Industry · Coaching
Independently administered 360s for executive and leadership coaches, where the report goes to the coachee and the coach, and the employer receives nothing.
A coach has the same problem a firm has, in miniature. A 360 is worth reading only if the raters answered honestly, and the people being asked usually work for the person being assessed. A coach who administers their own 360 is in the position a firm is in when it runs its own upward review: the instrument may be well designed, but the respondent is still working out who will see the answer.
An external administrator removes that calculation. Responses go to SRA rather than to the coach's inbox or the organization's systems, and the raters are told so before they answer.
Rater group design and suppression are the parts most coaching 360s are thinnest on. Reporting peer, upward and downward views separately is what makes a 360 actionable rather than an averaged score, and doing that without exposing a rater takes a threshold applied to each group.
The method holds. The design around it does not transfer untouched, and these are the four things we would expect to change.
The employer receives nothing. Not the report, not a summary of it, not confirmation of who took part. If the coachee decides to share it, that is their decision and SRA is not the route. Raters are told this at the outset, because it is the reason they answer candidly.
A single coachee's 360 might run to eight or twelve raters across three groups. The threshold applies per group rather than per organization, so a group of two direct reports is folded into a wider cut or withheld. Which groups will report is settled before anyone is invited.
Nothing in the instrument feeds compensation, promotion or a performance record. That changes the questions: they ask about behaviors the coachee can work on over the next six months rather than producing a rating to be ranked against peers.
One assessment near the start to set the agenda, and a repeat at six or twelve months to show whether anything moved. The comparison that matters to a coachee is against their own earlier results, which is a different rhythm from an annual firm-wide cycle.
White labelling under your own practice name is available, and the data still sits with SRA either way. We will say plainly that we recommend naming the administrator to raters: legible independence is what produces candid answers, and raters who assume the coach holds the responses answer as though the coach holds them.
SRA administers 360s for coaching practices today, alongside the firm-wide programs. The instrument, the rater group design and the confidentiality discipline are the same ones used in a firm program, scaled to one coachee at a time.
There is no coaching benchmark. For a developmental assessment that matters less than it does for a firm program, because the comparison a coachee needs is against their own repeat assessment rather than against a market average. It is still worth saying rather than leaving you to discover it.
This is not an evaluative instrument. If the organization paying for the coaching needs a report of its own, this is the wrong arrangement, and a 360 bought by the firm is the right one.
One program applies here. The others on this site are bought by firms for whole populations, and they report to the firm, which is the opposite of the arrangement described above.
The arrangement here differs from the firm-wide programs, so it is set out in full rather than cross-referenced.
Responses go to SRA and are held and processed there. They do not sit in your practice management system and they never enter the employer's systems in any form.
The report reaches the coachee and the coach. The organization does not receive it, a summary of it, or confirmation that a given person participated. Where the organization is paying, it receives confirmation that the assessment ran and nothing about its content.
Peer, upward and downward views are reported separately, each against a minimum agreed before raters are invited. A group below it is folded into a wider cut or withheld rather than reported thinly.
Free-text responses are reviewed for identifiability. At these pool sizes that review removes more than it does in a firm program, and some comments cannot be released in any form that protects the author.
ISO 27001 certified. SOC 2 Type I available under NDA. GDPR Article 28 and CCPA aligned, with SRA as processor.
Disclosure required by law. SRA does not identify a respondent to the coachee, to you, or to the organization. Identity is disclosed only where the law requires it. Where the law permits, SRA gives notice before disclosing, and discloses only what is legally required.