When wanting to create effective, long-lasting change due to your 360 feedback, staff and employee or stakeholder and customer feedback surveys, you must ensure that there is an alignment between the senior leadership’s vision for change and the actions that must be put in place to ensure that that vision can be reality. If a senior leader is disengaged throughout the feedback process, the feedback results and recommendations can become disconnected from the actions taken by leaders to fix issues.

It is critical that people in senior leadership positions remain engaged and supportive throughout feedback initiatives as it ensures a lasting return on the investment (ROI). Participants need to feel comfortable and confident that their opinions are valued and acted upon by the leaders as it ensures you receive the most valuable feedback results. If a leader remains unengaged in the feedback process, it sends a negative message about the value of the exercise.

An example of poor senior leadership engagement may be:

“In a 360 degree feedback project, the CEO and senior executive group chose not to participate with the rest of the management group in the survey process. The results of the feedback process revealed challenges in managing performance, coaching and developing critical new skills for implementing change. The participating managers agreed these areas were essential to the organisation’s future growth and financial targets and not on creating long-term reward structures to implement lasting change, manage performance or improve skill development.

Without the involvement of the SEO and senior leadership, the organisation’s reward structure remained linked to short-term financial success and they failed to create positive behavioral changes that are critical for the team’s development.

Unfortunately, the critical need to develop a performance management culture and to build new organizational skills and capability were overlooked.”

To make constructive changes in the work place, you need to ensure that senior leadership are strongly committed  throughout the entire feedback process, from the initial communication of gathering feedback to the follow-up actions that have been determined as a result, if a senior leader is not committed to the cause it will have a rippling effect in the organisation.

If you ensure that your senior leaders are engaged, team leaders are better enables to receive feedback results and to subsequently implement changes, as well as promoting employee engagement to all!

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