Greetings!
It's time for a family 360°.
360° evaluations have been popular in business for some time. The idea is that rather than one person conducting a review of another, employees have each of the people with whom they regularly interact provide performance feedback. The intended result is a panoramic view of one's effectiveness.
Recently, in an e-mail exchange with Denise Dampierre, creator of "Home is Fun," she mentioned the idea of a family 360°. I considered doing this with our children over the holidays and created a form to record our responses.
Two concerns: 1) That some family members would not be sufficiently mature to provide meaningful feedback on others, and 2) That some family members would provide either vague generalities or scathingly specific rebukes. I was not concerned that there would be too much praise.
Our children are in high school and middle school and, on their best days, demonstrate intelligence and an ability to articulate their ideas. So I decided to give it a shot.
Our guidelines read as follows: "Truth spoken in love, helpful, behavioral (specific), meant to help the person grow."
I gave everyone one week to record answers and return them to me. Then I compiled the results so that each person could read everyone else's comments about him/her on one page.
Overall, I was pleased. The comments were helpful and on target. Now we have something to follow up on throughout the year - specific areas of growth we are committed to addressing.
Here were some of the growth areas for me: - Don't say "no" to something without having a good reason to say "no."
- You need to improve on listening. It's annoying.
- Watch football less and do stuff with us more.
Some of the encouraging, "Keep it up!", comments included: - Spending time with the family - like playing games or one-on-one time (demonstrating that different people have differing perspectives).
- Helping me educationally, spiritually, financially.
- I like how (most of the time) you are willing to be flexible.
Of course, we can continue to make these comments more behavioral and specific. It's a start and should help to provide areas of focus for our weekly family meetings during 2011.
| 
