After a 360: What the Data Reveals About Accountability and Improvement

Written by Terri Baumgardner, Ph.D., SPHR | 8/3/26, 6:54 PM

360-degree feedback is a powerful tool. It provides perspective to participants regarding how others see their effectiveness in the work setting. It can enhance a person’s self-insight. It can also enhance motivation to change, grow, and develop.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, 360-degree feedback is implemented more as a stand-alone event than as part of a process that can help ensure individual impact, as well as group and organizational impact. The focus in this article is enhancing individual impact.

There are many steps that can be taken to enhance the impact of 360 feedback for individuals. These include ensuring that:

There is a process for helping individuals interpret their feedback and determine what are the most important areas of focus
Individuals know how to translate the most important themes from their feedback into a development action plan
A recommended action planning process exists and is followed in the organization
Once an initial draft of an action plan is complete, the participant shares the plan with their manager and gets buy-in and alignment on the plan
The participant also shares the themes from their feedback with the other stakeholder groups who provided feedback, and asks for their help in supporting their development efforts
The participant and manager continue to work closely together over the course of the next months on implementing the action plan, monitoring progress, and adjusting the plan as needed
A follow-up streamlined “accountability” 360 assessment is completed to help participants understand if people see improvement in the behaviors that the participant was working on improving
A true “Time 2” 360 assessment is completed to show evidence of improvement or decline across all behaviors and competencies
Once follow-up assessments are completed, the action plan can be adjusted, and the participant and manager can continue to work together on making additional progress

Follow-Up Assessments to Original 360

As noted above, there are two types of assessments that might occur in follow-up to the original 360. A person may complete a streamlined 360 assessment, which asks the person to select a shorter list of behaviors that they have been working on improving, and get feedback from their original raters on the extent of improvement and effort seen. This assessment at Assessments International is called Progress Check and it often happens six months after the original 360 assessment. The follow-up assessment is really focused on improving accountability for change, growth and development.

The second type of follow-up assessment is a full “Time 2” assessment, which is repeating the same 360 with the original raters. This assessment provides assessment of improvement or decline related to every behavior and every competency in the assessment. This type of assessment usually occurs one year after the original 360 assessment. This type of assessment is more for the purpose of demonstrating impact, change and return-on-investment because people are growing and developing.

What Progress Check Data Tells Us

Progress Check is designed more as a pulse check for an individual’s accountability to grow and develop. In the six months after taking the 360, has an individual demonstrated improvement related to specific behaviors and competencies that is noticed by others? Do others notice that an individual is putting forth effort to improve?

As noted, in our Progress Check, people are asked to select three to ten behaviors that they have been working on improving, and they want to get feedback from their original raters on the Improvement and Effort seen.

The rating scales provided are:

Improvement	Effort
1 - No Improvement	1 - No Effort
2 - Slight Improvement	2 - Slight Effort
3 - Moderate Improvement	3 - Moderate Effort
4 - Significant Improvement	4 - Significant Effort
Don’t Know / Can’t Say	Don’t Know / Can’t Say

For this overview, we looked at four organizations who all completed The PROFILOR® for Mid-Level Leaders and the follow-on Progress Check for Mid-Level Leaders assessments. We included each organization’s most recent application of the Progress Check to begin examining themes.

Overall Improvement and Effort

Across the four organizations, the average Overall Improvement rating is 3.24, representing slightly above a moderate improvement. The average Overall Effort rating is 3.56, which represents about the mid-point between moderate and significant effort. There is a pattern of Effort ratings being higher than Improvement ratings. More analysis is needed to replicate and explore this result.

The average Overall Improvement ratings ranged from 2.96 to 3.46 across the four organizations. The average Overall Effort ratings ranged from 3.40 to 3.69. It is interesting to note the lowest ratings for Improvement and Effort came from the same organization (“Organization C”). The highest ratings for Improvement and Effort came from the same organization (“Organization B”). This pattern may indicate a more or less harsh/lenient rater population.

Competencies That People Select to Work on Improving

The behaviors are all associated with competencies, so when people select behaviors, the competencies most and least often selected by people to work on can also be identified. Across the four organizations, there are three competencies that consistently show up as the most often selected competencies to work on improving. These are: Make Sound Decisions, Act Strategically, and Manage Execution. Table 1 shows the percent of participants from each of the four organizations who chose to work on improving these competencies.

Table 1

Percent of Mid-Level Leaders Selecting Behaviors in These Competencies for Updated Feedback

Competency	Organization A	Organization B	Organization C	Organization D
Make Sound Decisions	79%	61%	59%	58%
Act Strategically	59%	43%	50%	61%
Manage Execution	66%	50%	59%	63%

It is noteworthy that such high percentages of Mid-Level Leaders choose to work on behaviors within these three competency areas. It seems that regardless of organizational or personal context, these three competencies are often seen as critical to improve by Mid-Level Leaders.

For these three competencies, Table 2 shows each organization’s overall Improvement and Effort average rating.

Table 2

Overall average improvement and effort ratings for the four organizations

Competency	Organization A		Organization B		Organization C		Organization D
	Improve	Effort	Improve	Effort	Improve	Effort	Improve	Effort
Make Sound Decisions	3.14	3.49	3.63	3.83	2.82	3.64	3.37	3.78
Act Strategically	3.30	3. 58	3.46	3.81	3.15	3.61	3.36	3.86
Manage Execution	3.18	3.42	3.71	3.69	3.02	3.39	3.38	3.51

Behaviors That People Select to Work on Improving

One behavior stood out as consistently selected as a behavior these mid-level leaders were working on improving. This behavior represented the Act Strategically competency. The behavior is: Balances big-picture concerns with day-to-day activities. This was the #1 selected behavior for three of the four organizations. For the remaining organization, it was the #3 selected behavior. Across the four organizations, this behavior was selected by twenty-one percent (21%) to forty-five percent (45%) of participants.

In the Make Sound Decisions competency, there was less consistency in the behaviors most often selected by participants. Thirty-six percent (36%) of participants in one organization and twenty-nine percent of participants in a second organization selected the following behavior as one they were working on improving: Makes decisions in the face of uncertainty.

In the Manage Execution competency, Delegates enough of own work to others was the #1 selected behavior for one organization and the #2 selected behavior for two other organizations, with the percent of participants selecting the behavior ranging from nineteen percent (19%) to thirty-one percent (31%).

Table 3 shows the behaviors most often selected as behaviors to work on improving, within the top three selected competencies.

Table 3

Percent of Mid-Level Leaders that selected these behaviors to work on improving in the three main competency areas

Competency	Behavior	Organization A	Organization B	Organization C	Organization D
Act Strategically	Balances big-picture concerns with day-to-day activities	31% selected 3.26 Improvement 3.59 Effort	21% selected 3.40 Improvement 3.78 Effort	25% selected 3.01 Improvement 3.56 Effort	45% selected 3.30 Improvement 3.77 Effort
Make Sound Decisions	Makes decisions in the face of uncertainty	21% selected 3.30 Improvement 3.60 Effort	36% selected 3.58 Improvement 3.73 Effort	16% selected 2.74 Improvement 3.27 Effort	29% selected 3.28 Improvement 3.78 Effort
Manages Execution	Delegates enough of own work to others	31% selected 3.08 Improvement 3.34 Effort	18% selected 3.24 Improvement 3.42 Effort	19% selected 2.68 Improvement 2.94 Effort	29% selected 3.05 Improvement 3.20 Improvement

Outside of these three competency areas, there was one additional behavior that was in the top five list of behaviors selected to work on improving by three of the four organizations – Continually searches for ways to improve customer/client service.

Conclusion

Progress Check asks individuals to select 3 to 10 behaviors that they have been working on improving and would like to know if others have noticed any improvement or the effort they have put forth to improve. It is true that you might expect individuals to differ quite a bit in terms of what they choose to work on improving. It is also true that you might see individuals within the same organization choosing to work on improving the same behaviors (because these are highly valued in the organization).

It also appears to be the case that there are certain behaviors that Mid-Level Leaders select to work on improving regardless of individual or organization needs. These behaviors may represent consistently challenging behaviors to master in Mid-Level Leader roles. Of all behaviors, Balances big-picture concerns with day-to-day activities, seems to take precedence for these leaders in their development focus. As such, this may be a behavior that organizations want to prioritize in their leadership development initiatives for Mid-Level Leaders.

View full post