What do you think of reverse mentoring and 360 degree appraisal?

The concepts of 360 degree appraisal and reverse mentoring is a very welcome addition to the way organisations go about evaluating and training thier people. It's certainly a way of moving towards proffessionalism. The appraisal system ensures that you are judged not only for your skills but most importantly for your people handling skills. That's what a manager or a boss is supposed to be good at. The mentoring system ensures that you learn from the experience of others, whoever they may be. A junior or a new entrant brings with him/her a freshness of ideas, and many times helps you see an reorganise things in new and effective ways. Mimpi there is a lot to be said about the subjects, but unfortunately this seems to be prevalent only in the larger organisations in our country. There's a long way for it go in smaller companies. It's to do with the mindset and preparedness of individuals, who think it below thier stature to learn of judged by thier juniors. I've heard elder senior people even saying that don't teach me how to do my work. My experience is your age. This mindset has to change and we need to be more open. It could make such a positive difference.

yup,things have undergone tremendous change,there is no one man show or dictatorialship,that does have its obvious advantages and disadvantages,the disadvantage being that nobody takes responsibility of any thing in turn work is being loosely done.

I think 360 degree appraisal is good as long as it is fair and bosses are open enough not to use it against you. Because the bottom line is that even if the reportees report back on the managers, usually the manager has a bigger say on things. In my company we do not have a 360 degree appraisal, but still my rapport with manager is good enough for me to give feedback to him as and when I find it necessary and similarly he also does the same. So despite not having a formal 360 degree mechanism we still do so. So at the end of the day the success of such mechanisms is very much dependant on the maturity of the participants. Cheers! Ram

I think it is a trap. Why? Because it is a trap. The key word is "theoretically" because now the authority is still there but the lines are blurred and that allows more subjectivity to enter into the relationship and where there is sujectivity, there is prejudice and where there is prejudice there are no business ethics. So we replace a bad system with a worse one.

More and more companies are using that kind of development? I am aware that its being used but Im not aware that its slowly becoming the trend cause I think the bosses still would like to be the boss and exercise their authority whenever they can. Though I also like the work place as a big family where the top executives actually care about the employees from the next of rank down to the utility persons and guards. I have a much higher respect for companies like that. Its always good to learn new things that can benefit not only the self but also other people. It wouldnt really matter where the learning has come from. What matters is that the individual has learned something from the experience. That's just what I think anyways.^_^

I don't see any problem of it. I knew that I've been fair with my colleagues and subordinates. Actually, its been here in our company for five years now and I haven't have a negative impact to my work. For others I knew off, they become better team leader as they take those negative feedback as to their own advantage.

mimipi I think it might have a lot of good on its side as I have had bosses who were out of touch with the current timews and could profit from less experienced employees showing them how to enter the twenty first century. of course it also has som disadvantages as the underling might not be as up on things as his boss and also the possibility of misusing and abusing this new mentoring.the people who have to be advised to be respectful to each other always else this just might be a real mess.

I think that's excellent! I think the problem with a lot of businesses is lack of communication. This allows everyone to hear from everyone else and, hopefully, learn where they need help or extra work. The last job I had working in an office was with a huge corporation that didn't seem to care at all about the little people. They didn't want to hear any suggestions or learn from those under them. The company seems to be about to fold because they've been letting people go left and right, including people who have been there over 20 years! I'm talking about a HUGE company, too. They have branches all over the place. I think part of their downfall was because they didn't want to learn anything from the subordinates. I'm sure there are many companies like that one. I honestly believe that the more people communicate, the better off everyone will be.

I think that it would be better for the morale of the whole workplace to be given more responsibility and work together as a team more. I still think that there should be a leader, but it could be a team of leaders instead of one individual. I have never worked in a large company or the corporate environment, so I have no experience in this area, but from my experience in working for small companies, I found that the business was more productive and the quality of work was better when everyone at all levels treated each other as equals.

We started this program last year, in the company I work for. The program is called Halogen. But, the requesite for this new way of appraisal to be successful was to gather lots of background information about everyone involved. We had a good kick off year in 2008. Unfortunately, when the appraisals were to restart for 2009, the recession came on. Everybody was so demoralized that the process became just an afterthought. There was no incentive on doing the evaluation because everybody knew that we were all getting a paycut, and there were layoffs coming. So, the idea was great. But the execution was something else.