67. Rethinking 360 Feedback for Women in Leadership
by Steph Champion and Andrew Simon
Yellow Edge explores whether traditional 360-degree feedback processes fully account for the context in which women experience and exercise leadership. We consider how leadership behaviours can be perceived differently, whose perspectives can provide meaningful insight, and why feedback should be treated as data rather than a verdict. We also explore how a more contextual and human approach to 360 feedback can create richer conversations about leadership, development and possibility.
The same leadership behaviour can be experienced differently
Leadership is never assessed in a social vacuum. A leader's behaviour is interpreted through expectations about authority, confidence, warmth, decisiveness, ambition, collaboration, visibility and even what a leader is supposed to look and sound like.
For women, these expectations can sometimes create tensions.
Be decisive, but not overly forceful.
Be confident, but not self-promoting.
Be collaborative but demonstrate authority.
Be empathetic and supportive but maintain boundaries.
Be visible but be careful how that visibility is expressed.
Not every woman experiences these tensions, and gender is only one of many factors shaping leadership experience. But sufficiently persistent differences exist to warrant curiosity. A gender-informed 360 therefore should not begin from the assumption that women need to be "fixed" or taught how to fit an established model of leadership. Instead, it asks a more interesting question:
What can we learn when we examine leadership capability alongside the context in which that capability is being exercised and judged?
That shifts the 360 from being simply a measurement exercise towards becoming an inquiry into leadership.
From assessing the leader to understanding her leadership
This distinction is important. Traditional 360s can inadvertently locate leadership effectiveness almost entirely within the individual:
How well do you communicate? How strategic are you? How effectively do you influence? What should you do differently?
Those are useful questions, but they tell only part of the story. Leadership is relational and contextual. Its effectiveness emerges from the interaction between the person, other people and the environment in which they are working.
A richer 360 therefore explores not only what a woman does as a leader, but also how her leadership is experienced, where it flourishes, where it becomes harder, and what enables or constrains it. This is why our Women in Leadership 360 brings together five familiar leadership capability areas:
strategic leadership and judgement
leadership presence and influence
relationships, collaboration and inclusion
empowering and developing others; and
self-awareness and sustainable leadership.
But around those capabilities sits a broader gender-informed lens. The process creates space to explore visibility and authority, confidence, access to networks and sponsorship, expectations about leadership style, emotional labour, boundaries and the sustainability of leadership. The intention is not to make gender the explanation for everything. It is to make context discussable.
Who gets to tell us about our leadership?
There is another assumption worth challenging in traditional 360 feedback: who counts as a legitimate observer of leadership? Conventionally, we turn to the organisational hierarchy: manager, peers and direct reports.
They remain important voices. But contemporary leadership increasingly happens across boundaries, networks, projects, communities and informal relationships. Some of the people with the richest insight into a leader may sit outside her immediate reporting structure.
A mentor may have observed the evolution of her leadership over many years. A sponsor may understand how she operates in senior organisational environments. A trusted colleague may see how she responds when confidence is tested. A cross-organisational collaborator may experience her capacity to influence without authority. Someone she has mentored may have a particularly valuable perspective on how she enables others.
So perhaps the question should not simply be: Who sits around this person in the organisational chart? Perhaps it should be Who has genuinely experienced her leadership?
This creates the possibility of a much more relational picture of leadership—one built from the people and relationships that actually matter.
Feedback is data, not a verdict
There is also a deeper issue in how we encourage leaders to receive 360 feedback.
We sometimes talk about feedback as though every piece of it contains a truth the recipient needs to accept. It doesn't. Feedback is valuable data about how another person has experienced us. Patterns across multiple people deserve attention. Surprises deserve curiosity. Differences between self-perception and the perceptions of others can be particularly illuminating.
But feedback also occurs within systems containing expectations, assumptions, organisational norms and sometimes bias. A woman receiving feedback that she needs to be "more confident", for example, might reasonably explore several possibilities.
Does she need to express her views more clearly? Is she underestimating her expertise? Is her contribution being overlooked? Is a particular environment rewarding one style of confidence over another? Would the same behaviour be interpreted differently in somebody else?
The developmental task is therefore not simply to accept the feedback and change. It is to make sense of the feedback.
That is why the conversation accompanying a 360 may ultimately be more important than the scores themselves. A skilled debrief helps a participant stand back from individual comments and look for patterns, tensions and possibilities. It helps distinguish feedback that suggests a useful individual change from feedback that may tell us something about the environment surrounding the leader.
Most importantly, it gives the participant agency. She does not have to respond to every piece of feedback. She can decide what is useful, what deserves further exploration, what she wants to experiment with and what she consciously chooses not to change.
From development gaps to leadership possibilities
This also suggests a different way of thinking about the purpose of a 360. Leadership development has often been framed around identifying gaps and addressing weaknesses.
There is certainly value in recognising capabilities that need strengthening. But development can also mean using an existing strength more deliberately, becoming more conscious of one's impact, strengthening an important relationship, expanding networks, trying a different way of exercising influence, establishing healthier boundaries or changing some of the conditions surrounding one's leadership.
The developmental question becomes less "What's wrong and how do I fix it?" and more:
"What am I learning about myself as a leader, and what possibilities does that open?" That is a considerably more generative conversation.
Perhaps we need a more human 360
There is a wider implication here that goes beyond women in leadership. If leadership is increasingly collective, relational and exercised in complex systems, our approaches to assessing and developing leaders may need to evolve as well.
A contemporary 360 should certainly provide credible information about capability and impact. But perhaps it should also help people understand the interaction between self, others and system. It should illuminate not just capability, but identity and context; not just behaviours, but relationships; not just development needs, but strengths and possibilities; not just what the leader might change, but what might need to change around the leader.
For women in leadership, bringing this wider perspective into the feedback conversation is particularly important. The objective is not to create a special standard of leadership for women. It is to create a richer conversation about leadership—one that recognises that becoming a more effective leader is not simply about changing the person. Sometimes it is about understanding ourselves differently. Sometimes it is about using our capabilities differently. Sometimes it is about changing the relationships around us.
And sometimes good leadership means having the confidence to question the system rather than automatically adapting ourselves to it.
Authors
Steph Champion is Executive Manager - Coaching and Performance at Yellow Edge, a Canberra-headquartered B Corp dedicated to helping individual, teams and organisations realise their potential.
Andrew Simon is Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Yellow Edge, a Canberra-headquartered B Corp dedicated to helping individual, teams and organisations realise their potential.
Published September 2026
Yellow Edge is a local, privately owned Canberra based consulting company focused on helping individuals, teams and organisations to achieve high performance. Yellow Edge is a certified BCorp. BCorp companies make decisions that make a positive impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. https://www.bcorporation.com.au/