To Improve Leadership, Some Colleges Take a Cue From Industry: 360-Degree Reviews

Chris Hildreth, Rooster Media

Susan Jaffe, dean of dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, can’t claim to love all the comments she has received on her 360-degree performance reviews, which include assessments from not only her superiors, but also some of her fellow deans and her faculty members. Even though those are sometimes painful, Jaffe finds them helpful. “Just because we’re the boss, doesn’t mean we’re always right,” she said.

Such all-around evaluations are common in the business world, but harder to find in the academy, especially for those at higher administrative levels.

Some college administrators tend to think they’re unnecessary, or worry about what the results will be, said Peter Seldin, an emeritus professor of management at Pace University who has written extensively on academic evaluations. “Another group firmly believes in the philosophical position that faculty need to be evaluated, but administrators don’t.”

The School of the Arts gives 360 reviews every three years, hand-in-hand with executive training by a consultant, at the dean level and above.

“A dean is directly responsible for a multimillion-dollar budget plus significant compliance and regulatory operations plus the professional livelihood of 30 to 40 people,” said David English, the school’s executive vice chancellor and provost. “It’s not enough to say, Oh, you’re a smart person, you’ll be fine, here’s the HR person if you need anything.”

The school still does standard annual reviews, but those don’t give an administrator as much insight, said English. Dean Wilcox, who became dean of liberal arts there in 2012, agrees. He said his 360 evaluation was much more valuable than a traditional performance review.

“I’m a theater person who went into teaching, and I have zero leadership training,” he said. “I realized when I took the job, that was a skill set that was lacking.”

The review — for which the consultant charges $495 per person — is administered electronically and takes around half an hour for each reviewer to complete, English said. The reviewee’s faculty, staff, and direct supervisor can respond to the 360, while the person being evaluated can also select others to include.

“I was asked to identify people to talk to across the spectrum,” Wilcox said. “I wanted to hear criticism, not just handpick people that say I’m doing OK.” His review was done by two bosses, eight peers, and eight direct reports.

But criticism is rarely easy to take and can be morale-crushing. “People can be harsh,” said Allison Vaillancourt, vice president for business affairs and human resources at the University of Arizona. Her institution gives 360s using a point scale combined with open-ended questions that prompt written responses. “If you just give someone a data dump, it can be completely debilitating.”

How to help people put the criticism to good use? One way is to have a trained coach or human-resources representative go through the appraisal with the reviewee. In 2017, the University of Arizona developed a team within human resources focused on organizational leadership and development; one of its missions is to help reviewees make sense of the findings, as well as work on an action plan. Wilcox, of the School of the Arts, said it was helpful that his 360 was part of a long-term strategy to have deans work with coaches: “If I had received the review outside this process, it would be much more difficult to pick through.”

Keys to Success

Other important ways to make sure a 360 succeeds, according to the Center for Creative Leadership, a company that works with colleges and industry, are: being clear about why it’s being done and what problem is being solved; having strong support for the reviews from senior executives; and making clear that the data are confidential.

It’s also important, especially in higher education, to make sure the questions make sense for how the college is structured.

“What one dean does can be very different from what another dean does,” said Jeffrey L. Buller, director of leadership and professional development at Florida Atlantic University, who has published several books on faculty evaluations and academic leadership.

That’s even truer for vice presidents, he said. “What a vice president for academic affairs does is almost totally different than what a vice president for business affairs does, or a vice president for student affairs.”

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In past 360s, Jaffe said, deans unfamiliar with her work were asked questions about how well she ran her program or delegated to her staff.

“They would have no idea, but one person gave me a super low score. I was howling. I got far better scores from people I’m actually working with.” She brought up her concerns, and in later reviews, people unacquainted with her work were not included.

Before the School of the Arts worked with a consultant, it used 360s based on evaluations given in industry; changing to one specifically designed for higher education helped get at issues that matter more to a university than to corporations, said English.

In the same vein, when governing boards perform 360 reviews of university presidents, it’s critical that the members of the board — many of whom increasingly come from sectors outside of higher education — are trained to know how a college leader’s role differs from that of an industry CEO. “A lot of people think they know how to run a university because they’ve been to college,” said Buller. “That’s not the case.”

Timing can also make a difference: Katie Conboy, provost and senior vice president at Simmons University, in Boston, said her 360 review took place in the middle of a major restructuring, and — through her review — she was surprised to find that the faculty was far more lukewarm about the changes than she had thought.

“I was floating along being happy and assuming I was going to bring people along with me,” she said, and was surprised to read comments like, “She really needs to listen, not just pretend to listen.”

“Those are things you don’t forget,” she said, but the experience taught her that she had to make more of an effort to talk about what she was accomplishing and to praise people for their contributions.

She thinks 360 reviews are especially valuable for new deans.

“Deans are in an interesting spot — in one sense they are the CEOs of their unit, and in another they’re middle managers of the university,” she said. “So they need to hear from those who see them as their CEO and also from people who see them as partners — I think that’s a helpful balancing.”

Ensuring Follow-Up

Trying to make the focus of the 360s developmental rather than evaluative — and ensuring follow-up — makes the reviews most useful.

“The primarily driving force behind such evaluations should be to help people be better at their jobs — not to use them as a punitive tool,” said Pace’s Seldin. That requires care.

“People have all sorts of motivations when they complete 360s,” said Vaillancourt. “If we’re not getting along with someone and we’re asked to give feedback, it’s possible we could use a 360 to punish someone. Or if we really like someone, we might not be honest, because we don’t want someone to get in trouble.”

At Arizona, 360 reviews done every five years can include responses from faculty, students, administrators, and other stakeholders — even community collaborators, donors, and industry partners, depending on who is being reviewed. The five-year appraisals have come to carry a great deal of weight — too much, Vaillancourt believes — and there are some faculty members who would like to see full 360 reviews annually. What she would rather see is informal 360 reviews every few years, so that people are “able to course-correct before the five-year review process happens.”

Those could include just a few questions, such as, “What are this person’s most significant accomplishments this year, what advice do you have for this person to start, stop, or change in order to be more effective?”

“It’s more like pulse-taking,” she said.

In addition, over the past five years or so, academic or administrative heads at Arizona have been able to request their own 360 and choose whom they want feedback from, to get a sense of how they are doing; these are not shown to superiors. Vaillancourt said there might be five to 10 such requests annually.

She thinks 360-degree reviews will become increasingly common on campuses: “I think there’s a realization that leadership development really matters and giving people developmental feedback can be quite transformative.”

It may take a while, though. Seldin notes that his book on conducting faculty evaluations outsells his book on conducting evaluations for administrators four to one.