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LEGAL SERVICES SECTOR FOCUS:
360 degree feedback in a law firm

With origins in the US military, researchers finding that peers were more accurate in providing feedback than the boss, 360 degree feedback is now rooted in industry.

The growth in 360 degree feedback is said to have followed research completed by the Centre for Creative Leadership that found that an important part of a person’s personal and professional development is the feedback that they receive. That research also found that most people operate in a feedback-poor environment.

It is this latter point that often drives interest in 360s within law firms. Most of our law firm clients have identified that the partners have gained their position with little feedback on their behaviours and how those behaviours affect those around them.

360 degree feedback offers an opportunity for the partners – or other members of the firm – to gain specific feedback on those behaviours that are most important to the firm and that are having the greatest impact on their colleagues.

The nature of a law firm also throws interesting concerns from Managing Partners when introducing 360 degree feedback.

The first concern is often that of anonymity. In an ideal world, 360 feedback would not require anonymity from the respondent. But, particularly where there is fear of repercussion, anonymous feedback can give an opportunity for honest feedback to be provided that may have otherwise been withheld. The flipside of this concern is that people will use anonymity to cloak mischievous comment. We find that neither of these concerns arises in practice. Professional people act professionally when they give feedback to colleagues. We have the evidence to prove it.

The second concern is that the questions must be appropriate to the unique qualities of the firm. This is highly important. Not only must the behaviours to be measured, and the questions asked, be appropriate to law firms, we suggest they are specific to the values of the individual firm itself. Off-the-shelf questionnaires are rarely appropriate for the legal sector.

The final common concern is that people will not complete the feedback. We have to report that across the range of industries and professions we work in, we find that lawyers are the most compliant in completing the feedback – hitting 95% completion rates on a regular basis. Moreover, they are the most diligent in terms of ensuring that the narrative they provide to support their rating scores is complete, accurate, and fair.

It is this latter point that leads us to believe that 360 degree feedback is very well suited to the legal profession. 360 degree feedback can lead to the misuse of statistics to produce behavioural scores that in turn lead to poor conversations around what score was achieved for a particular behaviour. The richness of 360 comes from the ability to bring together feedback from a number of sources and produce a single report of that feedback. The accuracy of the narrative in the 360 feedback we see in law firms leads to highly meaningful conversations with partners and truly great feedback for them.

Brendan Walsh Managing Director, Bowland solutions
www.bowlandsolutions.com