Wait — You Don't Ask About Weaknesses?

A Conversation with the Head of Leadership Development About What Makes the Shift Positive 360 Interview So Different

Most 360 feedback processes follow a familiar formula: an anonymous survey, a set of competency ratings, and a report that quietly lands in someone's inbox. The Shift Positive 360 doesn't follow that formula — and the difference isn't cosmetic. It's built into the interview itself, question by question.

Recently, Pete Berridge, co-founder of Change Positive and creator of the Shift Positive 360^® method, sat down with Mark, the head of leadership development at a large organization, to walk through exactly what happens in that interview and why it's designed the way it is. Mark had been watching his company's leaders work with SP360-certified coaches and hearing consistently positive things — but from the outside, he admitted, it just looked like another 360. What follows is that conversation, lightly edited for length.

Why the Interview Starts With the Feedback-Giver, Not the Leader

Mark: I've been watching our leaders work with SP360-certified coaches, and the results have been noticeably different from what we see with others. But when I look at your website, I think, okay, it's a 360. I wouldn't have picked up on why it's so different just from reading about it. So I'm hoping you can walk me through it.

Pete: You're right — on the surface, it looks like a 360. You gather feedback from stakeholders, you create a report, you use it in coaching. But the how is completely different, and the why behind each design choice is what makes it work. Let me walk you through the actual interview, step by step, because that's where you'll feel the difference. First — and this surprises everyone — the interview doesn't start with questions about the leader. It starts with questions about the feedback provider.

Mark: Wait, what? You're interviewing them about the leader, but you start by asking about them?

Pete: Exactly. I ask about their background, what brought them to the organization, their current role, their key goals. Then — and this is the one that really opens things up — I ask: Assuming you achieve those goals in the future, what did you do to contribute to those successes?

When people talk about their own aspirations, it activates positive affect — and under the influence of positive emotions, people become more open, more curious, more creative. It also puts them in a developmental mindset before the leader's name ever comes up. Then comes the bridge question: Suppose the leader played a really big part in helping you achieve this success — what did they do that was so helpful?

That question gets the feedback-giver connecting the leader's behavior to their own outcomes — in a future-oriented, behavioral, specific way. They're not giving a 1-to-5 rating for "strategic thinking." They're picturing a vivid scenario where the leader helped them succeed, and they're describing what that person actually did. That's does two things — one, help the leader understand what specific people need from them, and two, get the feedback-giver invested in the leader's development.

Leading with Strengths, Not Weaknesses — On Purpose

Pete: After that opening, I ask what the person loves about the leader, what their greatest strengths are, and what they're doing when they're at their best. I push for specifics — real moments, observable behaviors, even quotes.

Tom Rath's research shows that the likelihood of active disengagement drops to just one percent when people receive feedback on their strengths.

But something else happens on the feedback provider's side, too. Asking someone to recall specific moments when another person was at their best changes their own mindset — they become more appreciative, more generative, and more likely to keep noticing strengths in others going forward. The interview itself becomes a development experience for the person giving feedback, not just a data-collection exercise.

The Question That Replaces "What's Wrong"

Mark: So after strengths — this is where a traditional 360 would ask about weaknesses or development areas, right?

Pete: Right. And we never ask that question. Asking about weaknesses might yield interesting or even insightful information, but it's insufficient for creating change, and it has a negative effect on both sides. It primes the feedback provider to see more of what they don't want, and if that's what goes into the report, it risks triggering the leader's negativity bias. Nearly forty percent of feedback interventions actually make performance worse, and this is a big reason why.

Pete: I ask: What's next for this person that would make them even more effective? It sounds simple, but it's profoundly different from asking about weaknesses. It invites the feedback-giver to envision possibilities rather than diagnose problems. But, here's the interesting thing - the feedback provider doesn't know the answer to this question; until they come up with the answer to this question. Because of the negativity bias, they quickly see what isn't working. But it takes intentionality to go further to clearly see what they want instead. That's crucial.

Addressing Real Issues Without Triggering Defensiveness

Mark: But can you actually address hard issues that way? What if someone has a real issue in how they work with others?

Pete: This is a common misconception — that Shift Positive means only being positive. It doesn't. It means being constructive, and that's an important distinction. Instead of saying "Sarah doesn't listen" — which is problem-focused, abstract, and likely to trigger defensiveness — you reframe it: "What I'd love to see from Sarah is that when someone disagrees with her in a meeting, she pauses, asks a clarifying question, and reflects back what she heard before responding." That's direct. It's clear. It addresses the same issue. But it tells Sarah what to do rather than what to stop doing.

Why the Feedback Isn't Anonymous

Pete: When feedback is solution-focused, it no longer needs to be confidential. If I'm telling you what to stop doing or I'm giving you a rating, I might want to hide behind anonymity. But if I'm telling you what I'd love to see you do more of, how it can help me be more effective in working with you, why would it need to be anonymous? That's just a good conversation.

Pete: All of it. Instead of abstract ratings from "your direct reports" or "your peers," the leader receives specific behavioral recommendations from named colleagues who are willing to own their perspective — which makes the feedback richer, more nuanced, and far more actionable.

Mark: The anonymity piece has always felt non-negotiable to me. Every coach I talk to says confidentiality has to be there. But honestly, it's always felt like we're working around a problem rather than solving it.

Pete: Here's what I've found after twenty years of coaching: it's the coaches and HR business partners who insist confidentiality is essential. The leaders and feedback providers are fine with it — they understand that context matters — different people want different things from that leader. The real resistance isn't coming from the people giving or receiving feedback. It's from the professionals administering it.

Confidentiality made sense when the process was built around identifying what's broken — it was a protective mechanism. But it strips away tone, relationship, and the opportunity for dialogue. And the first thing every leader does when they get an anonymous 360 report is try to figure out who said what. When they can't get that, the feedback creates more anxiety than insight. With transparency, they get that context from the start, and the feedback provider is more thoughtful and constructive because their name is on it.

Envisioning the Relationship, Not Just the Person

The interview also includes a section on success: a specific time the feedback provider and the leader worked together well, what each of them did well in that moment, and what an even stronger version of that working relationship would look like. It's built on the concept of positive deviance — exploring what's already worked, even in difficult relationships — and from David Cooperrider's Appreciative Inquiry: building from what works rather than fixing what's broken.

As feedback providers describe what they want to see from the leader, they often realize the relationship runs both ways — "they show up that way because I show up this way."

From Stakeholder to Ally: The One-Thing Commitment

Pete: The last section is allyship. I ask the feedback provider to commit to one specific thing they will do to support the leader's growth.

Pete: Yes — and this is the moment they move from being a stakeholder to becoming an ally. They're not just providing input to a report that gets filed away. They're stepping into an ongoing partnership, actively agreeing to look for the leader's growth and reinforce it when they see it. The commitment is specific and behavioral, and ideally connects to the growth theme they named earlier and to their own strengths.

By the end of the process, a leader doesn't just have a report — they have a network of people, sometimes six, eight, ten of them, who've committed to actively supporting their success.

An analysis by a statistician at Claremont Graduate University, based on more than 500 evaluations across 94 leaders, found that every single leader demonstrated positive growth using this method.

First, leaders who had explicit conversations about how colleagues could support their development — those "one thing" commitments — showed far more improvement toward their goals. Second, the more actively allies engaged in that support, the more those leaders improved. A 100% success rate, compared to the nearly 40% failure rate we saw earlier. The takeaway is straightforward: we don't change by ourselves. We change through the interactions and reinforcement of the people around us.

Why the Growth Question Sticks: Inattentional Blindness

Part of why the "what's next" question works comes down to a phenomenon called inattentional blindness — the same effect at play in the well-known "moonwalking bear" experiment, where viewers so focused on counting basketball passes miss a bear moonwalking through the middle of the frame. The same thing happens with feedback: unless people are nudged to envision what they want to see, they're likely to miss it when it actually happens.

When a feedback-giver articulates a specific behavior they'd love to see — "I want to see Sarah pause and ask clarifying questions before responding when someone pushes back" — they've created a mental image, and they become primed to notice it. When Sarah does pause and ask that question, the ally notices, and offers a nod, a smile, a "great question." Those micro-reinforcements, not the report itself, are how change actually sticks.

Why This Isn't Really a "360"

Mark: I came into this conversation thinking I understood 360 feedback. But honestly, I don't think this is a 360 at all — not in any traditional sense. Calling it a 360 actually undersells it, because people hear "360" and think anonymous surveys, rating scales, a report that sits in a drawer. This is something fundamentally different.

Pete: A traditional 360 asks: How does this leader measure up? The Shift Positive 360 asks: How can this leader and the people around them become more effective together? Feedback isn't about them. It's about us. When we embrace that, feedback stops being something we do to people and becomes something we do with people — and it actually works.