psychological safety here?

The Evidence Gap

It turns out that the case for 360 degree feedback is pretty underwhelming, given how embedded all this is. Despite three decades of near universal corporate enthusiasm, nobody has ever managed to show, convincingly, that it does what it’s supposed to do. The Institute for Employment Studies spent a year interviewing organisations running these schemes and combing through the available research, and concluded that widespread adoption of 360 degree feedback reflects “faith rather than proven validity,” which is, it turns out, a rather generous way of putting it. Evidence of actual impact on individual development or organisational performance was, in their own words, “scant.” Similarly, the most authoritative meta-analysis in the field, pulling together twenty-four longitudinal studies, found that improvement in ratings over time, the entire point of the exercise, was ‘generally small’. As the authors put it, “practitioners should not expect large, widespread performance improvement after employees receive multisource feedback.”

That meta-analysis was published in 2005. Two decades on, the more recent literature isn’t full of fresh studies overturning or confirming it, it’s largely quiet, with prominent practitioners in the field noting a “glaring absence” of new research even as usage of 360 feedback keeps climbing. The honest answer to “does this work?” still sits somewhere closer to “a bit, maybe, for some people, under conditions nobody’s fully pinned down” than anything resembling a “yes!”

None of which has slowed adoption down. Which brings me back to the money. Google “360 degree feedback” (a reasonable start for any investigative dive into the practice!) and the first page is dominated by sponsored placements and paid products, all companies selling their own version of a 360 degree feedback tool. Twenty years ago, the IES were already noting the volume of “spin from external providers” surrounding this practice. If there was a lot of spin then, I suspect there’s a great deal more now.

More Raters, More Bias

All feedback is subjective. I’ve written about why that matters elsewhere, so I won’t revisit the whole argument, except to say that the moment you treat a rating as a fact about a person rather than an impression formed by another person, you’re already in trouble.

What’s worth adding in this context is a particular claim some 360 degree tools lean on, implicitly or explicitly: that gathering feedback from many sources cancels out individual bias and delivers something more objective than a single manager’s view. It’s an appealing idea, but averaging several biased judgements doesn’t remove the bias, it just blends it into something that looks smoother and harder to attribute while carrying the original distortions inside it. Gender and racial bias don’t disappear when you collect more ratings; in fact they may well accumulate while becoming harder to see, hidden behind an aggregate score that feels objective and is anything but. 

There’s another issue too: 360 asks how a person is performing, rarely about what pressures and constraints they were facing. The forms have feedback for the individual and rarely for the conditions, so the subject of the feedback ends up holding the weight of the system around them.

The Trouble with Anonymity

Anonymity exists in these practices for an obvious reason: people are supposed to feel safer telling the truth if they can’t be identified for it. Aside from the (very real) risk that this reinforces the idea that it’s actually not safe to speak up unless we’re anonymous, the IES researchers did find this working roughly as intended – raters giving upward feedback anonymously were more critical than those who knew their names would be attached. But they also found the protection failing in two different ways. In some cases, managers asked direct reports to provide them directly with “anonymous” feedback, which of course undermines the anonymity from the start. In other cases, raters who had been promised anonymity colluded with each other, with several colleagues agreeing in advance to write identical negative comments about their manager so that no single person could be singled out and blamed. They didn’t trust the protection the system offered, so they built their own on top of it.

There’s a further risk in anonymous feedback – it can easily mask people over- or under-rating for political reasons, which is most likely when the stakes are high. In some organisations, 360 degree feedback has reportedly been folded into the machinery of ‘rank and yank,’ the practice of ranking people by their performance ratings and firing the bottom 10%, a practice which is (thankfully) effectively unlawful in many parts of the world. But where it, or practices like it, still exist, are you really going to risk rating a colleague higher than yourself? 

When the IES researchers looked at places where anonymity was removed instead, some people reported being approached and made to feel uncomfortable for giving honest upward feedback. Yet others preferred it that way, worried that anonymity would let others use the process to settle old scores under cover rather than to give honest feedback. “At least the feedback can be challenged if the names are on it,” as one of them put it, and I see their point. We know feedback is most useful when it’s context-rich – when it can be located in specific incidents and relationships – and when it’s part of a two-way conversation. Anonymised 360 degree feedback removes both the context and the conversation.

So take anonymity away, and people fear retaliation for their honesty. Leave it in place, and people suspect the cover is being used to settle scores or game the system. Either way, the distrust is still there. The problem was arguably never about anonymity at all, but that nobody in the system trusted that honest feedback would be received well, used fairly, or kept safe, regardless of whether names were on it.

Which brings us back to psychological safety. What people need in order to offer honest feedback, is consistent, demonstrated, lived experience that speaking honestly won’t cost them anything. That can only be developed slowly, through what actually happens when people speak up – we can’t shortcut our way to it via an anonymous feedback form.

The Costs of 360 Degree Feedback

There is a financial and relational cost to 360 degree feedback which is easy to overlook when it becomes ‘the norm’. We work with a number of large organisations stuck with a frustrating annual ritual, gathering and inputting reams of data into a system most people resent, kept alive less by conviction that it actually works than by a software licence they’re tied to. These platforms cost a significant amount of money, and the decision to buy one was often made a long way up the organisation. The cost is sunk; the plan is the plan, and questioning it means telling someone senior that their expensive choice isn’t working. It’s often easier, on balance, to just keep doing it.

In another organisation, someone told me their HR team was considering bringing 360 feedback in specifically to deal with one ‘bad manager’. The logic, as it was explained to me, was that this was the only way to get that manager some direct, unfiltered feedback from the people reporting to them. Which might be true. But it also means reaching for an entire organisation-wide measurement system, with all its cost, fatigue and risk, to solve a problem that’s really about one person — a siege engine wheeled up to a door that only needed knocking on.

So where does that leave us?

Not, unfortunately, with a tidy verdict. I’m not here to tell you 360 degree feedback never works, or that everyone running it should stop tomorrow. The honest position is that we don’t really know what it does, the evidence has been thin for twenty years and a great many organisations are running these processes at real cost to time, money and trust without properly questioning whether they’re helping or harming.

If there’s a structural point underneath all of this, it’s that candid feedback isn’t a system we install. The IES researchers, after all their interviews and analysis, landed somewhere strikingly modest: that organisations might do better simply reminding people to give honest, regular feedback as a matter of ordinary practice, rather than building elaborate machinery to extract it once a year. 

I don’t think the story of 360 degree feedback is over. The tools are still being sold, the licences still being signed, the annual cycles still grinding on in organisations full of people wondering what they’re for. I suspect I’ll be having these conversations with clients for a long time yet. But maybe we can at least take a step back and ask what problem this process is actually meant to solve, and whether this is a good way to solve it.

Further Reading

Silverman, M., Kerrin, M., & Carter, A. (2005). 360 Degree Feedback: Beyond the Spin. Report 418. Institute for Employment Studies.

Bracken, D. W., Rose, D. S., & Church, A. H. (2016). The evolution and devolution of 360° feedback. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(4), 761–794.

Ostroff, C., Atwater, L. E., & Feinberg, B. J. (2004). Understanding self-other agreement: A look at rater and ratee characteristics, context, and outcomes. Personnel Psychology, 57(2), 333–375.

Smither, J. W., London, M., & Reilly, R. R. (2005). Does performance improve following multisource feedback? A theoretical model, meta-analysis, and review of empirical findings. Personnel Psychology, 58(1), 33–66. 

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Delivering Effective Feedback Psych Safety Workshop

If this leaves you wondering what good feedback actually looks like, the more personal, everyday kind that doesn’t need an annual cycle or an anonymous form, that’s exactly what we cover in our Delivering Effective Feedback workshop. Full details are here.