Level Up Your 360 Review Process

Revolutionizing 360 Reviews: Evaluate Behavior, Not Skills, for Meaningful Feedback

Where To: Your team getting meaningful, behavior-based feedback that drives growth and improvement.

Where From: Struggling with traditional 360 reviews that lead to confusion and fail to provide actionable insights.

Where Next: Revolutionizing the feedback process by focusing on observable behaviors, creating more clarity and actionable outcomes for both individuals and the organization.

Have you ever received feedback from a 360 review that left you confused, wondering how to actually improve?

You're not alone. Traditional 360 reviews often fall short. They provide vague feedback based on inaccurate information or unqualified judgments of skills.

But there is a better way.

Coaching Product Leaders, I often run 360 reviews for them. I iterated and refined the process, until reaching a review format that achieves RESULTS. You can see the assessment form here.?

I’ve also implemented this with OutSystems . I took the process and adapted it to OutSystems’ Product values.??

“The power of this new 360 review approach is that it’s not just about gathering feedback but about creating a clear path for growth. Aligning behaviors with our company values, enables our teams to take ownership of their development. It is truly impactful”, says Anabela Cesário , EVP of Product Management at OutSystems.

Interested in improving the 360 review process at your company?

There is a series of simple steps and small changes you can implement that will make a big difference.

Your team will appreciate the effort, and thrive thanks to the actionable feedback. The best part? The results drive meaningful, lasting impact on both individuals and the organization.

Why Traditional 360 Reviews Fail

1. They Ask For Unqualified Feedback

Ask a sales manager to rate a product manager's prioritization skills. Or an engineer to judge leadership qualities.

What will they say? What knowledge do they have to make a fair assessment?

Yet, this is exactly what many 360 reviews do.

They ask employees to assess skills they're not qualified to evaluate. Often, people reply with N/A, turning the process into a waste of time. Or, worse, they rate the skills with random numbers, skewing the results and compromising the whole assessment.

2. They Rely Heavily on Subjectivity?

Traditional 360 reviews lean heavily on SUBJECTIVE opinions rather than OBJECTIVE observations of behavior.

They tend to be about feelings and impressions. But feelings and impressions are an unfair way to assess someone’s performance and contribution to a company. They are a way to propagate personal biases, not to evaluate someone fairly.

Subjectivity should stay out of 360 reviews.

3. They Are Open to Misjudgments?

I've seen countless examples of misjudgments in 360 reviews.

A common one? Rating someone's "communication skills" without considering the various forms of communication required in their role.

This is not about people providing subjective feedback. It’s about evaluating others in roles they don’t fully understand, even though sometimes they think they do!

Expecting everyone to completely understand the scope of everyone else’s roles is utopian, to say the least. So don’t even open that door. Don’t let people ASSUME other people’s roles, evaluating them poorly in skills that weren’t even required in the first place.

360 reviews should be a growth opportunity for the people being assessed. A chance to reflect on the past months. A moment to understand what needs improvement, and an opportunity to walk away with actionable feedback.

But these basic mistakes turn 360 reviews into a frustrating and unhelpful exercise.

Let’s see how you can revolutionize your 360 reviews.

360 Reviews Should Analyze BEHAVIOR

The solution to improve 360 reviews lies in focusing on behaviors rather than skills.

Why? Behaviors can be observed, so it’s possible to judge them objectively.

As an example, instead of asking, "Rate this person's organizational skills," we would ask, "Does this person arrive on time for meetings, and comes equipped with an agenda?" See the difference? The latter is a behavior anyone can observe, regardless of their role or expertise.

To shift the way your company designs 360 reviews, follow these three simple guidelines:

1. Map Skills to Behaviors

At OutSystems, we started by identifying key groups of skills for each role.

Then, we mapped these skills to observable behaviors. For instance, "strategic thinking" might turn into "proposes ideas that align with long-term company goals."

Do this for every skill you deem necessary in a role. These observable behaviors will be the ones you ask contributors about, never mentioning the skill behind it.

Create a scale that people can use to rate each behavior. “Never”, “Sometimes”, “Often”, and “Always” are the ideal points in the scale. Use an even number of options to eliminate the ambiguous middle ground people often default to when unsure.

Consider also adding a “No context” option to avoid participants entering a random evaluation simply because they don’t have an alternative.

2. Set Clear Expectations

Roles have different levels, and expectations vary accordingly.

A Junior Product Manager might be expected to "Sometimes" exhibit a behavior, while a Senior should "Always" show it.

Identify the frequency that each level of a role should have for each behavior. You don’t need to communicate this to the contributors, but it’s something for the manager to keep in mind when processing the collected information.

3. Describe People In Three Words

Another exercise we did at OutSystems as part of the 360 review was asking to describe the assessed person in three words. Then, we asked the person under evaluation to describe themselves in three words as well.

It seems simple but led to interesting discussions.

It allows room for self-reflection while providing an opportunity to compare the two sets of words. How close or how far is the self-evaluation to the peer evaluation?

After the feedback is collected, it is time for the manager to process it, generating valuable and actionable feedback. In traditional 360 reviews, that needs improvement as well.

Below I outline how we approached this at OutSystems.

How to Make Feedback Actionable

The goal of going through a 360 review is to provide valuable feedback that allows people to improve their daily work. For that, the information collected from peers must be properly processed by the manager. The result should be actionable advice that people can easily implement.

Here's how to do it:

1. Translate Scores to Development Plans?

If someone receives a "Sometimes" rating on behavior that should be “Often”, their goal is clear - aim for that level. This provides a concrete target for improvement. Be careful to surface if the reduced behavior frequency is actually a skill which needs to be developed. Check out this flowchart to understand the difference.

2. Incorporate Anecdotal Evidence

At OutSystems, we allowed reviewers to provide examples that backed up their evaluations. These anecdotes give context and make the feedback more relatable and actionable. Passing these stories on to the assessed person helps them understand the context of the rating they’re receiving.

3. Compare Self-Assessment with Peer Feedback?

As mentioned above, we included self-assessments in the process. Sharing these with the assessed person lets them compare the two. It often leads to powerful "aha" moments and greater self-awareness.

“Shifting the focus to observable behaviors transformed the way our teams receive and act on feedback. It’s given us actionable insights that really improve performance”, says Patrícia Cadete , Program Management Team Lead at OutSystems.

Conclusion

360 reviews can be a powerful way to help people improve at work. They’re an opportunity to pause and ponder on yourself and others and find ways to be better moving forward.

But to achieve good results, 360 reviews must be conducted the right way. Otherwise, they’re a waste of time and effort. Worse: repeated poor reviews make people lose trust in the process, failing to take it seriously next time.

If you’d like me to run a 360 review for you as a Product Leader, schedule a FREE mini session. You can also always send me an email at [email protected] to share your story or a question.