Management and Leadership Surveys...

OspreyO

OspreyO

OspreyO

Soldato
Joined
12 Dec 2006
Posts
5,607
Our organization, has for a while been sending managers on these "leadership" courses. As a result they keep sending out anonymous" surveys for the team members to fill out on their managers.

Kinda dammed if you do them, or if you don't. It seems like no one fills them out honestly, or afraid to fill them out at all. Seem entirely pointless to me.

https://workchronicles.com/anonymous-employee-survey/

Has anyone else had to do this much. I think its a bit weird to be asking your team to rate you like this.
 
I sent one out once. One team member put war and peace why their colleague was a jack ass. Was a good lol but didn't net any tangible improvements. We did one recently on desire to return to the office; that was enlightening.
 
Ericsson U.K. used to do these surveys annually and the response to the first one was honest feedback and magically, the teams which pointed out management failings suddenly got given additional performance targets to improve the team’s performance.

Every year afterwards, the response was the survey equivalent of the “This is fine” meme where the character is drinking coffee in a burning room.

It was hilarious watching HR’s brains explode trying to figure out why everyone said it was great and yet staff were leaving in droves.
 
I once did one of these where I was in a small team and my writing style made it obvious it was me who wrote it. I put a list of reasons and justifications on why management wasn't very good and what the gaps were. I got sat down and asked to go through each one of them like it was a personal insult. Worked well there... ha
 
Thus far a few are from friends which is fair enough, if it a bit pointless for obvious reasons.

The others however are from people I very little involvement with.
I would rarely have any dealings with them, other than a very brief conversation about some work item.
One for example I've had two conversations in about 2yrs. I really know nothing about them.
 
OspreyO said:
True.

The more I get asked to do I'm starting to feel its a little demeaning to be asked to fill in a pointless survey.
Click to expand...

It's a useful way to get some feedback from team members. Giving critical feedback face to face doesn't come easily to some people. Having an anonymous way to get some is a useful tool.

Some very bizarre comments about management in this thread....I guess some people have never experienced decent leadership.
 
Bouton Aide said:
They should know what you are doing really. They are there to overlook and just to ensure the works getting done. If your not doing your job they are there to kick your ass.
Click to expand...

If you mean the surveys. The Surveys are not about anything specific work wise. Just about, peoples characteristics. Are they a good listener, can they multitask. often I have no idea.
 
mid_gen said:
It's a useful way to get some feedback from team members. Giving critical feedback face to face doesn't come easily to some people. Having an anonymous way to get some is a useful tool.
Some very bizarre comments about management in this thread....I guess some people have never experienced decent leadership.
Click to expand...

Its rare enough to have a good leadership.
 
mid_gen said:
I guess it depends on the businesses and industries you're in....I've worked mainly in very large organisations where poor leadership gets weeded out pretty fast.
Click to expand...

That is my experience as well.

Worked at a small place that decided to do an anonymous survey, and our branch got absolutely awful scores. For some reason, I can't recall why, they wound up sharing the results with everybody. Then the next year our branch claimed we weren't participating because they were joining a different survey that was better suited for our geography. And then killed it off a few months later.

So, in a sense, we never got such bad scores again.

The entire team either resigned or was fired over the following two years :/
 
This is just part of 360-degree feedback, you get reviews from your manager but the organisation, managers' managers/directors etc.. (and really the managers too if they're any good) will want to get feedback too. Some organisations will have some peer review process in place too where you get feedback from co-workers both within your team and perhaps from other teams you interact with, in some cases getting good feedback from your peers can be important for promotion.

This sort of thing, especially if you're getting feedback from all angles can mean you're in a position that is more robust to bad management etc.. as someone else commented, they really shouldn't exist - you have multiple people giving you reviews then one bad manager has less of an impact than in some organisation where your entire annual appraisal rests on the subjective opinion of a single person + that one bad manager shouldn't really exist because they'd potentially get negative reviews from people who report to them and/or peers.

Of course, it isn't foolproof, maybe one bad manager might pick on one person but is well-liked by others or perhaps someone comes in and just isn't a fit for the company in general and so gets mediocre or bad reviews etc.. Also if there are various levels you need to progress through then that can be an obstacle for someone who has come from a different type of firm where those grades/levels aren't present - if they slot you in too high then you might have higher expectations/serious pressure and not perform to that standard, if they slot you in too low then you might have a bit of an opportunity cost if it takes you 2years+ to get to the level you perhaps should have been at initially.

But generally, feedback is good - just be objective about it - it's not really something to get paranoid about, especially if it's anonymous - you don't need to mention anything too specific to yourself and essentially out yourself if you're concerned, just be objective and truthfully about it.
 
OspreyO said:
I've seen bad managers just as often in large organizations.
Click to expand...

Well depends on the industry too, certainly worked at my share of very large, terrible business (banking industry) full of terrible management. Last 8 years or so since switching industries, have been largely excellent in terms of management.

Small companies though, you're rarely going to have truly excellent management throughout, because good managers can go earn more at bigger companies.
 
Oh yes ... the anonymous survey where they send "reminder" emails until you've completed it :rolleyes: The last one I had asked enough information on "demographics" (i.e. location and current project) to ensure my reply could only have come from me or one other colleague.
 
Getting an automated reminder doesn't necessarily mean it isn't anonymous [in the context of what matters i.e. visibility to management], if the people who review the results of the survey don't have a means to see who's been sent a reminder. Behind the scenes, it has to be attributed to individuals in some way to ensure legitimacy e.g. people can't spam multiple responses, or respond to surveys they shouldn't.
As for the demographics, the surveys we used hid the detailed responses from any teams smaller than 5 people so e.g. a manager with 4 direct reports wouldn't get to see their ratings and it would just roll up to the higher level. Admittedly, dependent on the overall team hierarchy, you could sometimes narrow things down a lot by applying various filters and a process of elimination. Definitely not perfect in terms of anonymity, but I know it wasn't possible to link the textual responses to individuals, you could only really deduce it for the quantitative metrics. In fact in some cases the fact it was anonymous caused problems, because you'd get a one line comment out of context making it difficult to know how to address it, so in meetings with the team you'd have to call out such things and request further info (again anonymously if people didn't want to put their name against it).

Overall, I don't have a problem with such surveys. They provide useful insights that can drive change, dependent on the culture of the organisation.
If I take me as an example, one of the things I picked up on was that my team felt they didn't have enough understanding of our future vision and strategy. So I was able to focus a bit more on that in team meetings etc.

More broadly, I know from sitting on the leadership team for my division that a LOT of time end effort was put into addressing survey feedback. Way more than I had realised before I moved into management.
randomshenans said:
I once did one of these where I was in a small team and my writing style made it obvious it was me who wrote it
Click to expand...
I used to tailor my writing style for the freetext survey elements, flattening it out into almost bullet points (very little use of commas, brackets etc). To someone who knew me it could probably still be attributed if they looked hard enough, but there wasn't really a confrontational culture anyway so worst case scenario would be having an honest conversation about perceived issues.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom