4 steps to leadership 360 success (Judopay example)

Judopay is a true UK FinTech success story - now the industry leader in mobile-centric payments.

However, like most high-growth tech companies, they found themselves approaching 100 staff and still stuck on Google Docs and Sheets for their performance management processes.

Last year we helped them run a 360 feedback process for their Senior Leadership Team (SLT).

Why did Judopay first focus on the SLT for 360 feedback? Because leadership attracts the highest salaries in the organisation. Their management styles can have an enormous cultural and financial impact throughout the business, positive and negative. For Judopay, it was a matter of 'can we afford not to have our SLT highly self-aware and constantly fine-tuning their softer skills?'

Here are some of the key outcomes from that process:

And here are the 4 steps we took to achieve those outcomes:

1. Align your feedback questions to best-practice (2 hours)
2. Have the SLT nominate peers to give them anonymous feedback (3 weeks)
3. Hold a short "post-360 workshop" (2 hours)
4. Conduct a short "post-360 survey" (1 week)

Let's dive into each part...

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1. Align your feedback questions to best-practice

The quality of the conversations following any 360 feedback process comes down to the quality of the feedback questions.

It's important not to overreach here: 4-6 high-quality questions in your feedback form are more than enough.

For Judopay we used 6 open-ended questions:

None of these questions included a rating or scale as the response type—it was all open text.

But, we limited feedback to 280 characters—the same length as a tweet. This ensured two things:

1. High completion rates (a low bar to provide feedback)
2. Clear, actionable advice (no sh*t sandwiches)

Restricting responses to the length of a tweet also enhances anonymity by concealing writing styles. More on anonymity below.

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2. SLT nominates peers to provide anonymous feedback

Each member of the SLT was free to choose 4-8 people to give them feedback. Those chosen had 3 weeks to respond. Out of 78 feedback requests, 60 were answered on time (77% completion rate).

Why did we let the SLT choose their reviewers, rather than have HR assign reviewers? Because advice is easier to hear and more likely to be listened to when it's solicited.

Why did we remove names from comments? Because this results in more honest feedback. More honest feedback results in better performance discussions. More on that here.

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3. Hold a short "post-360 workshop"

It’s one thing to get great feedback. It’s another thing to put that feedback into practice.

Once everyone had received and read their feedback, Carmen (Judopay's HR Lead) booked in a feedback 'debrief' meeting and ahead of this asked each member to bring along 3 themes and 3 action plans from their feedback.

They then met and Carmen opened the conversation by sharing her feedback and what she had learnt during the process. Each member of the SLT then spoke in turn about their action plans and feedback.

This action plan was shared with the wider team and updates were given on company update calls the following month.

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4. Conduct a short "post-360 survey"

Why go to the effort of getting 'feedback on the feedback'? Because without hard data you're making decisions based on anecdotal evidence.

We helped Judopay run two post-360 pulse surveys using Howamigoing's Private feedback feature.

The first survey went to the SLT, to see how the process helped them. These were the questions:

We also ran a short pulse survey to the non-SLT to see what it was like to give critical feedback to management. Here were the questions:

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Want to do your own leadership 360?

Send an email to hello@howamigoing.com and we'll set up a short best-practice call. It's our bread and butter - and we love doing it!

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