Leadership Surveys: Who to Ask and What to Ask Them

As a company adds team leaders and layers of decision-making, it gets harder to see firsthand how leaders support their people. You start to wonder whether leaders are communicating goals, sorting things out when priorities collide, and giving their teams chances to receive feedback. A leadership survey examines these behaviors through the observations of the people who work with each leader.

A first leadership survey doesn’t need responses from every direction: managers, peers, direct reports, and the leaders themselves. You can also run an upward survey, in which team members give feedback to their direct leader. When you choose respondents based on your purpose and the behaviors you want to observe, even a growing company of 100 to 500 employees can start with just the scope it needs.

Start With the Leader Behaviors You Want to Understand

“Assessing leadership” is too broad to tell you which questions to ask. Write down specifically what you’re trying to do: improve team members’ day-to-day experience at work, identify development areas for individual leaders, or set the direction for leadership training across the company. Your purpose also determines who will read the results and what reports you’ll need.

Say your company has added a number of new team leaders and you want to reduce confusion about priorities on their teams. You might look at whether leaders explain goals clearly and coordinate when work overlaps. If cross-department collaboration is the bigger concern, you need responses from people who have watched the leader reach agreements and share information with other departments. Pinning down behaviors you can observe in the work does more for follow-up conversations than a single verdict on whether someone is a “good leader.”

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), a leadership development organization, likewise recommends that organizations introducing 360-degree feedback first define what they want to achieve and tie it to their talent and business strategy. That principle—clarify the problem you’re solving and the outcome you expect before you pick a method—is just as useful when you’re preparing an upward survey. [1]

Companies new to leadership surveys often hear, “While we’re at it, let’s just do a 360.” But when one peer leader rates five or six other leaders, the scores tend to run together toward the end, and the leaders who get the results are left unsure whose input to listen to first. If your goal is to understand how leaders support the work inside their teams, and most leaders have enough team members, you’re better off starting with team-member feedback and building experience reading and acting on the results. Expand to 360 when what matters happens out of the team’s sight, as with leaders whose core job is cross-department coordination, or senior leaders who work more with other leaders than with their own team members.

Ask the People Who Actually See the Behavior

A leadership survey and a 360-degree assessment aren’t the same thing. “Leadership” refers to what you examine; upward versus 360 is a choice about whose observations you collect. Culture Amp, for example, presents its Manager Effectiveness survey as one in which direct reports give feedback to their manager. That structure alone lets you examine the management behaviors team members experience. [2]

Team members see work assignments and day-to-day feedback up close. Peer leaders see cross-department coordination, and the senior leaders above them see goal delivery and reporting. They may be rating the same leader, but they have observed different moments. Also consider whether respondents have worked with the leader long enough and actually collaborated with them. If people rate every behavior simply because their name is on the list, guesswork creeps into the responses.

If your first round is meant to show how direct leaders support their teams day to day, you can start with team-member responses. If differences across relationships matter, or the gap between how leaders see themselves and how others see them, you can add self, manager, and peer ratings. In short, you expand to 360 when you have a reason to widen the view.

Ask About What People Experienced, Not Personality or Impressions

An item like “My team leader is a great leader” can capture an overall impression, but the score alone won’t tell you what to change. Pair it with items about specific behaviors, such as “When work priorities conflict, my leader clarifies what to do first,” and development conversations become easier. People who don’t normally have a chance to see a behavior should be able to choose “Not observed.”

You can also set a time frame. Asking respondents to “think about the past three months” helps keep older and more recent experiences from blurring together. Decide in advance, though, how to handle employees who didn’t actually work with the leader during that period. Choose the time frame based on your company’s operating cycle and the leader’s role.

It also matters that each item asks about only one behavior. If someone gives a low score to “Communicates goals clearly and rewards people fairly,” you can’t tell which part they had in mind. Pew Research Center likewise notes that questions asking about more than one concept at once, known as double-barreled questions, are hard to answer and produce responses that are hard to interpret. [3] Once you’ve split the questions, you can have a few actual respondents read them first to check that everyone understands each item the same way.

Explain How Results Will Be Used So People Can Answer Honestly

Respondents want to know who will see what they write, and in what form. Before the survey opens, explain which aggregated results and comments leaders will receive, how much HR will see, and whether results will be used in performance reviews or compensation decisions. If you present the survey as developmental feedback and then use the results for another purpose, it can affect how people answer next time.

You can also keep individual leader reports separate from the aggregate view used to find company-wide development needs. Each leader gets feedback on their own behavior, while the company sees the support that many leaders need in common. CCL stresses that an organization’s 360 feedback program should distinguish individual results from aggregate organizational access and be clear about confidentiality and respondent anonymity. Tell people who will actually have access based on the purpose and process your company has set. [1]

In small teams, a minimum group size for reporting and clear rules for sharing verbatim comments matter even more. If a leader has only one or two team members, averaging their responses still reveals who said what. You’ll need to decide whether to show detailed results for those groups, roll them up into a larger group, or use a different feedback method. And when a relationship makes the source obvious, as with ratings from a leader’s only manager, don’t cover those responses with a blanket promise that “everything is anonymous.”

Translate Scores Into Behavior

When the results arrive, look at each item and the spread of responses before you rank leaders. The same average can mean everyone feels much the same, or that experiences are sharply divided. The number of respondents, how much chance they had to observe, and how long they’ve worked with the leader all matter for interpretation.

If you ran a 360, read the results by relationship first. If team members feel they don’t get enough feedback while the leader’s manager sees communication as smooth, the two groups may be picturing different situations. Rather than averaging the two scores and drawing a conclusion, look separately at how the leader gives feedback to the team and how they report to their own manager.

When you discuss results with a leader, go back to concrete situations. Instead of stopping at “Your communication score is low,” look at the moments when work requests collided or the reasoning behind a decision never reached the team. The point isn’t to figure out who wrote which comment. It’s to agree on what the leader will do the next time the same situation comes up.

Before those conversations happen, the first question in the results briefing is often, “So which team leaders scored low?” But if the “clarifying priorities” item is low across several teams, look at the structure before the individuals: goals that change too often, or team leaders without the authority to coordinate. Give each leader the behaviors that stand out only in their own results and that they can change themselves. Take issues that appear across many leaders, or that sit outside a leader’s authority, to the company as training or policy work. Without that distinction, if every result becomes the individual leader’s homework, leaders will treat the next survey as an evaluation, and the company will see the same results all over again.

Use the First Results to Pick Behaviors to Change

No leader can improve on every item at once. Use the results to choose a behavior to practice repeatedly. If team members had been setting their own priorities whenever work overlapped, for example, the leader might choose to sort out conflicting requests with the team during weekly planning. Look, too, at what information or authority the company needs to give its leaders.

Later, look back at both what the leader put into practice and what changes team members noticed. Checking progress doesn’t require repeating a full 360 from scratch. You can briefly re-ask the same questions about the chosen behavior, or review it in regular check-in conversations.

If you’re preparing your first leadership survey, start by aligning four things: the purpose, the behaviors to observe, the respondents who actually see those behaviors, and how the results will be used. Even if you start with upward feedback alone, a clear design lets you understand what team members experience and decide which behaviors leaders should work on.

References

1. Center for Creative Leadership · How to Implement an Organizational 360 Feedback Initiative — Purpose and strategy, trust and confidentiality, and development and follow-up support.
2. Culture Amp · Manager Effectiveness — A survey structure in which managers get feedback from their direct reports.
3. Pew Research Center · Writing Survey Questions — Using specific wording and asking about one concept per question. Sources accessed Nov. 3, 2026.