Better Questions, Better Feedback

“You lack leadership presence.” It is the kind of line that appears, in one form or another, in 360-degree feedback reports every week. It sounds significant. It may even feel true to the people who wrote it. Yet it gives the leader who receives it almost nothing to work with. What, precisely, should change? Tone, pace, the way arguments are framed, the way meetings are opened? Feedback of this kind does not develop leaders; it unsettles them.

This question, the quality and usefulness of the feedback leaders actually receive, has been on my mind recently. It featured in my latest Leadership Discoveries™ podcast conversation with Antoinette Dale Henderson, and it is the subject of a sharp new article in California Management Review Insights by Tiffany Keller Hansbrough, Paul Hanges and Jon Gruda (2026), whose leadership research I have long admired. Their argument deserves the attention of every leader, coach and HR practitioner who commissions, designs or interprets multi-rater feedback.

1. The problem is the instrument, not the raters

When 360-degree processes disappoint, the usual suspects are rounded up: office politics, rater dishonesty, fear of consequences. Hansbrough, Hanges and Gruda (2026) point at the survey itself. Most instruments ask raters to assess broad qualities: is a good leader; demonstrates integrity; thinks strategically. Items of this kind do not prompt the rater to search their memory for evidence. They prompt a feeling.

The psychology here is well established. Human judgement operates in two broad modes: a fast, effortless, impression-based mode and a slower, deliberate, evidence-based mode (Kahneman, 2011). Trait-based survey items invite the fast mode. The rater consults their overall impression of the person: do I regard them as a good leader? That single global impression then colours every item on the instrument. Psychologists call this the halo effect. The practical consequence is feedback that is flat and undifferentiated: strong performers score uniformly high, others score uniformly low, and the profile tells the recipient how they are regarded rather than how they lead.

Behaviourally specific items work differently. An item such as “summarises key takeaways at the end of meetings” or “seeks out different perspectives when solving problems” cannot be answered from a general impression. The rater must retrieve an actual memory of an actual behaviour. This is slower and more effortful — the more credible and actionable feedback. The insight itself is not new; the case for behavioural anchoring in ratings stretches back over six decades (Smith and Kendall, 1963). What Hansbrough and colleagues add is a cognitive explanation for why organisations that ignore it keep getting the same disappointing results.

2. The video camera test

The most immediately useful idea in the article is a simple discipline the authors call the video camera test: if a behaviour could not be captured on film, it is an interpretation rather than an observation. A camera can record someone interrupting a colleague mid-presentation. It cannot record someone “being rude”, that is a judgement the observer has laid over the behaviour. The test gives survey designers, raters and coaches a shared standard for separating evidence from evaluation, and in my experience it is the separation that determines whether feedback lands as development or as verdict.

3. Designing a better instrument

For organisations reviewing their multi-rater processes, the authors’ recommendations translate into four design principles:

• Measure fewer competencies, chosen deliberately. Five to seven, selected on strategic priority

• Write items that pass the video camera test. Every item should describe an observable behaviour.

• Allow raters to say “have not observed”. In hybrid and distributed organisations, many raters genuinely have not seen the behaviour in question.

• Shorten the recall window. Nobody accurately remembers twelve months of behaviour. The authors propose brief quarterly pulses in place of a single annual survey, on the grounds that recent memory is more specific and less distorted.

4. What this means in practice

For leaders receiving feedback: ask for the behaviour behind the label. If a report tells you that you lack strategic thinking, the useful question is what people saw, or did not see, that led them there.

For coaches: the video camera test is as valuable in the debrief conversation as it is in survey design. Helping a client separate what was observed from what was concluded is often the moment a difficult report becomes a workable development agenda.

For HR practitioners: audit your current instrument before your next cycle. Count the items that would fail the video camera test. In my experience the proportion surprises people and it is the single fastest diagnostic of whether your process is generating development or merely judgement.

A 360-degree process can look rigorous, multiple raters, confidential responses, professional reporting and still rest on questions that invite impressions rather than evidence. The remedy is neither expensive nor complicated. Better questions create better feedback, and better feedback creates a far stronger basis for development. That, in the end, is the outcome the whole exercise exists to deliver.

References

Full article: Hansbrough, T.K., Hanges, P.J. and Gruda, D. (2026) 'The Cognitive Flaw Hiding Inside Your 360-Degree Feedback', California Management Review Insights, 20 July.

https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2026/07/the-cognitive-flaw-hiding-inside-your-360-degree-feedback/

Hansbrough, T.K., Hanges, P.J. and Gruda, D. (2026) ‘The Cognitive Flaw Hiding Inside Your 360-Degree Feedback’, California Management Review Insights, 20 July. Available at: https://cmr.berkeley.edu/2026/07/the-cognitive-flaw-hiding-inside-your-360-degree-feedback/ (Accessed: 21 July 2026).

Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. London: Allen Lane.

Smith, P.C. and Kendall, L.M. (1963) ‘Retranslation of expectations: An approach to the construction of unambiguous anchors for rating scales’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 47(2), pp. 149–155.