anonymity and naming names both have their place
I’ve allowed myself to lock horns with teammates over anonymous feedback. This argument usually ends in an impasse. Whoever has more power gets their way. Both parties leave dissatisfied.
I’m usually arguing against anonymity but I’m not doing it very generously. I’m making the least favorable assumptions. Those assumptions are:
Anonymity is desired because people are scared to give each other feedback
Any anonymous feedback erodes a larger culture of feedback by giving formal approval to the idea that feedback is scary, risky, and maybe even impossible without protection.
Leaders won’t be able to act on anonymous feedback because addressing individual situations requires breaking the confidentiality the process is designed for.
These assumptions aren’t totally fair or accurate and when I argue based on them with an especially zesty resentment you can imagine how well it all goes (it goes poorly! Quite poorly.)
I recently got a 360 review. Ben arranged it for me. He got me to share the email addresses of over a dozen current and former colleagues, then interviewed them. He edited their responses to anonymize them, stripping out telling references to the organizations and written tics that would clue me in to who among the group I sent him had written the comments.
This anonymous feedback was super duper helpful. I loved it. Even if a lot of it was hard to hear. This matched my experience with the last similarly robust 360 I did 7-8 years ago. A transformative moment.
As I’ve thought about this for the last few days, my curmudgeonly resistance to anonymous feedback has weakened. A little.
I now think it can be just the thing in a certain set of conditions:
You’re most interested in patterns, not specific points.
You’ve got a large enough sample size that you’ll have 4 or 5 or more instances in the patterns you observe.
The people submitting the feedback are doing so without expectation of response.
I contend that a 360 review comprised of feedback from over a dozen current and former colleagues meets all three criteria.
My guess is most feedback opportunities on your current team do not.
-Eric
