The Creative Executive

Retaining talent is one of the most consistent challenges we hear from our clients. For successful, growing companies that have worked hard to establish an intentional culture, it’s never been more crucial to rethink and refresh your investment in your executives and senior leaders. Hiring and onboarding are hugely time-consuming and expensive, even before calculating the lost knowledge base and relationships of losing top talent.

Data doesn’t tell the whole story of leadership

A tool we often facilitate for corporate clients who want to invest in their high-performing executives (or discover high performers in the making) clients struggling to retain their high performers is the 360 assessment. Data doesn’t tell the whole leadership story (for the individual or company level), but a 360 assessment paints a fuller picture. Through a 360 assessment, executives discover nuanced insight that helps them amplify their "super powers" and uncover weak spots that may be holding them back. Typically run over a four-to-six week period, a 360 process involves twelve-to-fifteen facilitated interviews with managers, direct reports, and peers to understand how a leader is perceived. Productive 360 assessments will include open-ended questions designed with an expert facilitator after a discovery period.

The future of work requires leaders to excel at soft skills like empathy, adaptability and listening. A 360 assessment helps executives understand how they show up with these harder-to-measure human skills.

Insights from the interviews present a view of the leader’s strengths and opportunities for growth in areas such as credibility, communication skills, and how well they develop their people and reflect the values of the broader organization. Offering a 360 program in your organization helps keep employees engaged and motivated because the process strengthens accountability, collaboration, and alignment among teams and challenges executives to examine their impact regularly. As an executive coach who has facilitated hundreds of 360s, my favorite part of the process is when executives celebrate the wins, including things they may not have known previously. More often than not, the people interviewed about the leader take away insights into how they show up. Improved communication and employee job satisfaction occur at the individual executive level but also across teams and the organization.

For the company, high-level insights from the program can help uncover potential problem areas that require strategic intervention. One recent client, a global tech company, illustrates this. During our ongoing partnership, the Creative Executive has facilitated 360 assessments for 26-plus executives and senior managers. We discovered confusion about the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts—the vision had not been well-defined, and the strategy had not been communicated—in that individual executives were left to interpret what it meant in the day-to-day leadership of their teams. Understanding these broader insights helped the company focus on specific actions to help improve their leadership engagement overall regarding this professed company value.

Highly popular with individuals and organizations, 360 assessments are a powerful, efficient way to demonstrate your investment in your leaders. For companies with newly-lean development budgets, 360s pack a punch for a relatively small investment compared to the return in engagement and retainment you’ll see as an organization.