The Self-Serve Mini 360
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The traditional 360 is the leadership development equivalent of visiting the dentist. It’s time-consuming, inconvenient for everyone’s schedule, and painful if you’re not putting in routine upkeep efforts. Not to mention potentially expensive. The upside is that if you conduct a thorough 360, you’ll probably get more actionable advice than “you probably need to floss more.”
If you’re experiencing a pivotal moment in your leadership development—your team is unhappy or underperforming, you’re relatively new to a role, you are struggling more than you’d expect for a period of time—a traditional, full 360 is absolutely valuable. I often use a hybrid qualitative/quantitative 360 approach with detailed surveys and interviews. The output is exceptionally valuable. If that sounds like you, call me.
But what if you’re not in a critical moment and just want more feedback? Maybe you’re just managing a team that’s doing perfectly fine. A full 360 would be great, but it’s not worth the time and money. This need for everyday quality feedback is what led me to create the Self-Serve Mini 360: a way to capture essential insights of a full 360 without the logistical and resource constraints.
The Core Idea
The Self-Serve Mini 360 focuses on a central idea: Do you describe yourself the same way others do? More specifically, do your peers, direct reports, and senior colleagues use similar adjectives when they think about how you "show up" professionally?
Make no mistake: The Mini 360 lacks the breadth and depth of evaluating your performance on competency scales or specific behaviors. That’s a known disadvantage. It’s just a simple mapping of the gap between self-perception and social reality, which is a strong predictor of leadership effectiveness.
How It Works
The entire process is easy to execute.
Step 1: Create the Survey Using Google Forms or any other survey platform (make sure to comply with your company’s security requirements!), just copy my six-question template. The heart of it is simple: from a curated list, respondents select five adjectives that most describe you and five that least describe you.
Step 2: Send the Email Use the opening in my template to send a brief note to colleagues across all levels—peers, team members, senior leaders. Cast a wide net; you'll typically get 40-60% response rates, and make sure you BCC everyone.
I recommend leaving the survey open for 7-10 days. Any less and people may not get to it, but any longer and they’ll delay indefinitely.
You will need to send reminder emails. When you do, begin with a sentence like: “Some of you receiving this follow-up may have already completed the survey—I have no way of knowing, so if you have, thank you!” This will boost trust and lower the annoyance factor.
Step 3: Complete It Yourself This is crucial. Take the survey and assess how you see yourself. You don’t need to fill out the survey itself online, but you absolutely must write down your own answers before seeing any feedback!
Step 4: Analyze the Results Compare gaps between self-perception and others' perceptions across organizational levels. I strongly recommend two things:
Wait until all the results are in before reviewing. This will be hard. But you want to avoid the anchoring bias of early results.
Review the results with a coach, mentor, HR professional, or a trusted friend.
Step 5: Close the Loop Share your thematic findings with participants. I recommend a brief email to everyone with your three key takeaways and planned actions for each. This isn't just courtesy—it often sparks the most valuable conversations about leadership presence and organizational dynamics.
A Quick Anecdote
A senior executive I recently worked with discovered she was seen as "strategic" and "innovative" by senior leaders but "unpredictable" and "unclear" by her direct reports. Same person; completely different lived experience depending on organizational level.
That insight transformed how she communicated. Not because she changed what she was thinking, but because she learned how to translate her strategic vision into language that landed differently at different levels.
The Self-Serve Advantage
The ownership makes this powerful. When you administer your own feedback process, you not only control the timing but you also walk the talk of self-development. The simple act of engaging in this process builds others’ trust in you.
You may absolutely want to utilize a full, robust 360. But at the risk of putting myself out of business, the Self-Serve Mini 360 may do enough at a fraction of the cost and effort.
Want to see what it’s like to complete a Mini 360 as a participant? You can rate me here.
That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.
*Note: This edition is updated from a 2018 newsletter on the same topic.