Why leaders find 90 percent of their 360-degree feedback reports unhelpful, and how to fix it.
by Tijs Besieux, PhD
"I tend to discard the first nine pages of the report. But here, page ten, is my personal goldmine."
This is what Stefan, a senior leader at a specialty chemicals company, said to me when we explored his 360-degree feedback report together as part of a leadership development program.
What Stefan referred to, the nine pages he quickly skimmed, was the bulk of the feedback report: the quantitative survey data. Page ten, the final page, had a few bits and pieces of qualitative input. The typical "open field," buried at the end of the survey, where the people who provided feedback could enter additional thoughts and insights.
So what Stefan basically said to me was that 90 percent of the report is, to him, virtually useless. And 10 percent is a goldmine.
For me, that was a powerful insight, because while that 10 percent, the qualitative stuff, was the learning goldmine, it is very often treated in 360 survey design as a second-class citizen in the world of data sources. Often, an external provider will create a survey with plenty of items, all quantitative. And then, at the end, there is an open field where people are kindly prompted to provide additional feedback. The quantitative part is always mandatory, whereas the qualitative open-field section is often optional, leading many respondents to skip it.
I have now worked in leadership programs where, in total, 3,000 leaders gathered 360-degree feedback, and, on average, only 25 percent of the people who were asked to fill out the survey also provided qualitative feedback. And so it was shocking to hear that, for Stefan, the qualitative stuff was the real goldmine, while most providers of 360 feedback tools optimize for the quantitative stuff.
To make sure I understood what Stefan said, I first played back his words. I asked: Do I understand correctly that, for you, the quantitative part is less relevant and you find yourself gravitating toward the qualitative feedback in the 360 report? He said yes, so I pressed further, asking why.
Stefan then said something I found really interesting. "Let's just go through the report," he said. "If you look at all the quantitative scores, the report does a phenomenal job of pinpointing these items: what my average score is for a specific item, what the variance is on that item, how I compare with several benchmarks, like my peers or leaders working in similar companies, and whether all of these differences and similarities are statistically significant, yes or no.
“But let's look at one item to illustrate my frustration. Here, the item asks whether I regularly provide constructive feedback to colleagues. Out of 10, my average score is a 7.6. My peers in this company have an average of 7.4. And because we gathered so much data, this 0.2 gap is statistically significant. That's why, in my report, this item is highlighted in green, indicating I'm doing something good. So the report is nudging me toward being happy with 'outperforming' my peers.”
“But come on: statistically there might be a difference, but that comparison, in real life, is just noise. It's irrelevant. So when I look at all this data, all the colors they use, green for performing above a specific benchmark, red for performing below, these colors are almost irrelevant to me, because my main question is 'How effective am I as a leader?' And these very small statistical significances do not really answer that question.”
"So at first, when you look at the quantitative stuff, it looks very rich and interesting: the detailed scores, the benchmarks, the significances. But I ask myself: What signal am I picking up from this? How does this help me?"
Stefan then continued. "My second frustration is that these scores sit very much at the surface level. When people, on average, give me a 7.6 out of 10 for how well I deliver constructive feedback, there is no context for me. There is no example of what I specifically did, nor any suggestion of what I could try differently next time. There is no illustration of a time when I gave specific feedback that really helped someone move forward.
“When I go to a restaurant and the waiter asks if I like the food, I won't say, 'I'd give it an 8 out of 10.' No, I will probably say that I like the food; I will mention what surprised me, what I specifically liked and why, and what they could perhaps consider changing to further improve their service. That's where the learning happens.”
"So, based on the quantitative stuff, I could pride myself on having above-average scores, but the deeper question is: Will this actually help me grow as a leader and better serve the company and our customers? I don't think so. The quantitative stuff sits at the surface level but does not give me the right signal to develop myself as a leader. And you have to keep in mind that most people will fill out this survey in a socially desirable way.
“These are people on my team, peers I work with every day, and a boss who one day decided to hire me for her team. You should check out the other leaders' reports in the program. The vast majority of us score between 7 and 8 out of 10. Now, I get that, at an organizational level, this is good for getting a sense of where we stand, and it might help the organization prioritize which topics to act on. But it does not do much to help an individual leader like me develop.”
"So now let's look at the qualitative stuff," he said, "even though only three out of seven people filled it out. Just look at what they write, because this is where I'll learn. Look at this one example: here I have someone on my team who is brave enough to speak up, and he calls me out on how I communicated a company-wide change program within our team.
“My team member says: 'Stefan, when you announced the IT transformation project during our weekly team check-in, you took the entire change program for granted in terms of why this was happening, like it was obvious to us as a team. You just barged into the meeting and started by saying, "So we're going to do this IT transformation project, and here is what it means for all of you."' And see, my team member writes: 'You never talked to us about why we are doing this change, what's the relevance, why as a company we need to be doing this now. You just took this for granted and leaped straight into the implementation side of it, leaving me, and perhaps other team members, wondering, "What's in it for me? Why are we doing this?" And in that moment I felt how this approach increased my resistance to change.'"
And so Stefan said: "These few lines, this qualitative insight, are for me more powerful than anything I saw in the first nine pages of quantitative feedback in the report."
"Now," Stefan continued, "this type of feedback, the qualitative signal, hits me in the face like a brick. I need to sit down and pause. Because my first response is resistance. When I absorbed this feedback, my instinct was to say, 'This person is wrong. I did send a comms package on the IT transformation before the meeting took place; it's incorrect of him to say that I did not communicate the why.'
“You see, my first response is defensive, because my instinct says that I'm under attack. So I need to find time and space to let it sink in. But when I allow myself that time, I start to see the real value. And the real value in this example is that, even though I may have sent out an email before the meeting where I talked about the IT change, clearly, at least to one person, this message did not land well. And if I want to become more effective at change management, one of the core foundations is the ability to let messages land well. Messages about the why, what, and how of a planned change. So I see this as a valuable opportunity to learn, try new things, and become more effective.”
“Because, see, when you look at the remainder of what my team member says, he's offering a suggestion on how to do it better. He writes: 'Next time, you could start the meeting by taking a tour of the table and polling everyone: based on the briefing package that I sent, in your own words, what do you think is the why for this IT change program?' So he gave me a clear suggestion, and one that I really like. This approach does not require me to repeat the message; it's a way to help others take the floor and play back how I framed it, which immediately helps me see any gap between how I intended the message and how it was perceived.”
"So if you now look again at the feedback report," Stefan continued, "it's all optimized for the quantitative stuff. The nice colors, the benchmarks, and the statistical significance of a 0.2 gap. I understand why we do it; it's easier to report on, control, and measure than qualitative feedback. But at the same time, for us leaders who really want to reflect, develop, and grow in our leadership behavior, it's these qualitative comments, these open fields, which so few people fill out, that contain the real goldmine."
Ever since that conversation, I have been observing how leaders read their 360 reports when we get together in a leadership program. And I started to notice that so many leaders do exactly what Stefan called out. They skim the quantitative stuff, and then, with a heavy heart, they lean into the qualitative feedback. And when you observe their nonverbal behavior as they start reading the qualitative feedback, you see that it lands differently.
One time, I saw someone read a few lines of the qualitative feedback, then look up at the sky, nod, and raise his finger upward, as if he had just read validation of something he had decided earlier, and apparently made a pact with himself, to change.
So, to fix 360-degree feedback reports, you need to address the qualitative feedback, that is, if it's already included in the report you use. The qualitative feedback needs to be at least on par with the quantitative data, and I would argue that, for the individual on the receiving end of the report, it needs to become even more important.
I took this insight back to my own company, Cleo Felix, where we were building a 360 survey that measures customer-first leadership behavior. What follows is not a blueprint, simply what we tried and what I learned along the way. We made two changes: we made the qualitative input mandatory, and we made it conversational.
The survey is structured as sets of three items within a specific cluster. So you could have three quantitative items that measure "customer intelligence." When someone fills out the survey and answers the first three questions, they click "next" to proceed to a mandatory open-field question. I compare these open fields to a chatbot.
We use AI to turn a one-directional qualitative open-field question into a conversational part of the survey. The open field first plays back the input the person provided, then starts asking follow-up questions. It could ask, "Could you provide an example that illustrates the score you gave?" Then, based on the answer, the survey asks a series of follow-up questions to help the respondent make their input as specific, behavioral, and solution-oriented as possible.
It will ask what specifically happened, who was present at that moment, what behavior they observed, what they thought the consequences of that behavior were, how that behavior impacted, for instance, the meeting or the decision-making process, and how the behavior aligns with the company's strategy and values. The survey then synthesizes this input and finally asks for advice on what the leader could try next time.
Once respondents answer these follow-up questions, the survey asks them to validate their input before moving on to the next series of three quantitative items. Because the AI is trained on the specific types of questions that help uncover contextualized leadership behavior, the quality of the qualitative input increases dramatically. And so we combine five clusters, each with three quantitative questions and an open field (think: chatbot) where AI helps respondents provide specific, behavioral, and solution-oriented feedback for the recipient to reflect on.
I had a hunch, but I was never really sure whether this would improve things on the leader's end until we piloted it. A leader suddenly stood up and said: "I've been with this company for almost 30 years now, and I've got to say that this is probably the most powerful feedback I have ever received to help me grow as a leader." That's when I knew the goldmine no longer had to hide on page ten.