21 360 Feedback Questions for Colleagues, Peers & Managers
Use these 21 practical 360 feedback questions for managers, peers and direct reports to uncover strengths, blind spots and useful areas for growth.
If you want useful 360 feedback, do not ask everyone the same generic questions.
Your manager sees your performance and judgement. Your peers see how you collaborate. Your direct reports experience your leadership first-hand.
The best 360 feedback questions reflect those different perspectives.
If you only do one thing
Use a short set of questions that:
- focus on behaviour people have actually observed
- ask about strengths as well as areas to improve
- are relevant to the respondent’s relationship with you
- make it safe for people to say something you might not expect
- look for patterns across several responses, rather than overreacting to one comment
You do not need 50 questions. For an individual 360, 15-25 well-chosen questions is usually plenty.
Below are 21 you can copy and use.
Instead of copying these into a form, run them privately with Feedvance.
If you are still shaping the ask itself, start with the guide on how to ask for honest feedback at work. If privacy is the hard part, the companion guide on anonymous feedback from colleagues explains thresholds, grouped insights and raw comment handling.
What are 360 feedback questions?
360 feedback questions are questions used to collect feedback about someone from people who work with them from different perspectives.
For an individual professional, that commonly means feedback from:
- your manager, who sees your performance, judgement and development
- your peers, who experience your communication, collaboration and reliability
- your direct reports, who experience your leadership, support and decision-making
You do not necessarily need feedback from every possible group. The aim is to see your work from more than one angle and identify patterns you would struggle to see by yourself.
Good 360 questions concentrate on specific, observable behaviour rather than vague personality judgements.
More useful than:
Am I a good communicator?
Ask:
Where could I communicate decisions more clearly?
That gives someone a behaviour they can actually comment on.
360 feedback questions for your manager
Your manager is well placed to comment on your impact, judgement, priorities and development.
Ask questions that go beyond whether you are simply doing a good job.
1. What do you see as my strongest contribution to the team?
A useful starting point because it identifies strengths you may want to use more deliberately.
2. Where could I have more impact in my role?
This shifts the conversation from fixing weaknesses to increasing effectiveness.
3. How well do I prioritise when several things are competing for my attention?
Useful if your role involves ambiguous priorities, multiple stakeholders or increasing responsibility.
4. Where could I take more ownership without waiting for direction?
Particularly helpful if you are preparing for greater responsibility or a promotion. For a full promotion-focused workflow, use the promotion readiness feedback plan alongside these questions.
5. How effectively do I communicate progress, problems and changing priorities?
Your manager often sees whether you are giving them the right level of visibility, which peers may not be able to judge.
6. What is one behaviour that could hold me back as I take on more responsibility?
This can uncover a development issue that has not yet become a formal performance problem.
7. If I wanted to become significantly more effective over the next six months, what should I change first?
Forces prioritisation. You want to know the highest-leverage change, not collect an overwhelming list of improvements.
Peer feedback questions for colleagues
Peers often see things your manager does not.
They know whether you follow through, communicate well under pressure, make collaboration easier and handle disagreement constructively.
8. What do I do that makes working with me easier?
This often reveals small behaviours worth preserving that would not appear in a formal performance review.
9. What could I change to make working with me easier?
Simple, specific and difficult to answer with generic praise.
10. How reliably do I follow through on commitments I make to other people?
Reliability has a strong effect on professional reputation, but it can be difficult to assess yourself.
11. How well do I keep people informed when plans, deadlines or priorities change?
Especially useful in cross-functional roles where communication failures create work for other people.
12. When I disagree with someone, what do I do well, and what could I do differently?
Peers are often better placed than managers to observe your behaviour during everyday disagreements.
13. Is there anything I do that unintentionally slows down or frustrates other people?
This gives respondents permission to surface friction that might otherwise feel too minor or awkward to mention.
14. What is one thing you think I should do more of?
A deliberately simple question that often surfaces strengths, behaviours or contributions you have not recognised yourself.
360 feedback questions for direct reports
If you manage people, direct-report feedback can be some of the most useful and the hardest to collect candidly.
The power difference matters. Even a supportive manager can make employees cautious about giving critical feedback when they know exactly who will read it.
Ask about behaviours your team actually experiences.
15. How clear am I about priorities and what good work looks like?
People need to know not just what to do, but how decisions and trade-offs should be made.
16. How comfortable do you feel disagreeing with me or telling me when you think I am wrong?
This can help uncover whether your stated openness to challenge matches people’s actual experience.
17. When something goes wrong, how constructive is my response?
People quickly learn whether problems should be raised early or hidden until they can no longer be avoided.
18. How useful is the feedback and guidance I give you?
This focuses on whether your management is actually helping someone improve rather than simply how often you give feedback.
19. Where do I give too much direction, or not enough?
Useful for identifying both micromanagement and under-management.
20. What could I do differently to help you perform at your best?
A broader question that can surface obstacles, missing support and management habits you have not considered.
21. What is one thing I could change that would make me a better manager for this team?
Keep this towards the end. It gives respondents permission to prioritise the change that matters most to them.
How many 360 feedback questions should you ask?
More questions do not automatically produce better feedback.
For a lightweight individual 360, aim for roughly 5-8 relevant questions per respondent group, rather than sending everyone a huge questionnaire.
If someone has to work through 40 repetitive questions, thoughtful responses become harder to sustain.
A useful structure is:
| Type | Questions |
|---|---|
| Strengths | 1-2 |
| Effectiveness and impact | 2-3 |
| Development | 2-3 |
| Open final question | 1 |
If you are collecting feedback from different groups, some overlap is useful. Asking several groups about communication or reliability, for example, lets you see whether the same pattern appears from different perspectives.
But do not force questions onto respondents who cannot reasonably answer them.
A peer probably cannot judge how effectively you coach a direct report. A direct report may have little visibility into how you manage senior stakeholders.
What makes a good 360 feedback question?
The best questions make it easier for someone to give you feedback you can actually use.
Ask about behaviour, not personality
Avoid:
Am I a strong leader?
Try:
How clearly do I communicate priorities when the team has competing demands?
The second question gives respondents something they can actually observe.
Ask one thing at a time
Avoid:
Do I communicate clearly, collaborate effectively and support the team?
Someone might think you are excellent at one and poor at another.
Separate them.
Ask for improvement, not just evaluation
Rating communication from 1-5 gives you a score.
Asking what you could do differently to communicate more clearly gives you something you can act on.
Ratings can help identify patterns, but open questions often provide the context needed to understand them.
Do not make every question negative
A useful 360 should tell you what to keep doing, not only what to fix.
Feedback is not automatically helpful simply because more of it has been collected. A major meta-analysis found that feedback interventions improved performance on average, but more than one-third of the interventions studied actually reduced performance. The way feedback is focused and delivered matters.
The goal is not maximum feedback.
It is credible, specific feedback that helps someone decide what to do differently.
How to get more honest 360 feedback
Writing good questions is only half of the problem.
The other half is whether people feel comfortable answering them honestly.
Imagine asking a direct report:
How comfortable do you feel challenging my decisions?
If their response appears next to their name, you have introduced an obvious problem.
Even if you tell them “please be honest”, they still have to think about what could happen afterwards.
This matters particularly when feedback involves managers, promotion prospects, important client relationships or other situations where professional consequences feel possible.
Privacy can encourage disclosure of sensitive information, although more disclosure should not automatically be interpreted as more accurate feedback. A better approach is to design the process so respondents have clear protections.
For a deeper privacy checklist, read how Feedvance approaches respondent protection and the guide to getting anonymous feedback from colleagues.
How to protect people giving you feedback
If you are collecting feedback yourself, think about deductive disclosure: the possibility of working out who gave an answer even when their name is not attached.
For example:
- one person is your only direct report
- only two colleagues from a particular team respond
- a written comment refers to a project only one person worked on
- results can be filtered into groups so small that identities become obvious
Simply removing people’s names does not solve all of these problems.
Useful safeguards include minimum response thresholds, aggregation and limiting how identifiable open-text comments are shown.
How Feedvance handles this
Feedvance is designed for individuals who want professional feedback without putting respondents in the position of handing identifiable criticism directly back to them.
Overall insights only unlock once at least three people have responded.
If results are broken down by relationship, such as peers or direct reports, that breakdown only becomes visible when at least three people in that group have responded.
So if two direct reports respond, you do not receive a separate direct-reports view that effectively narrows the feedback down to two people.
You also never see who responded.
And because distinctive wording in written comments can identify someone even without their name, Feedvance does not simply display raw open-text responses. Open feedback is grouped and rewritten with AI to reduce identifying details before insights are shown.
These safeguards reduce opportunities to identify individual respondents. They are not a claim that identification could never be inferred in every imaginable context, but they deliberately avoid some of the most obvious ways feedback systems expose respondents.
Instead of copying these questions into a form, run them privately with Feedvance.
A simple 360 feedback question set
Do not need all 21?
Start with these six:
- Manager: What do you see as my strongest contribution to the team?
- Manager: What is one behaviour that could hold me back as I take on more responsibility?
- Peer: What do I do that makes working with me easier?
- Peer: What could I change to make working with me easier?
- Direct report: How comfortable do you feel disagreeing with me or telling me when you think I am wrong?
- Direct report: What is one thing I could change that would make me a better manager for this team?
That is enough to start seeing differences between how you intend to come across and how other people experience working with you.
For a promotion-specific version of this question set, use how to ask for feedback before a promotion conversation.
Frequently asked questions about 360 feedback questions
What are the best questions to ask in 360 feedback?
Good 360 feedback questions ask about observable behaviour, strengths and specific opportunities to improve.
Useful examples include:
- What do I do that makes working with me easier?
- Where could I have more impact?
- How well do I communicate when priorities change?
- What is one behaviour I should change?
- What should I do more of?
The questions should also reflect what the respondent can realistically observe.
What questions should I ask colleagues for peer feedback?
Ask colleagues about areas they experience first-hand: collaboration, communication, reliability, handling disagreements and your impact on other people’s work.
For example:
What could I change to make working with me easier?
It is often more actionable than asking a colleague to give you a general performance rating.
What questions should direct reports answer about a manager?
Direct reports are particularly well placed to comment on clarity, delegation, support, reactions to mistakes, quality of feedback and whether disagreement feels safe.
Avoid asking them to judge areas they cannot observe, such as your relationship with senior leadership.
How many questions should a 360 feedback survey have?
There is no universal perfect number.
For an individual feedback exercise, 15-25 focused questions is a sensible starting point. If every respondent is not relevant to every question, use smaller sets for managers, peers and direct reports.
Quality matters more than length.
Should 360 feedback be anonymous?
Respondents should understand exactly what is and is not visible before answering.
Removing names alone does not necessarily prevent identification. Small respondent groups, filters and distinctive written comments can all reveal clues about who said something.
Feedvance therefore uses privacy guardrails rather than relying only on an anonymous label: results have minimum response thresholds, the requester is not shown who responded, and raw open-text responses are not displayed.
What is the minimum number of responses for private 360 feedback?
With Feedvance, overall insights unlock once at least three people have responded.
Relationship-level breakdowns, for example feedback specifically from peers, require at least three responses from that group before they unlock.
Minimum response thresholds are also used more broadly in professional employee-feedback systems to reduce confidentiality risks, although the precise threshold varies by system and use case.
What happens if I only get two responses?
If only two people respond in total, Feedvance does not unlock the overall insights yet.
If you have at least three responses overall but only two from a particular group, your overall insights can unlock, but the separate breakdown for that group remains hidden until it reaches three respondents.
That prevents a role-specific view from becoming a shortcut to identifying a very small number of people.
Should 360 feedback include written comments?
Written feedback can provide useful context that a numerical score cannot.
But raw comments can also be identifying. Someone’s wording, references to a particular meeting or knowledge of a specific event may reveal who wrote it.
Feedvance uses open text as input, but does not show those comments back to the requester verbatim. Instead, responses are grouped and rewritten into less identifiable insights.
Get feedback without the awkward ask
You can copy these questions into a survey and send the link around yourself.
But the difficult part of asking colleagues for feedback is not usually building the form.
It is convincing people that they can tell you something difficult without putting themselves in an uncomfortable position afterwards.
Feedvance is designed to make that ask lighter.
Choose who you want feedback from. Ask questions that matter to you. Feedvance protects respondent visibility with minimum thresholds and turns responses into private, grouped insights you can use for your own development.
Instead of copying these into a form, run them privately with Feedvance.
Run your 360 feedback with Feedvance