The four voices and what each one sees, why anonymity does not apply equally to all of them, the wording detail that ruins most questionnaires, and how to collect feedback from your own clients.
A 360 does not measure performance. It measures the gap between how a person sees themselves and how others see them. The average of all responses is the least useful number in the entire report: what opens the coaching conversation is the difference.
And above all, two asymmetries. What the person scores high and their environment scores low, which is usually a blind spot. And what they score low and their environment scores high, which is nearly always a strength they do not recognise in themselves.
None of the four sees the whole picture. That is why you need all four, and why they cannot be blended into a single average.
The underlying mistake is applying the same threshold to all four groups. It sounds fair and causes two harms: either the manager's voice gets suppressed, since it is nearly always one person, leaving the 360 half done — or it gets published without warning that it came from one person, and the person assessed reads their manager's view as «the organisation».
Every question has to be written twice: once for the self-assessment and once for whoever is answering about another person. Reusing the same sentence is the commonest failure when building a 360.
They look like the same question and they are not. The second requires the respondent to have seen delegation happen; the first only asks for an opinion about oneself. If a peer has never been in that situation, a single wording forces them to invent an answer, and that noise ends up inside the average.
Practical rule: if a question cannot be written in the third person without sounding odd, it is not observable. And what is not observable should not be in a 360.
A 360 assesses the person being coached. This is the opposite: what your client thinks of your work. It is collected far more simply, and almost nobody does it systematically.
The 360 exists, inside the Organisations module. Several people answer about one person, and the result is grouped by the person assessed and by rater type — not by department, which is a different grain entirely. Each instrument knows whether it is answered about oneself or about someone else, which is why it asks for the second wording of every question.
The anonymity rule is the one described in this guide, because it is the one implemented: self-assessment always visible, manager visible and flagged when it is a single voice, peers and team with a configurable threshold. And 360 responses stay out of the departmental average: mixing a leader's self-assessment with their peers' view produces a figure that means nothing.
What is not there, and worth knowing before signing up: bringing third parties into an ordinary one-to-one process. If you work with an individual client and want their manager's or peers' view without setting up an organisation module, that function is still pending. The 360 lives in Organisations, not on a standalone client record.
For feedback work inside the session there are standalone instruments: individual 360 feedback, the SBI model, the feedback burger, the Johari window and group performance feedback. Plus the process satisfaction survey, with its two permissions.
Between four and six per group. Fewer than three peers puts the group below the threshold and it cannot be published. More than eight and people start answering on autopilot.
Once a year, or at the start and end of a coaching process of six months or more. Repeating it quarterly exhausts the respondents and leaves no time for anything to change.
Not if you promised anonymity. The coach sees what the person assessed sees, grouped. Seeing who said what turns the debrief into an investigation, and next round nobody answers honestly.
You give it back, but not first and not alone. An isolated comment is not a pattern, and presenting it as one makes the person defend themselves against that sentence instead of looking at the whole.
Not very. With no peers and no team you are left with two voices, and with two there is no 360: there is a comparison. For an independent professional, a survey to their own clients works better.
360 grouped by person assessed and by rater type, with an anonymity threshold per group. Inside the Organisations module. From 30 USD a month.
See plans from 30 USD/month → Or see how the Organisations module works30-day guarantee · No contracts · Instant access · One-off payment available