About the UQ Leadership Survey

The UQ Leadership Survey is a 360-degree feedback tool designed to help you enhance your leadership and support your development.

It supports the development of leadership skills and behaviour related to the 7 key capabilities of the UQ Leadership Framework.

The survey can be used by:

senior leaders, who should undertake the 360-degree feedback process regularly
other staff members who want to use the survey for a particular need.

If you’re interested in undertaking the survey process, contact UQ Leadership.

360-degree feedback

A 360-degree feedback survey asks for feedback from people who work in a variety of relationships with you. It usually includes feedback from peers or colleagues, direct reports and managers, as well as self-ratings. It can include customers, collaborators or other stakeholders.

Leadership is not just about what a leader does, but also about:

their relationships
how others perceive their behaviour, strengths and development needs.

It is important that you understand the impact of your behaviour on others.

A 360-degree survey gives you rich information that you can use to:

check your own perspectives on your strengths and development needs against others' perspectives
celebrate your strengths
plan further development
design your job and career to make use of your strengths
achieve higher performance more easily.

What the survey measures

The survey is a combination of quantitative scales and written responses.

It provides you with data and insight into perceptions of your leadership style held by your manager, team members and colleagues.

The survey and report can help you:

understand others’ perceptions of your leadership style
compare these with your perceptions of yourself
develop an action plan for development.

The survey report is intended as a stimulus for reflection and conversation, and should be interpreted alongside other performance indicators. It doesn’t measure factors like intent, personality or ability.

Anonymity and aggregation of responses

The leader undertaking the survey nominates respondents in a number of categories:

manager or supervisor
peers and colleagues
direct reports
other contacts.

They also complete the survey to rate themselves.

A total of 5 respondents (other than the leader’s self-rating) must complete the survey for a report to be generated.

Peers, colleagues, direct reports and other contacts

If you are a respondent in the ‘peers and colleagues’, ‘direct reports’ or ‘other contacts’ categories, your feedback will be anonymous. These categories will only appear in the report if they have at least 3 responses. Quantitative responses will be combined within each category. The report doesn’t identify:

who gave which responses
who did or didn’t respond to the survey.

Managers and supervisors

If you’re the person's manager or supervisor, your responses will usually be identifiable because you’re likely to be the only person in this category. But if more than one manager or supervisor is nominated, the responses from everyone in this category will be aggregated to provide an average rating.

Written responses

Written responses are included in the survey report unedited and in full, but they’re not identified. They’re presented in a randomised order to maximise anonymity. Try not to include any information that may identify you. Shorter comments are usually less easily identified as being provided by a specific person.

Reporting and access to data

The report is a tool for the development of the leader being rated. If you undertake the survey, your individual identifiable data will only be used for your own review and action planning. Your report belongs to you and you're not obligated to show it to anyone.

Reports are only accessible to UQ Leadership staff involved in coordinating the program who need access to facilitate your debrief and help you understand your report. Your results will not be shared with anyone else without your permission.

You will be expected to share the action plan you develop in response to the report with your manager and team. See receiving the report and implementing your action plan in the information for leaders being rated for details.

The survey is hosted through the online survey system of Voice Project, the survey specialists we partnered with to develop the survey. All data is collected and stored by Voice Project. UQ staff are not able to access individual responses. Voice Project may use de-identified data combined with many other people’s data for research or benchmarking.

Group reports and benchmarking

Group reports may be produced at times to help identify group-level training needs and trends. They are only produced with a minimum of 5 participants to preserve anonymity. Group reports contain data averaged across a specified group of participants (for example, all senior managers). Group reports do not include the identity of respondents, and no individual scores are identifiable.

In future, aggregated data may be used to provide a benchmark score for leaders across UQ.

Survey design

We’ve developed the survey in collaboration with Voice Project, survey specialists based at Macquarie University.

Where available, questions were selected from Voice Project's bank of questions with demonstrated reliability. These questions were supplemented with tailored questions specifically crafted for UQ to ensure relevance in relation to UQ's leadership capabilities.

The response scale is asymmetrical with no ‘mid-point’, which helps to provide more clear and usable feedback for the person being rated. The scale used in the survey also allows greater differentiation between positive performers.