360 madness

When I was in my last corporate role the organization hired professional HR psychologists who put us all through 360 degree reviews.

I was interviewed about how I thought others (i.e. my boss, my peers and my direct reports) all perceived me. In other interviews the ‘others’ were all asked how they perceived me.

The differences in these perceived perceptions was startling and very depressing. The overall feeling I got was that everyone hated me.

Of course we are all naturally very sensitive to the things about ourselves that other people don’t like. Human nature made me focus on the negatives and under-weight the positives.

After time, and a little counseling I got these results out of this process:

1. I stopped worrying so much about what I thought other people thought about me (just through sheer desensitization to the pain of it all). That is, I hardened up.

2. I started playing my inter-people relationships with a ‘straighter bat’ and stopped do anything that could be construed as trying to ‘manipulate’ other’s perception of me. This included telling stories to make people feel temporarily better about things.

3. I started addressing my weaknesses which in my case was a poor effort at reporting up. This showed up as a category that I was weak on, although I did allow for experimental bias (bosses being more likely to say what they thought even in a blind survey).

4. I recognized that leadership is a lonely business and that I better get used to this. There is no use trying to be everyone’s best mate because this just made the intermittent tough messages or decisions all that much harder to deliver.

5. Whilst constant and comprehensive communication to the workforce is a desirable thing, it can be time consuming and often counter-productive at times. People hear what they want to hear and often misconstrue communications in order to confirm their internal biases. The message must be simple and intermittent in order to have impact.

6. Eventually I left the corporation because I realized that part of the issue was that I was in a workplace that depressed me. Simply stated it was a large organization where many senior people spent more time worrying about their status and income, rather than the quality of their outcomes or the satisfaction of a job well done. Hence the shit atmosphere and the need for 360 degree reviews.

I have a rule of thumb now as to what I need in order to be happy in my workplace:

1. I need to be the boss or a consultant
2. If I am the boss then the organization needs to be no more than 20-30 people strong. After this its hard to keep a lid on the BS.
3. Also I practice all the six useful outcomes as described above.
4. And I have to be inherently interested in the outcomes of the business or work activity; I won’t just do things for money or for keeping busy.