[Ailist] appreciative group 360

[Roger Davies]

Hi Mike,

I have limited experience of 360's but do have recent experience of doing
them for the first time. Here's my 2c worth.

The first time you sit in a room and have 8 people talking about you it's,
to say the least, a little un-nerving. For you and probably for everyone
else as they don't know how you will react. Of course doing it
appreciatively will help a lot with that if everyone knows that you'll only
be talking about the good stuff. I was fortunate in that the group of people
I was with had an inherently appreciative focus and were very diplomatic
about possible improvements. I heard that the same thing tried on a
different site ended up with people in tears and weeks of fall out that was
not good.

I guess that there will be a risk of all participants feeling that it's a
one sided 360 to only talk about positives. I would encourage talking about
concerns but give some guidance on framing them constructively. For instance
using phrases like 'When we have to talk about difficult subjects I would
find it better if we could work together in establishing the  facts first'.
All improvements brought up in the form of a request.

It's very uplifting to be told how good you are but my feeling is that it
has to be balanced, in a positive way, by at least knowing what others find
difficult about you as a person. My experience is it takes a fairly mature
and open culture to get good benefit from a 360. 

I'm currently working on a Voice of the Customer introduction following the
FOCUS process in 'Voices to Choices'. It too seeks a 360 view from a cross
section of customers (internal in my case). However it does take you through
developing an interview guide. If this is the first ever time this group has
done a 360 it maybe a good approach to get the whole group to develop and
use a standard interview guide. You could do that, do some prior interview
training and then have pairs interview each other in turn. A kind of a
closed 360.

I'm sure that there will be many other points of view and the successful one
will be the one that best fits the current culture that you are working
with.

Roger


-----Original Message-----
From: ailist-bounces at lists.business.utah.edu
[mailto:ailist-bounces at lists.business.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Michael
Holdstock
Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 3:09 AM
To: ailist at lists.business.utah.edu
Subject: [Ailist] appreciative group 360


I am in the process of designing an appreciative 360 for a client/manager.

How his staff feel about him I can handle, but he would also like to know
how the staff feel/experience/appreciate each other (we are talking about
groups of size 8/10).

Anyone got any protocols/links/books/articles and not least experience and
ideas they would like to share with me - which I will later digest for the
list?

Thanks in advance

Mike
Karlstad, Sweden
Inspire them, support them and get out of the way
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