|
By the time you step into a managerial role, and certainly when you become a senior-level executive, there's typically not a doubt that you have what it takes to be effective in your job. But to have honed a set of skills and optimized your talents, you likely received pointers, feedback, and sound advice along the way.
Whether it was from mentors, superiors, or coaches, there's been someone there, at least in part, that monitored your progression, help strengthen your weaknesses, and prodded you along for success. Along this path, you may have even received criticisms that you may not have wanted to hear, but have helped you continue making forward progress on your upward path.
That said, as you move up the corporate ladder, and especially when you move into senior-level roles, you may have the opportunity of going about activities to meet your department's or company's goals without your actions being as closely monitored as they were in the past. Although your actions and behaviors may be overseen by a more senior-level executive or a board of directors, you no longer are receiving the regular and close feedback, whether good or bad, on your performance.
As a result, in a lot of cases, many senior executives find that with less feedback they focus less on their own development, including areas that they can improve not only for the good of their own career, but their company's success. Senior-level executives can become isolated, particularly from performance criticisms, because superiors fear sharing their thoughts. But that's where a bottom-up evaluation survey built by online survey software comes into play, and a growing number of executives are realizing the benefits they have to offer.
In a nutshell, a bottom-up evaluation survey, sometimes referred to as a bottom-up feedback survey, is a survey tool that measures the leadership abilities and actions of a manager based upon a number of skill sets and core competencies. But the key in a bottom-up evaluation survey is that the feedback is obtained from the executive's team. That is staff members of the executive's team or department are the ones who provide feedback on the executive's performance in order to provide an image of the leader's strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement.
Because traditional performance reviews from a direct boss can be one-sided, obtaining bottom up feedback can result in a more complete view of a person's work performance especially when performed through specialized survey software. But experts caution that using a bottom-up evaluation approach shouldn't be the 'be all and end all'. In other words, it shouldn't be a replacement to feedback from a direct superior. Rather, it should be treated as a supplement, and which servers as a check and balance.
In order to make a bottom-up evaluation survey tool a success, it must be implemented with anonymity. Even when asked, employees fear that negative criticisms may be unwelcome even if the senior executive claims to encourage constructive criticism.
The bottom line on bottom-line evaluation surveys are being pegged as a new wave survey tool that can boost employee morale and company success.
|