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The role of a leader is crucial to a company’s success.
Effective leadership, combined with a sense of responsibility and both professional and interpersonal skills, enables leaders to achieve company goals while motivating their team.
They foster team spirit, create a positive work environment, and strengthen employee retention.
But how can you ensure that your manager already possesses these key qualifications or needs to develop them further?
This is where 90-degree feedback comes into play.
It offers managers the opportunity to assess their leadership skills from an objective, external perspective.
This feedback not only helps assess the manager’s current standing but also provides valuable insights for personal and professional development.
Regular 90-degree feedback enables continuous improvement of leadership skills, which ultimately benefits the entire company.
Contents of the template:
Objectives of the survey:
Helpful features for the survey:
Data protection „made in Germany“ (GDPR)
Anonymity function for honest feedback
90-degree feedback is—similar to the more widely known 360-degree feedback — a proven tool for assessing and developing managers.
Unlike the more comprehensive 360-degree method, which gathers feedback from different perspectives (e.g., employees, peers at the same hierarchical level, supervisors, and external partners), 90-degree feedback focuses on a single direction of evaluation.
This usually involves an assessment by direct employees or the manager’s supervisor.
This deliberately limited perspective offers several advantages.
First, the process is significantly simpler and requires fewer resources, as fewer people are involved and less data needs to be collected and analyzed.
Second, this method allows for more personal and often more open feedback, since the respondents are in closer — often daily — contact with the manager.
This creates a feedback culture based on trust and mutual understanding—an aspect that is especially valued in smaller teams or companies with flat hierarchies.
Another difference compared with 270-degree or 360-degree feedback lies in the purpose and atmosphere of the survey.
While the more comprehensive approaches often focus on structured, standardized evaluation—frequently anonymous and formal—90-degree feedback is generally more personal and dialogue-oriented.
It is particularly well suited for regular feedback meetings as part of employee development or for preparing development discussions with managers.
However, the limited perspective also comes with certain constraints.
Since only one viewpoint is included, the picture of the manager may be less balanced or complete.
Especially in more complex organizational structures or for managers with a wide range of external touchpoints—such as customers, project partners, or other departments—a broader range of feedback may be useful to gain a more comprehensive overall picture.
Nevertheless, 90-degree feedback is a valuable tool that, when used correctly, supports an open and continuous development process.
It creates room for personal reflection and targeted development and promotes communication between managers and their teams.
Particularly as an introduction to a more comprehensive feedback culture, it can be a low-threshold and effective first step.
90-degree feedback gives your managers a valuable opportunity to undergo a comprehensive professional assessment from a new perspective.
Feedback from colleagues, employees, and direct supervisors can help identify the manager’s strengths, weaknesses, as well as potential and talents.
This feedback provides the assessed manager with valuable insights and enables them to work specifically on their professional and personal development.
A key advantage of 90-degree feedback is its greater acceptance and the personal nature of the survey.
Because the feedback comes from a group of people with whom the manager interacts daily, it is often more constructive and honest.
Participants actively want to contribute to the manager’s development and success, resulting in valuable and meaningful feedback.
This not only promotes the manager’s personal and professional development, but also strengthens trust and team collaboration.
As a result, 90-degree feedback provides an effective way to improve employee performance and leadership potential while fostering a positive work culture.
Yes. To help make your 90-degree evaluation a complete success, we have compiled a few tips below:
Tip 1: Ensure Participant Anonymity
To obtain honest and unbiased feedback, it is advisable to collect 90-degree feedback anonymously.
Employees who report directly to a manager may otherwise hesitate to provide negative feedback because they fear possible consequences or negative effects on their working relationship.
For this reason, it is crucial that feedback is collected anonymously.
This allows participants to provide honest and constructive feedback freely, without fear of potential repercussions.
In addition to anonymity, it is important that comments do not reveal the identity of the person providing feedback.
For example, potential spelling errors or individual writing styles should be removed to ensure that the feedback remains objective and neutral.
This ensures that feedback is based on the manager’s actual performance and behavior, without being influenced by personal preferences or bias.
Tip 2: Test the Questionnaire Before Publishing
The questionnaire is ready—so is it time to start collecting feedback?
Before sending the 90-degree feedback questionnaire to your employees, it is advisable to conduct a pre-test to ensure it is clear, easy to understand, and user-friendly.
We recommend asking an independent person to review the questionnaire and test the feedback process.
This person can go through the questionnaire from a participant’s perspective and identify potential issues or unclear points.
This pre-test helps ensure that the questionnaire is well structured and that the questions are clearly and unambiguously worded.
Any difficulties or misunderstandings can therefore be identified and resolved in good time before the questionnaire is sent to employees.
By ensuring that the questionnaire is well designed and user-friendly, you can maximize the quality and meaningfulness of the feedback and ensure employees experience the process positively and can provide constructive feedback.
Tip 3: Inspiration for Additional Use Cases
There is no doubt that 90-degree feedback is highly suitable for evaluating managers.
For example, it can also be used to assess employees and provide them with constructive feedback on their performance.
This enables companies to better understand employees’ strengths and areas for development and take targeted development measures.
In addition, 90-degree feedback can be used when selecting candidates for training programs or filling specific positions.
By asking potential candidates for feedback, companies can better assess whether they are suitable for the desired position and which areas may still offer development potential.
Overall, 90-degree feedback provides a versatile and effective way to assess performance and potential across different areas and support targeted development measures.
Thanks to its adaptability, it can help continuously improve the performance and effectiveness of employees and teams.
With a 360-degree feedback tool provider such as easyfeedback, you can easily create, design, and conduct a standardized 90-degree questionnaire.
Thanks to user-friendly interfaces and intuitive features, you can quickly and easily create questionnaires tailored precisely to your requirements.
Build your participant list, personalize your email invitation, and analyze the results using your own filters.
easyfeedback enables you to analyze and interpret feedback results comprehensively by applying different filters and criteria to identify specific data and trends.
Compare the anonymously collected data and create a 90-degree profile that gives you insights into the strengths and development areas of your specialists and managers.
Sign up for our survey tool free of charge and benefit from the wide range of features and possibilities offered by easyfeedback.
Create your own 90-degree questionnaire or use our ready-made template, and start assessing your specialists and managers today.
Give it a try and discover how easy and effective it is to optimize your feedback processes and develop your employees in a targeted way with easyfeedback.
