Flow360 · Multi-source leadership feedback
A 360 degree feedback assessment. People don't experience your intentions — they experience your behavior.
Flow360 is a 360 degree feedback assessment measuring 8 to 12 behavioral competencies chosen from a library of 26, rated by managers, peers and direct reports alongside the person's own view. It makes the gap between what was meant and what landed visible.
- Assessment
- The leader rates themselves against the chosen competencies, and nominated managers, peers and direct reports each complete the same rater questionnaire. Around 15 to 20 minutes per person. Flow360 does not use the DISC and Emotional Intelligence questionnaire behind the individual reports — it is a different instrument, measuring different things.
- Competencies
- 26 available; 8 to 12 selected per assessment. The same selection can run across a cohort so results are comparable.
- Raters
- Manager: one. Peers: minimum two, maximum seven. Direct reports: minimum two, maximum ten. We recommend a total of five to fifteen. The peer group can include anyone who is neither the person's manager nor a direct report — including customers and suppliers, which is often where the most useful reading comes from.
- Confidentiality
- Ratings are aggregated by group, so individual responses are not identifiable. The minimums above are what makes that aggregation meaningful.
The gap
Self-awareness alone was never going to be enough
Most leaders gauge their impact through reflection, experience and instinct. It is a reasonable starting point, and it misses the signals that matter most.
People don't always say what they think
Honest feedback rarely travels upward without being softened, edited or held back entirely. The closer the working relationship, the harder it becomes to say the thing that most needs saying.
Reflection has its own blind spots
Self-awareness is shaped by the very patterns it is trying to see. Without an external view, a leader reinforces their own picture rather than testing it, and the gap between intention and impact widens quietly.
Feedback is patchy and inconsistent
When it does arrive, it comes one perspective at a time, in moments already charged with other context. What is missing is a balanced view of how the behavior is experienced across everyone it affects.
The model
Who gives 360 degree feedback? Managers, peers and direct reports
Each group sees something the others cannot. It is the combination that turns isolated observations into a coherent picture.
Managers
Strategic perspective
They see the behavior in the context of broader expectations and organizational standards. Their view sharpens what is being asked of the leader, and how visibly they are meeting it.
Peers
Lateral perspective
They experience the behavior in collaboration and shared accountability, without the dynamics of authority. Their view shows what a leader contributes when nothing is owed and nothing is owned.
Direct reports
Lived perspective
They experience leadership daily, in decisions, feedback and everyday interactions. Their view reveals what the intentions actually translate into for the people most shaped by them.
Where the perspectives agree, the signal is reliable. Where they diverge, the most useful insight emerges — pointing at the situations where intention and impact are quietly out of step, and where development effort will return the most.
What's in the report
What does a 360 degree feedback report cover? Four dimensions
A 360 feedback assessment reads the competencies you select through the same four lenses — surfacing patterns across perspectives, highlighting where intention and impact diverge, and pointing to the behaviors where effort will land hardest.
Leadership behaviors
A structured view of how core leadership behaviors are experienced across managers, peers and direct reports — not in the abstract, but as they show up day to day.
Communication effectiveness
How clearly messages are received, how well the style adapts to different audiences, and where meaning is most likely to be lost between intent and arrival.
Strengths and development areas
An honest, balanced picture of the behaviors others value most, and the patterns that limit effectiveness — especially in the situations where leadership matters most.
Perception differences
Where the three groups see the leader differently, and what those gaps reveal about how the behavior lands across different relationships, contexts and conditions.
A responsible approach
Designed for development, not for judgment
When feedback is tied to evaluation, people guard what they say. When it is tied to development, they tell the truth. Flow360 is built around that distinction, and it is what makes the insight worth acting on.
What Flow360 is not
- Not used to determine performance ratings
- Not used to drive reward or progression decisions
- Not a replacement for formal appraisal
How that is protected
- Confidentiality built into the design, with ratings aggregated by group
- Honest feedback supported rather than penalized
- Insight directed back to the individual first
Honesty travels where safety lives.
One distinction worth being precise about. Flow360 is not a psychometric instrument, and it is not presented as one. A psychometric measures traits through a validated questionnaire completed by the person themselves. Flow360 measures how a person's behavior is experienced by named groups of people who work with them — which is a different kind of evidence, with different strengths.
It is harder to dismiss, because it is not a model's opinion of someone. It is their colleagues'. And it is exactly why Flow360 works as the before-and-after measure in a twelve-month program, where a style instrument would not: behavior against a competency can change. A behavioral style largely does not.
Configuration
You choose what gets measured
Flow360 carries a library of 26 competencies. Each assessment measures between eight and twelve of them, selected by you.
That is the part most multi-rater tools get wrong in one of two directions. A fixed competency set measures whatever the vendor decided leadership meant, which is rarely what your organization has written into its own framework. A fully open one produces a survey nobody finishes and results nobody can compare.
Eight to twelve is the working range, and it exists for a practical reason: fewer than eight and the picture is too narrow to act on; more than twelve and rater fatigue starts degrading the quality of the answers you were relying on.
Selecting from a library also means the same competencies can run across a leadership cohort — so a group is comparable — while a different set runs for a different population in the same organization. Align them to your own leadership framework and the results arrive in language your business already uses.
- 26 available
- The libraryA defined set of behavioral competencies, each with its own rater items and detailed interpretation in the report. Listed in full below.
- 8 to 12 measured
- Per assessmentChosen at setup. Enough breadth to be useful, short enough that raters complete it properly — which is what protects the data.
- Critical competency alignment
- Where it matters mostIdentify which of the selected competencies matter most for the role, and read the perception gaps against those first rather than treating all of them equally.
The full library
Twenty-six competencies
Each one is defined in full for raters, so everyone answering is rating the same thing rather than their own idea of what the word means.
- Leading change
- Communicating effectively
- People development
- Personal development
- Providing motivation
- Building trust
- Promoting teamwork
- Results orientation
- Managing conflict
- Empowering people
- Displaying authenticity
- Demonstrating integrity
- Demonstrating self-awareness
- Demonstrating empathy
- Being accountable
- Shaping a vision
- Building consensus
- Executing a plan
- Customer focus
- Promoting wellbeing
- Inspiring others
- Encouraging collaboration
- Decision making
- Advocating diversity and fostering inclusion
- Managing remotely
- Leadership shadow
Read that list as a map of what a leadership framework usually contains. The ones organizations most often add late — managing remotely, promoting wellbeing, advocating diversity and fostering inclusion, leadership shadow — are in the library rather than bolted on, which matters if your own framework has moved in the last few years.
Choosing raters
The temptation is to pick people who like you
It is the single most common way a 360 gets wasted, and it is worth saying plainly to anyone about to nominate: resist choosing people you expect to say nice things.
Two tests are more useful. Has this person had enough opportunity to observe you to hold a realistic view? And do you trust them to be honest rather than kind? It is entirely possible there is someone you have clashed with, and whether to include them deserves real thought rather than an instinctive no — that is often where the most informative reading sits.
The peer group is broader than people assume. Anyone who is neither your manager nor your direct report qualifies, including customers and suppliers. For a client-facing leader, that is frequently the most valuable perspective in the report and the one nobody thinks to ask for.
From feedback to action
A report on its own changes nothing
Flow360 is structured to move from raw feedback to deliberate change, through three steps.
- Reflect honestly
- Sit with the feedback before responding to it. Notice what feels familiar, what feels surprising, and where the picture from others differs from your own — without rushing to defend, dismiss or rationalize.
- Identify priorities
- Not every signal needs equal weight. Choose the small number of behaviors where change would matter most to the people around you, and where focused effort will create the clearest return.
- Commit to behavioral change
- Move from intention into practice. Identify the situations where the new behavior applies, the cues that trigger the old one, and the small repeatable shifts that turn awareness into a different lived experience for others.Awareness is the start. Practiced behavior is what others actually experience.
How it is used
Strongest inside a program, not on its own
Flow360 stands alone, but it was built to sit alongside the self-assessed reports and to open and close a development cycle.
- With Core 2.0 and Leader 2.0
- Those reports reveal the underlying behavioral style. Flow360 shows how that style is experienced by others, turning self-knowledge into an externally validated picture.
- With FlowConnect
- FlowConnect carries the insight into real situations, so the behaviors Flow360 surfaces actually shift where it counts. It ships with Core 2.0 and Leader 2.0 rather than with Flow360.
- Across a leadership group
- Used together, Flow360 creates a shared reference point that helps a group talk about behavior openly and develop together rather than in isolation.In a twelve-month program, Flow360 runs at month one and again at month twelve. The people who experience the leader's behavior are the ones who verify whether it changed, which is a harder standard than self-report and a more useful one for a sponsor.
What changes
When leaders see how they are experienced
The shifts that show up in the leader, in their relationships, and in the teams they shape.
- Messages get framed for the audience receiving them rather than the person sending them, and the gap between what is meant and what is heard closes.
- When a leader visibly listens and acts, people feel seen and bring more of themselves — including what they previously held back.
- Teams respond more openly when leadership behavior adjusts to what they need. Candor and discretionary effort rise as a consequence.
- Behavior starts matching intention more often — not occasionally, and not only when things are easy.
Who it's for
Organizations that take feedback seriously
Leadership development teams
Who want a structured, responsible way to bring multi-source feedback into a program — without the defensiveness that comes with performance evaluation.
Senior leaders and people managers
Who want a clearer view of how their behavior is actually experienced across managers, peers and direct reports, and the structure to act on what they find.
Organizations building feedback culture
Who recognize that honest feedback only travels in environments designed to support it, and want to make it the norm rather than the exception.
Practical detail
How it actually runs
| Assessment | The leader rates themselves against the chosen competencies, and nominated managers, peers and direct reports each complete the same rater questionnaire. Around 15 to 20 minutes per person. Flow360 does not use the DISC and Emotional Intelligence questionnaire behind the individual reports — it is a different instrument, measuring different things. |
|---|---|
| Competencies | 26 available; 8 to 12 selected per assessment. The same selection can run across a cohort so results are comparable. |
| Raters | Manager: one. Peers: minimum two, maximum seven. Direct reports: minimum two, maximum ten. We recommend a total of five to fifteen. The peer group can include anyone who is neither the person's manager nor a direct report — including customers and suppliers, which is often where the most useful reading comes from. |
| Confidentiality | Ratings are aggregated by group, so individual responses are not identifiable. The minimums above are what makes that aggregation meaningful. |
| Report | Delivered through FlowHub, where the process is set up, raters are nominated and completion is tracked. Typical turnaround to confirm. |
| FlowConnect | Not included with Flow360. FlowConnect is written for an individual behavioral profile, so it ships with Portrait 2.0, Core 2.0, Leader 2.0 and Sales 2.0. A leader running Flow360 alongside Leader 2.0 has it through that report. |
| Languages | Available in multiple languages, with the same instrument and the same model throughout. |
| Cost | 25 tokens per report, regardless of how many raters contribute. The rate per token improves with volume, and tokens don't expire. |
| Support | Debrief structures and facilitation guides. A Flow360 debrief is the one we most strongly recommend running with a trained facilitator rather than sending unaccompanied. |
| Evidence base | Construction and measurement are documented in the Discflow 2.0 Technical Manual, available to qualified users on request. The evidence summary |
The line, stated plainly
Flow360 is a development tool. It is not designed or supported for performance ratings, reward or progression decisions, or as a replacement for formal appraisal. Tying it to evaluation is the fastest way to make the feedback useless.
If Flow360 isn't the fit
Three you might want instead
Leader 2.0
The self-assessed leadership report. Often run first, with Flow360 added once the leader is ready for the external view.
Core 2.0
The flagship individual profile. Behavioral style and Emotional Intelligence, self-assessed, with FlowConnect included.
Common questions
Flow360 questions
What is a 360 degree feedback assessment?
An assessment where a person is rated on defined behaviors by the people who work with them — managers, peers and direct reports — alongside their own self-rating, so differences in perception become visible.
Who should give 360 degree feedback?
One manager, two to seven peers, and two to ten direct reports. We recommend five to fifteen raters in total. The peer group can include customers and suppliers.
How many competencies does Flow360 measure?
Between 8 and 12, chosen from a library of 26. Selecting them means the assessment can be aligned to your own leadership framework rather than a fixed vendor model.
Is Flow360 a DISC assessment?
No. Flow360 is competency-based rather than DISC-based, and it is not a psychometric instrument. It measures how a person's behavior is experienced by named groups of colleagues.
Can 360 feedback be used for performance reviews?
Not with Flow360. It is designed for development, and tying it to performance ratings, reward or progression is the fastest way to make the feedback dishonest and therefore useless.
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