If you watched the movie Horrible Bosses and thought ‘Why doesn’t someone just evaluate them, for heaven’s sake?’ then you probably already see the value of rating the boss on his or her performance. Traditionally, there was no one keeping score but the top brass: the Board of Directors, maybe a couple of brave near-peers like the COO and CFO. Other than that, it was up to the leader to decide what part he had to play in the company’s overall performance.

Fortunately, the paradigm of performance appraisal is shifting to a more holistic approach whereby company leaders can be evaluated from multiple angles: by their peers, managers, customers, vendors, subordinate staff, and entire departments as well as by themselves. This 360-degree feedback can be a more accurate measure of a boss’s performance; after all, who better to hold up the mirror of truth than those whose entire work lives hinge on the decisions made by this person?

Employee evaluation forms of this nature are naturally controversial because even though it’s obvious to everyone that subordinates are probably the best people to comment on managerial effectiveness, supervisors still feel threatened by it and staff are afraid to give honest feedback for fear of reprisal. When conducted in an atmosphere of respect and privacy, assessments of senior management can:

It’s essential, when using subordinate employee evaluation forms as a source of feedback, that the data be kept anonymous. Unlike others, subordinates simply will not participate fully if they fear identification by their supervisors. Now that you have designed the forms to be anonymous, what else is essential for them to contain?

Because many subordinates who are completing this type of survey will only have fleeting experience with top management via following orders, reading company policies or attending company-wide meetings, they should not be asked to comment on task-oriented skills they may not understand. It’s also important to make sure the staff filling out the employee evaluation forms have been with the company, in good standing, for at least a year. Finally, the feedback should be delivered in person.

If these cautions are followed, assessing top management can be significantly more effective than an ‘open-door policy’ in identifying employee concerns that might otherwise go unnoticed. With 360-degree feedback, it’s no longer lonely at the top.