Is the 360 Feedback Process
Being Used Against You?
How to read whether the feedback process you are inside is developmental or political. And what the signals look like when it is the latter.
By Shirisha Nagendran · ICF PCC Executive Coach
There is a particular kind of disbelief that comes with reading feedback that is partially true.
Not without truth, not invented. Some of it you recognise and agree. A delivery of a message that could have been softer in one meeting. A moment when you moved quickly on a decision and did not bring everyone with you. The conversation where you gave candid feedback to your team member that they were not performing, which is now being interpreted as micromanaging or having perfectionist leader tendencies. You know these things happened. You have reflected on them before.
And there is also this confusion that tells you: "Am I supposed to keep everybody happy and perform to the highest level of expectations?" That one small thing you could have done better is receiving macroscopic attention.
But the weightage is off.
The proportion is off.
The things you handled well, the project that you turned around after a year of tracking red and stalled deliveries, the stakeholder who had been a persistent blocker and is now an advocate, the team you held together without attrition through six months of uncertainty and organisational restructuring, the praise from senior stakeholders when the project finally got delivered in your capable hands after having been stalled for four years.
None of that appears. Or it appears briefly, like yes, very good, you did what was expected of you, that is the job, and then disappears inside a list of concerns that reads as though your entire track record this year has been a mounting problem.
Minor friction has been elevated into a pattern. Something said once in a corridor has become evidence of something systemic. The picture does not match the year you remember navigating.
This is the disbelief that brings most high performers to this question: is this feedback a genuine reflection of how my leadership is landing, or is something else happening here? Not knowing whether to trust what you are reading or trust what you know. Not certain whether the instinct that something is off is accurate or defensive. Starting, quietly, to wonder whether you are the problem.
This guide will not tell you that the feedback is inaccurate. What it will do is give you the political literacy to read the situation for yourself. Because there is a specific set of instruments through which feedback can be gathered and used, each of them legitimate on its face, each of them capable of serving a very different purpose than the one they appear to serve. Understanding those instruments, how they work, and what the signals look like when they are being used politically rather than developmentally, is the work of this guide.
The question of what to do once you have reached a conclusion is covered in the companion guide. This one has a narrower purpose: helping you see clearly.
The four instruments
Feedback on your leadership can be gathered in several ways. Most of them are, under normal circumstances, reasonable tools. A manager who wants to understand how a leader is experienced by their team has legitimate reasons to use all of them. The question is not whether these instruments exist. It is whether the way they are being used in your situation matches the purpose they are supposed to serve.
Instrument 01
The 360-degree feedback process
A 360-degree feedback process is a structured assessment in which feedback about your performance and leadership is gathered from multiple sources: your direct manager, your peers, your direct reports, and sometimes stakeholders outside your immediate team. The outputs are typically aggregated and anonymised before being shared with you, on the basis that anonymity produces more candid responses.
The formal 360 is the most visible of these instruments. It has a process. There is usually an HR owner. There are documented criteria. There is a report. There is a debrief conversation. All of this gives it the look and structure of objectivity, which is precisely what makes it effective as a political instrument when it is used as one. The features designed to reduce bias, anonymity, multiple sources, aggregation, also make the data very difficult to contest.
Instrument 02
The formal skip-level meeting
A skip-level meeting is a conversation between a leader and the team members who report to someone below them, conducted without the immediate manager present. Many organisations run these on a regular schedule as part of their leadership infrastructure. The premise is sound: it gives senior leaders direct access to how things are experienced at the ground level, independent of the filter that any single manager represents.
When this process runs on its normal schedule, with its normal scope, it is a legitimate part of how an organisation takes its own pulse. The political question is not whether the meeting happened. It is what was being looked for, how the conversation was framed, and what happened to the information afterwards.
Instrument 03
The impromptu skip-level
This is a skip-level meeting that is called outside the normal cadence. Not part of a regular schedule, not triggered by a routine review point, but convened specifically in response to a situation. The manager's manager requests time with your team, or with selected members of it, at a moment that does not fit the ordinary rhythm of organisational life.
The impromptu skip-level is harder to ignore than the formal version precisely because it is unusual. When something outside the ordinary schedule happens, it is because someone has decided it needed to happen now. The timing is itself a signal, and it is one that the people being asked to attend will also have noticed.
Instrument 04
Casual check-ins
This is the most informal of the four and, under normal circumstances, entirely legitimate. A manager who asks a peer "how do you think she's getting on?" or drops by for a quick read of team morale is doing something that good managers do routinely. It does not have a name on a calendar. It does not produce a report. It happens in corridors, in brief conversations after a meeting has ended, in a quick exchange framed as routine management. Used well, it gives a manager ground-level information that formal processes rarely surface.
The political question is not whether these conversations happen. It is whether they are being directed, systematically and without your knowledge, at building a case about a specific person. When casual check-ins become a pattern of undocumented information gathering about you, the impressions collected feed directly into the formal concerns that surface later, stripped of the context in which they were gathered.
The mechanism underneath
Each of these instruments has a legitimate use. Understanding the political use requires understanding the dynamic that sits underneath them.
The assumption we all bring
Most of us go into these processes with a reasonable assumption. That the point is to surface what is actually happening. To get a fair picture of how leadership is landing, where the gaps are, what needs to shift. To work with reality as it is, not as anyone wants it to be. That is what we are told these processes are for. It is what most HR owners believe they are running. It is what most people being assessed believe they are participating in.
The projection is almost always developmental
Here is what is also true: almost without exception, regardless of the underlying purpose, these processes are projected as developmental. That is the framing. That is what gets said in the meeting where it is announced, what appears in the email from HR, what your manager tells you when they introduce it. Development. Growth. Investment in your leadership.
Understanding that the projection and the purpose are not always the same thing is the first act of political literacy in this context.
The spectrum of purpose
These instruments are used for a range of purposes, and genuine development is only one of them.
At one end is exactly what is projected. The process is designed around your growth. There is enough runway ahead to act on what is learned. The debrief is collaborative. The feedback, however uncomfortable, is given in the spirit of helping you become more effective. In this situation, the projection matches the purpose.
In the middle is organisational preparation. A restructure is coming. Roles are being redefined. A capability assessment has been commissioned as a prerequisite for decisions that have not yet been announced. The organisation is preparing for something, and these processes are part of that preparation. The feedback being gathered is real, but the purpose is institutional rather than personal. People who have navigated organisations long enough usually recognise this territory. A major restructure is almost always preceded by a flurry of assessments, check-ins, and conversations that suddenly feel more pointed than usual. The projection is still developmental. The purpose is not.
At the other end is evidence construction. A conclusion about you has already been reached. The instruments are being used to build the documentation that justifies it. The projection remains developmental, as it almost always does. The purpose is to build a case.
It is not in your head
Before we go further, it is worth naming something. If you are reading this and thinking that you are probably overthinking it, that you are seeing patterns that are not there, that you are being paranoid, or that this kind of thing does not actually happen in professional organisations: that doubt is entirely normal. It is also worth examining.
The instinct to second-guess your own read of a situation is particularly strong when the situation involves power. It is easier to conclude that you are misreading things than to sit with the possibility that the process being used around you is not what it claims to be. That self-doubt is not a sign of poor judgement. It is a very human response to a genuinely disorienting experience.
But this is not a unique situation and it is not in your head. The political use of performance and feedback processes is well documented in organisational research. It has been studied, named, and mapped. What you may be experiencing has been researched, and that research is unambiguous: these things happen, they happen more often than organisations acknowledge, and they happen in patterns that are recognisable once you know what to look for.
This is what Cohen, March and Olsen, organisational behaviour researchers whose Garbage Can Model has become foundational to understanding how decisions actually get made in organisations, identified and named.
Solutions often exist in organisations before the problems that justify them do. The decision has already been reached. What the process provides is the legitimacy the decision needs in order to proceed.
The lane that shifts
Regardless of where your situation sits on this spectrum, feedback gathered through these instruments rarely stays in the developmental lane it was announced in. It becomes part of a record. A pattern. A narrative that exists somewhere, in someone's assessment of you, whether or not it is ever made explicit. The question is not whether the feedback will be used. It is what it is being used for, and whether you have any visibility of that.
This is not the same as saying the feedback gathered is entirely fabricated. In most cases it is not. Partial truths are more useful than invented ones precisely because they are harder to dismiss. What the political use of these instruments does is select, frame, weight, and present real observations in a way that builds a case rather than a picture.
One of the most consequential ways this happens is through characterisation. The feedback rarely arrives with specific evidence. What you receive instead are sweeping statements about your leadership. That the environment is toxic. That things feel chaotic. That the team does not feel supported. There is nothing to locate, nothing to contest, nothing to point to and say: that is not what happened. The characterisation floats free of any specific event, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to address. You cannot defend yourself against a feeling attributed to a room.
When specific incidents do appear, they tend to be singular. One moment, taken out of a full year of work, elevated to stand in for a pattern. The candid performance conversation you had with a team member, the one that was your responsibility to have, becomes evidence of micromanaging or perfectionist leader tendencies. The decision you made quickly under time pressure, which delivered results, becomes evidence of not bringing people with you. The high standard you hold your team to becomes evidence of being difficult to work for. None of these inferences are invented. All of them are real things that happened. But they have been taken out of their context, stripped of the circumstances that explain them, and filed under a character conclusion rather than a situational one. That is the reframing move. And it is effective precisely because you cannot deny that the original events occurred. The argument is not with what happened. It is with what it is being made to mean.
When geography and gender compound it
Research and practitioner experience consistently suggest that the threshold for treating a woman's leadership style as something worth investigating informally is lower than it is for her male peers. The casual check-in that becomes a pattern of undocumented information gathering happens more frequently, and with less justification required, when the leader in question is a woman. By the time it surfaces in a formal process, it has already been laundered through the appearance of independent evidence from multiple sources.
For women in GCC or India-based roles, working within multinational organisations where the power centre sits in a different geography, this dynamic is compounded further. The people with formal authority over your career may have limited direct visibility of your work, limited understanding of the local context in which you operate, and primary access to you through the very filter you are questioning. The feedback they receive confirms what they already had limited capacity to interrogate.
Understanding this changes what you are looking at. You are not primarily dealing with a perception problem that accurate performance data can correct. You are looking at whether a political process is using the structure of a development process as its instrument. These are different situations and they require different responses.
Reading the signals
How do you know which situation you are in? You cannot always be certain, and this guide will not pretend otherwise. Some of what follows can also describe a feedback process that is simply badly designed, under-resourced, or running without sufficient rigour. Poor process and political process can look similar from the inside. The signals below are not proof. They are patterns, and what matters is whether they cluster.
Signals that apply across all four instruments
- The timing seems off. Genuine development processes are designed around the person being developed. They happen at a point where there is enough runway ahead to act on what is learned. When a 360 is commissioned, or a skip-level is called, immediately after a significant structural change, a new hire above your level, a budget conversation that did not resolve in someone's favour, or a project that exposed a disagreement with your manager, the timing tells you something. Ask yourself: what else was happening in the organisation when this process was initiated?
- The process is not running for your peers. Look around. Is this process happening for others at your level, in other teams, or even within your own department? If your peers are not going through the same process, if it is not being initiated for your manager, if it appears to be running only for you, that asymmetry is data. A genuinely developmental or organisational process tends to run broadly. One that is targeted tends to be narrow.
- The concerns appearing now have never been raised with you directly. If your manager has raised a concern in a one-to-one, documented it, and followed up on it, the appearance of that concern in a formal process is not surprising. If the concerns surfacing now are ones you are hearing for the first time, that gap matters. Feedback that has never been offered to you, and appears for the first time as evidence of a recurring pattern, has not gone through the ordinary cycle of being given, received, and acted upon. It has gone directly from observation to documentation.
- The criteria are vague, undefined, or appear to have shifted. If you are being assessed against dimensions that were not clearly established when the work being evaluated was done, the framework is being constructed around a conclusion rather than the other way around. Ask, in writing where possible, what the specific criteria are and what the standard of performance against each of them looks like. The response will tell you a great deal.
- The feedback focuses on character rather than specific observable behaviour. "She creates a difficult environment for the team" is not the same as "in the Q3 planning session, she overrode three team members' input without acknowledgement." The first is a characterisation. The second is a behaviour in a specific context. Feedback weighted toward characterisations is less useful for development and more useful for building a case. It is also much harder to dispute, which is part of its value to someone constructing a narrative.
- You are being excluded from conversations you would ordinarily be part of. The feedback process itself is rarely the only signal. If you are being left off meeting invitations, if decisions that would normally come through you are being made around you, if peers have become subtly quieter, the formal process may be one element of a broader pattern. Political situations rarely operate through a single mechanism.
Signals specific to the 360-degree feedback
- The rater pool has been substantially controlled by your manager. When your manager determines who provides input on your performance, they determine the data. This does not mean the data will be biased, but it means the design of the process does not structurally prevent it. Find out, where you can, how raters were selected and by whom.
- The debrief is rushed, absent, or focused on presenting conclusions rather than exploring patterns. A genuinely developmental 360 does most of its work in the debrief: examining patterns, exploring context, building development intentions. When the debrief is treated as a formality, or focuses primarily on delivering concerns rather than working through them collaboratively, the process is not functioning as a development tool.
Signals specific to the formal skip-level
- The framing of what the meeting was for has shifted. A skip-level meeting scheduled as a routine culture conversation and then referenced afterwards as evidence of team concerns has changed its function between the scheduling and the debrief. Pay attention to how the meeting is described before it happens and how its outputs are characterised afterwards.
- You were informed after the fact, not before. In organisations where skip-levels are a standard practice, leaders are typically informed that the meeting is happening as a matter of professional courtesy. When you learn about a skip-level only after it has occurred, or through an indirect channel rather than directly from your manager, the process is not being run transparently.
Signals specific to the impromptu skip-level
- The timing is the most reliable signal here. An impromptu skip-level called in the weeks following a specific incident, a disagreement, a decision that went against your manager's preference, a moment of visibility that positioned you independently of your manager's narrative, is rarely coincidental. The question to hold is: what happened recently that might have prompted someone to want to know what your team thinks of you right now?
- Selected rather than full team. If only certain team members were included in an impromptu skip-level, the selection itself is information. Who was invited and who was not tells you something about what the conversation was designed to find.
Signals specific to casual check-ins
- Your team's behaviour shifts without explanation. When people who have been straightforward with you become careful, or when the dynamic in a room changes in ways that are hard to name, something has happened that you are not aware of. This is not always evidence of informal gathering, but it is worth paying attention to when it coincides with other signals.
- Concerns are raised with you that carry the texture of a rehearsed conversation. When a team member raises a concern that sounds unusually complete, that has a shape to it, that lands as though it has been discussed before it was delivered to you, it may have been. Managers who gather informal impressions sometimes use those conversations to prime people before a more formal process begins.
- You are told, in a formal setting, about concerns your team members would be surprised to learn they had raised. When feedback attributed to your team does not correspond to anything you would expect them to have said, either because your relationships with them are strong, or because the concerns described do not match the interactions you have had, ask yourself where those concerns actually originated.
The India and GCC dimension
Cultural and Geographic Context
In high power distance environments, where deference to authority is culturally embedded, each of these instruments carries additional weight.
Power distance, as Hofstede, an organisational psychologist, defined it, is the degree to which people with less power in an organisation accept and expect that power to be distributed unequally. In practical terms, it shapes what people feel safe to say, who they feel safe to say it to, and how much they are willing to contradict or qualify what a senior person appears to want to hear.
Hofstede's Power Distance Index places India at 77, compared to the UK at 35. In a high power distance culture, when a senior person signals, even indirectly, that they are gathering views about a particular leader, the people being asked are acutely sensitive to what is being sought. This does not mean they fabricate responses. It means they read the room and respond accordingly. The concerns they raise are real concerns, but the threshold for raising them, and the weight given to them, is shaped by an awareness of what the person asking seems to want to hear.
The result is that in a high-PDI context, a manager with a settled view of a leader will often find that the feedback gathered confirms it. Not because the data has been manufactured, but because the social dynamics of the gathering process have already shaped what gets said. The feedback looks like independent evidence from multiple sources. It may be, in part, a distributed reflection of one person's view.
For women in GCC or India-based roles, working within multinational organisations where the power centre sits in a different geography, this dynamic is compounded by a second layer. The people with formal authority over your career may have limited direct visibility of your work, limited understanding of the local context in which you operate, and primary access to you through the very filter you are questioning. The feedback they receive confirms what they already had limited capacity to interrogate.
How to hold what you have found
Before you reach a conclusion, sit with these questions. Not to answer them quickly, but to look at your situation honestly.
What was happening in the organisation when this process was initiated? Was there a structural change, a new hire above you, a budget decision that did not go someone's way, a moment where you became more visible or more independent?
Is this process running for anyone else at your level? Your peers, other departments, others within your own reporting line?
Are the concerns you are hearing now ones that have ever been raised with you directly? Or are you encountering them for the first time, already shaped into a pattern?
Is the feedback you have received specific, a behaviour, a moment, a decision, or is it a characterisation? And if there is a specific incident, is it one thing standing in for a year of work?
How was the debrief handled? Was it a conversation or a presentation? Were you asked questions or given conclusions?
Who selected the raters, or the people who were invited to speak? Do you know?
Has anything shifted in how your team interacts with you that you cannot fully explain?
When you look at the full picture of this year, does the feedback you have received correspond to the year you actually navigated?
These questions are worth sitting with, but they do not have to be worked through alone. A trusted colleague who knows the organisation and can give you a fair read, or a coach who can hold the mirror steadily, can be invaluable here. The goal is not to reach a conclusion quickly. It is to see clearly.
That conclusion, when you reach it, will most likely land as anger and fear. Anger at the process, at the people involved, at the system that is using the language of development to do something else entirely. Fear about what this means for the role, for the career, for everything that sits downstream of this job. Both are entirely reasonable responses to what is a genuinely threatening situation.
And alongside them, if you look for it, there may also be something else. A veil lifting. Not because the situation has improved. It has not. But because the fog clears. You can see what you are actually navigating. That clarity, however uncomfortable, is the beginning of being able to act with intention rather than react from confusion.
The instinct, once you can see clearly, will be to do something immediately. To confront the people involved. To challenge the process. To make your case right now. That instinct is understandable. It is also worth pausing before you follow it.
Sit with what you have found. Use the RAIN practice to breathe through the intensity of what you are feeling before you decide anything. Process the situation with a trusted person who can give you a fair read, or with your coach. What you do next matters, and it deserves to be decided from a place of clarity rather than the heat of the moment.
The companion guide covers what comes next. If you are navigating a situation like this and would like to work through it, Shirisha works with senior professionals on exactly this territory.
Frequently asked questions
The questions most people bring after reading this guide, and the answers that follow from the framework above.
How do I know if my 360 feedback is genuine or politically motivated?
Look for signals that cluster rather than any single indicator. The most reliable ones: the timing seems off relative to a specific organisational event; the process is not running for your peers at the same level; concerns are surfacing for the first time in a formal process rather than having been raised with you directly; the feedback focuses on character rather than specific observable behaviour; and you are being excluded from conversations you would ordinarily be part of. Poor process and political process can look similar. The question is whether the signals cluster, and whether the context around them gives you reason to look more carefully.
Am I being managed out?
Possibly. The clearest indicator is a combination of signals happening simultaneously: a formal process initiated without developmental logic, concerns raised for the first time in writing rather than in conversation, feedback that focuses on character rather than specific behaviour, and exclusion from decisions and conversations you would ordinarily be part of. No single signal confirms it. But when several are present at once, and when the process is running only for you and not your peers, the honest answer is that you are probably not in a development conversation. You are in a political one. This guide is designed to help you read that situation clearly before you decide what to do next. The companion guide, 360 Feedback Is Political: What to Do Next, covers exactly that.
What does a politically motivated 360 look like?
A politically motivated 360 typically has several distinguishing features. It is initiated at a moment that does not fit a developmental logic, shortly after a structural change, a disagreement, or a moment of visibility. The rater pool has been substantially controlled by your manager. The concerns in the report focus on character rather than specific observable behaviour, using language like "creates a difficult environment" or "lacks executive presence" without supporting evidence. The debrief is rushed or focused on presenting conclusions rather than exploring patterns. And the concerns appearing in the report are ones you are hearing for the first time, rather than issues that have been raised with you directly and given time to be addressed.
Can a 360 feedback process be used to build a case for managing someone out?
Yes. Organisational behaviour researchers Cohen, March and Olsen identified that solutions often exist in organisations before the problems that formally justify them. A manager who has already reached a conclusion about someone in a role needs documented evidence to proceed through HR. A 360, a skip-level, or systematic informal feedback gathering can provide that evidence. The process does not precede the verdict. In some cases the verdict precedes the process.
What is a skip-level meeting and when should I be concerned about one?
A skip-level is a conversation between a senior leader and team members below them, conducted without the immediate manager present. It is a legitimate organisational tool when it runs on a regular schedule. Concern is warranted when it is called outside the normal cadence following a specific incident; when you were informed after the fact rather than in advance; when only selected team members were included; or when the framing of what the meeting was for has shifted between scheduling and debrief.
What should I do if I think my skip-level was politically motivated?
Do not react immediately. First, establish what you actually know: was the meeting called outside the normal cadence? Were you informed before or after? Were all team members included or only selected ones? Has the framing of what the meeting was for shifted between scheduling and debrief? Once you have a clear picture of the signals, process the situation with a trusted colleague or coach before deciding on a course of action. The companion guide covers your choices in detail.
What is the difference between a badly run process and a political one?
They can look similar from the inside. A badly run process tends to be consistently badly run, for everyone, across the organisation, as a matter of institutional habit. A political process tends to be selectively applied, timed around a specific event, and accompanied by other signals: exclusion from conversations, decisions being made around you, peers who have become quietly more careful. No single signal is conclusive. The question is whether they cluster.
Can HR be trusted in this situation?
It depends on the organisation and the individual. HR's primary obligation is to the organisation, not to you. In most cases, HR owns the process but does not drive its political use. They are more likely to be managing a process that has been set in motion by someone above them than to be the architects of it. That said, HR can be a useful source of information about the process, the criteria, who selected the raters, and what the documented basis for the assessment is. Ask questions in writing where you can. The responses will tell you a great deal about whether the process is being run transparently.
How do I respond to feedback I believe is politically motivated?
This depends on where you are on the spectrum and what your objectives are. The most common mistake is treating a political situation as a developmental one, taking all the feedback at face value, working harder against criteria that were not set with your development in mind, and giving the process authority over your self-assessment that it has not earned. Before you respond to the feedback itself, get clear on what you are actually navigating. The companion guide covers your options once you have reached that conclusion.
Can I challenge or appeal a 360 feedback process?
In most organisations, formally challenging a 360 is possible but rarely straightforward. The design of the process, anonymity, aggregation, multiple sources, makes the data difficult to contest on factual grounds. What you can challenge is the process itself: who selected the raters, whether the criteria were clearly established in advance, whether the debrief was conducted in line with the organisation's stated purpose for the assessment. Ask questions in writing. Document the responses. Whether a formal challenge serves your interests depends on what you are trying to achieve, and that is a decision worth making with clear eyes rather than in the heat of the moment.
Should I tell my manager I think this process is political?
Almost never immediately, and rarely without a clear sense of what you want the conversation to achieve. Naming what you believe is happening changes the dynamic in ways that are difficult to reverse. It may accelerate the process rather than pause it. It may give the other party information about what you know and how you are reading the situation. There are circumstances where a direct conversation is the right move, but those tend to be ones where the relationship still has genuine repair potential and the other party is operating in partial rather than full political mode. This is a decision that deserves careful thought, ideally worked through with a coach or trusted adviser first.
Is the 360 feedback experience different for women in leadership?
Yes, and it is a structural difference, not a perception. Research by Stanford's Shelley Correll and Joan Williams at UC Hastings documents that women in leadership are evaluated against different standards than men in equivalent roles. The threshold for informally investigating a woman's leadership style is lower. Casual check-ins, corridor conversations, and routine queries about how she is experienced by her team can become a pattern of systematic, undocumented information gathering that she has no knowledge of. By the time it surfaces in a formal process, it has already been shaped into the appearance of independent evidence from multiple sources. The result is feedback that is disproportionate to the evidence, because the process that generated it was not symmetrical.
How does high power distance affect 360 feedback in India and GCC contexts?
Power distance shapes what people feel safe to say and to whom. In high power distance cultures, Hofstede's Power Distance Index places India at 77 compared to the UK at 35, people being asked for feedback are acutely sensitive to what the person asking seems to want to hear. A manager with a settled view of a leader will often find that feedback gathered in this context confirms it. Not because the data has been manufactured, but because the social dynamics of the gathering process have already shaped what gets said.
What is the Garbage Can Model and how does it apply to performance management?
The Garbage Can Model was developed by organisational behaviour researchers Cohen, March and Olsen in 1972. It describes how decisions actually get made in organisations, as distinct from how they are supposed to get made. Their central insight was that solutions often exist in organisations before the problems that formally justify them. Applied to performance management: a manager who has already reached a conclusion about someone in a role does not start a 360 or a skip-level to discover a problem. They start it to document a conclusion they have already reached. The process provides the legitimacy the decision needs in order to proceed through HR. The verdict precedes the process.
Should I get a lawyer involved?
That depends on what stage you are at and what country you are in. If you are at the early signals stage, a lawyer is probably premature. If you are inside a formal performance improvement process, or if you have been told your role is at risk, legal advice becomes relevant, particularly around what you sign, what you say in formal settings, and what your rights are in relation to the process being used. Employment law varies significantly by jurisdiction. Getting an initial consultation does not commit you to anything. It gives you information. And information is what this entire guide is about.
What is political literacy and how does it help in this situation?
Political literacy is the ability to see how power and influence actually move through an organisation, and to make deliberate, intentional choices about how you engage with that system. In the context of a 360 or a skip-level that does not add up, political literacy is what allows you to read the situation clearly rather than taking the process at face value. It is the difference between treating a political situation as a developmental one, and understanding what you are actually navigating before you decide how to respond. The political literacy hub at shirishanagendran.com covers the full framework.
What should I do once I have concluded the process is political?
Pause before acting. The instinct to confront or challenge immediately is understandable but rarely serves you well. Sit with what you have found, process it using the RAIN practice, and work through your situation with a trusted colleague or coach before deciding anything. The companion guide, "Navigating the Political Feedback Process: What To Do When You Know," covers your choices and how to exercise them.
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Further Reading
- Cohen, M. D., March, J. G. and Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly, 17(1), 1–25.
- Correll, S., Wynn, A., Wehner, J. and Weisshaar, K. Stanford VMware Women's Leadership Innovation Lab research on performance review language and gender bias.
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