360 Degree Feedback News and Comment

For the first time this year Appraisal360 will be exhibiting at the prestigious HRD2008 Learning and Development event at Excel in London's Docklands. We will be welcoming visitors on Stand 841 throughout the event from 15-17 April 2008.

As well as showcasing our leading edge 360 degree feedback tools we will be promoting our new Practitioner Scheme which helps practitioners to promote their 360 degree feedback services by displaying our logo on their websites and benefiting from a free entry in our online directory of practitioners.

Most people who have been using electronic communications for a while will know what this means. An innocently written email which comes over completely the wrong way to the recipient and causes a dreadful missunderstanding that was never intended.

The point was brought home to me recently in an email exchange with a good friend of mine - Matt Paines - when I made a comment that I figured he would find funny, and had I said it face to face I'm sure he would. Not so. Although thankfully a short telephone call (not that there is such a thing with Matt) soon repaired the damage.


The trouble is that electronic communication channels have grown explosively, but the associated ettiquette has a lot of catching up to do. People say things in emails that they would never say face to face, and things that might be OK said face to face take on a completely different significance when staring at you from the sterile intimacy of your inbox.


Translate this into a business environment and you start to see the potentially corrosive effect that this sort of thing can have on morale and the working environment in general. It doesn't have to be the big fallouts - the cummulative effect of cold impersonal emails over a period of time can be far greater.

That's why we've built in specific questions ito all our 360 feedback questionnaires about how people communicate via email - because we think it's important. And hopefully in time to come the email fallout will become a thing of the past.

Labels: email ettiquette

See us at the Regional CIPD conference in Coventry on 8 October where we will be giving online demonstrations of our 360 degree feedback system and our new Custom360 White Label online tool.

The theme of the event will be Tools for Developing Individuals and Organisations and has a special focus on online learning and development. Speakers include:-

• James Pennington from the B2B Centre
• Nicola Hughes from The Jump Start Company
• Kimberley Hare from Kaizen Training
• Steve Barden and John Helmer from Epic

I've just been discovering LinkedIn which is a site where you can publish a professional profile.

You can find my profile under my current business interests.

I will doubtless be adding a little more to it in due course.

Labels: linked in

In a change from last year HRD 2007 was held at Excel - a new venue in Docklands and a stone's throw from London City Airport. Billed as Europe's largest learning and development event - but did it live up to the hype?

Well - certainly it was big. the new venue is far larger than Earl's Court and Olympia where last year's event was held. But my impression was that delegates were a bit thin on the ground. Speaking to other exhibitors they too seemed to think it was a bit quiet - but whether that was because there really were fewer delegates or because the new venue spread them out is hard to say.

A number people thought - as I did that the new venue was confusing. It looks the same in every direction and on more than one occassion I spent a long time walking around trying to find again someone on a stand that I had been talking to before - and in one case failing completely - which was a blow as he had promised to be a good business contact.

In the evening of the first day were drinks and canapes to celebrate something or other. We were fortunate enough to get chatting to some HR Professionals from South Africa who had come to attend the event - maybe for other reasons too that they didn't mention.

So was it a success? Well I for one missed the relative cosiness of Olympia and found it rather difficult to find the people I wanted to. Maybe fewer people made the journey out to Docklands - but without seeing the figures we just won't know.

Verdict: slightly disappointing but worth the trip

Labels: HRD 2007

We hope to see as many of you as possible at the HRD Exhibition at Excel in Docklands over the next three days.

If you need to find us then call on 07808 064295 and we'll sort you out.

Labels: CIPD, HRD 2007

We often get asked the difference between 360 Degree Feedback and Psychometric Profiling

Psychometric Profiling tools such as Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) , DISC (Thomas International) or Forte Communications Style Profile work by asking you to choose a number of preferences and then tries to predict how you are likely to behave in different situations. For example: do you generally focus on the outer world or your own inner world (intraversion or extraversion), focus on basic information or on your interpretation of what you see or hear (Sensing or Intuition), use logic or look at the people and their feelings (Thinking or Feeling) or do you prefer to close off an issue or leave it open to new information and options (Judging or Perceiving)?

360 Degree Feedback on the other hand uses structured questions - generally based around an appropriate competency framework - to ask a number of people who know you well for observations about your real life behaviour. The aspects of behaviour covered by the competency framework are largely a matter of choice dependent on what is appropriate for the job or circumstances of the individual. In fact there is likely to be a parallel between the job description and the competency framework to be used.

Thus Psychometric Profiling measures your preferences and then predicts how you are likely to choose to behave, while 360 Degree Feedback focuses on your observed behaviour.

Each of these techniques has its place and used properly the two combined together can provide an incredibly powerful diagnostic resource for both individuals and the organisations they find themselves in.

Labels: 360 degree feedback, Myers Briggs