360 Feedback - It Works!
What your team actually thinks of your leadership (and why most founders never find out)
The hardest feedback I've ever seen a leader receive wasn't from a board review or a consultant's report. It came from the people who worked for them every day.
I was working with a business that had invested seriously in their leadership team. We'd done the profiling work, built genuine self-awareness across the group, and the leaders had a clear picture of how they naturally operated, where their strengths sat, and where they struggled under pressure. It was honest, considered work and the team had engaged with it well.
But there was a gap.
Everything we had was one perception, their own. And while most leaders, when they've done the work and built the trust, will approach that process honestly, the way you see yourself and the way others experience you are often very different things.
So we introduced a 360-degree feedback process.
What a 360 actually is (and what it isn't)
A 360 collects anonymous input from the people around a leader, direct reports, peers, and managers, focused entirely on observable leadership behaviour. Not a performance review. Not a personality assessment. A development tool designed to surface what self-assessment alone can't show you.
The questions I use are specifically designed to measure behaviour, not intent. Things like:
Does this leader take ownership when things go wrong, or do they deflect?
Do they hold others to agreed standards, even when it's uncomfortable?
Do they raise issues early, or let them escalate?
Do people feel safe to speak up around them?
These aren't abstract questions. They're the things your team is already noticing, already talking about quietly, and almost certainly never saying to your face. The 360 gives that observation somewhere to go constructively.
The rating scale runs from 1 to 7, anchored at the top by "consistently demonstrated, even under pressure." That last part matters. Anyone can lead well when things are calm. The 360 is designed to surface what actually happens when the pressure is on.
Why most founders never get this feedback
The further up you are in a business, the less honest feedback you receive. Not because people don't have views, but because the risk of saying something feels too high. So they say nothing, or they soften it, or they tell you what you want to hear.
This isn't a failure of your team. It's a structural reality of leadership. The higher the power differential, the quieter the feedback loop becomes.
A well-designed 360 breaks that loop. Anonymous input, behaviour-focused questions, delivered carefully and with context. In my experience, around 90% of feedback lands as recognised truth. People don't argue with it. They nod, sometimes uncomfortably, and say "yes, I can see that."
The part that changed everything
Here's what happened in the business I was working with: the Directors did the 360 too. Not because they were asked to as an afterthought, but because they chose to go first.
In a business where the founders have built something from the ground up, where it's their vision, their risk, their name above the door, that decision to say "I want to know how I'm actually landing on the people around me" is not a small thing. The senior team noticed. The message it sent, that nobody is exempt from honest feedback and that growth is expected at every level, was more powerful than anything we could have built into a program.
What came back was a genuine mix. Clear strengths that the team consistently validated, and a handful of patterns the leaders hadn't fully seen in themselves , the kind of feedback that makes you sit with it for a moment before you can receive it properly.
But they received it. And then they worked on the right things, not the things they assumed needed work, but the things that were genuinely affecting the people around them.
What happens after the 360
The debrief is where the real work begins. Results are reviewed privately, in a one-on-one conversation, alongside the leader's existing profile data. That combination, how you see yourself, and how others experience you, gives you a complete picture that neither source can provide alone.
Where there's alignment, it confirms genuine strengths. Where there are gaps, we look at whether it's an awareness issue (you didn't realise the impact) or a skill gap under pressure (you know what good looks like, but it breaks down when things get hard). Those are two different problems with two different development paths.
The goal isn't to produce a report. It's to give a leader the one thing most of them have never had: a clear, honest picture of how their leadership is actually being experienced by the people they're responsible for.
A founder who built something extraordinary can also be the thing that limits it
The workplace has shifted. People have more choices about where they work and who they work for, and they are increasingly choosing leaders who are self-aware, open, and willing to be accountable to the same standards they hold their team to.
A founder who built something extraordinary can also be the thing that limits it, if they're not prepared to look honestly at their own impact.
The 360 is one of the most powerful parts of the work I do, not because it's confronting (though sometimes it is), but because it creates the conditions for real development. You can't work on what you can't see. And most leaders, when they finally see it clearly, want to do something about it.