Guiding Leadership Development for Senior Leaders

Running a 360-degree assessment process for a diverse senior leadership team

Summary/overview

This organisation wanted to explore the individual performance and effectiveness of their senior leaders, in order to support their growth and development. We assisted them with 360-degree assessments, feedback sessions, and a team report and debrief to understand their strengths and opportunities as a leadership team.

Situation & Challenges

This organisation had a relatively newly formed senior leadership team, who they wanted to take from good to great. People Solutions had previously assisted them with work around understanding their team effectiveness and how to enhance this, and the organisation subsequently approached us about building upon this work, with a renewed focus on individual effectiveness and development.

The organisation already ran an internal 360-degree assessment and debriefing process with all employees as part of their annual performance cycle; however, this assessment is more aligned to organisational values, and they felt that a more robust and tailored tool was needed to understand the nuances of performance at a senior leadership level (e.g. strategic thinking, leadership, decision-making, innovation).

As well as providing each individual with information about their own strengths and areas for development, they also wanted to get a picture of the spread of strengths and gaps across the senior leadership team, so that they could focus development efforts more broadly. This information would also help them to build their own capability framework and internal assessment tool moving forward.

Our Solution

We proposed using the Saville Performance 360 tool for the assessment phase of this project, as it is a robust and reliable tool built on the Saville WAVE model, which provided a strong alignment with the particular areas of leadership they were interested in assessing.

We launched the project via a virtual meeting with the whole senior leadership team, where we explained the tool, what the 360-degree process involved, how to select raters, and how to prepare raters for the evaluation process. We also provided supplementary materials and templates to assist them with this.

Once all participants had nominated their chosen raters, we set up and managed the assessment project, giving them three weeks for everyone to complete their own and others’ assessments. Following the project close date, we generated individual reports and participants registered for a 1-hour debrief session with one of our psychologists. In these sessions, we talked them through the report and results, with a focus on leveraging strengths, understanding discrepancies between raters, and exploring what these results meant for them in their roles.

We also created a team report, which provided the spread of results across the team for each area of the WAVE profile, and highlighted team strengths and opportunities. We talked through these results with the CEO and then ran a team debrief session, talking through the spread of results, reflecting on the process as a whole, and discussing how they can use this information moving forward.

Result

The process ran very smoothly, with a high level of participation from all team members. The client had plans to use the information as part of their next formal strategy session, to look at how they can better leverage the strengths in their team and integrate these results with the team effectiveness work that had been done earlier.