Morgan was early. I had invited another friend of mine to join us. “Shannon, the reason I invited you to lunch was to talk about performance reviews. Morgan, here, doesn’t know whether to scream or eat a banana. You have had success with your process. I wonder if might give us some insight.”

Shannon revved up. “Some success” was a bit of an understatement. First she just smiled, because she knew exactly what Morgan had been struggling with. Then she got serious.

“Look, I am not going to tell you to chuck your old system, but once you’ve tasted the Kool-Aid, you might never go back.” Morgan was listening. “We use a 360 process. I got tired of being the bad guy. So I just stopped. I enlisted the help of all the people surrounding the person. If a person’s performance stunk, everybody knew it anyway, let them tell him. Why should I have all the fun?”

Morgan was skeptical. “Yeah, but how do get people to tell the truth?”

“Well, it takes some time, doesn’t happen all at once. First, we do it writing and it’s anonymous. We talk about confidentiality and we structure it so it contains both positive and negative feedback. We let the person pick four people, then I pick four people. The group includes peers, subordinates and bosses, it is really 360 degrees.” Shannon continued to explain all the logistics, the questions and how it was put together. At the end, Morgan was willing to try.

Based on our conversations with Morgan and Shannon, we have developed a web based application that helps the manager run this system. It is called 360Tool and is currently in beta testing. If you have an interest, you can follow this link to our beta test site. www.360tool.com . The help file has a decent explanation on Shannon’s process. If you would like to be notified when the application is available, there is place where you can sign up. -TF