360 Feedback Questions for Managers: 25 Examples
25 360 feedback questions for evaluating managers, organized by rater group. Get honest input from direct reports, peers, and leadership on how someone manages.
TL;DR: The best 360 feedback questions for managers target management behaviors that direct reports, peers, and the manager’s own boss can actually observe: clear priorities, useful feedback, fair treatment, delegation, and advocacy. Weight direct report responses most heavily and keep each rater group to 7-10 questions. For a general-purpose 360, see our 20 360 feedback questions that get honest answers. For directors and executives, use leadership 360 feedback questions instead.
Most companies run 360s on individual contributors and executives but skip the people in between: frontline managers. That’s backwards. BambooHR’s 2025 Boss Effect study found that 90% of employees who quit say their boss influenced the decision, and 58% cite management style as the primary reason they left, up from 37% in 2017. The 25 questions below are built to surface how someone actually manages before the exit interviews do.
Why Manager 360s Are Worth Running
A manager 360 collects structured feedback about a manager from their direct reports, peers, their own boss, and the manager themselves. It exists because managers are evaluated almost entirely on outputs their boss can see, while the behaviors that drive retention happen in 1:1s and Slack threads their boss never sees.
The same BambooHR research found that 33% of employees who quit cite their manager’s inability to give constructive feedback as a reason for leaving. None of that shows up in a quarterly business review. It shows up in a 360.
Questions for Direct Reports
Direct reports have the clearest view of management behavior, so they should answer the largest share of questions. These work best collected anonymously, with at least three respondents so no individual answer is identifiable. If you only have the budget or patience to collect feedback from one group, make it this one.
The yes/no-style questions below (“Does your manager give you clear priorities?”) convert naturally to a 1-5 rating scale, which is what lets you track change over time. The open-ended ones (“What has your manager done in the past six months that helped you grow?”) surface the examples behind the scores. Use both.
Clarity and direction:
- Does your manager give you clear priorities and expectations for your work?
- When priorities change, does your manager explain what changed and why?
- Do you understand how your work will be evaluated?
Feedback and development:
- How often does your manager give you feedback specific enough to act on?
- What has your manager done in the past six months that helped you grow?
- When you make a mistake, how does your manager respond?
Support and advocacy:
- When you bring your manager a problem, how useful is their response?
- Does your manager advocate for you when promotions, raises, or visible projects are decided?
Trust and fairness:
- Does your manager apply the same standards to everyone on the team?
- Do you feel safe raising concerns or disagreeing with your manager?
Questions for Peers
Peers see how a manager operates across team boundaries: whether they share information, hoard resources, or escalate conflicts well. Peer questions should stay focused on collaboration between teams, because peers have no visibility into how someone runs their own team.
- When your team depends on this manager’s team, how reliably do they deliver?
- How does this manager handle disagreements between teams?
- Does this manager share context and information that other teams need?
- When this manager commits to something cross-functional, do they follow through?
- What’s one thing this manager does that makes working across teams easier or harder?
Questions for Their Manager
The manager’s own boss evaluates a different layer: whether this person develops their team, manages performance honestly, and communicates upward without filtering. These questions pair well with the data points a boss already has, like team retention and internal mobility.
- How effectively does this manager develop the people on their team?
- Does this manager address underperformance directly, or let it linger?
- How accurately does this manager represent their team’s work, including problems?
- How well does this manager balance team advocacy with company priorities?
- Where would this manager need to grow before taking on a larger team?
Self-Assessment Questions
Self-assessment matters in a manager 360 mainly for the gap analysis. When a manager rates themselves high on “gives actionable feedback” and their team rates them low, that gap is the development plan. Keep this section short and reflective.
- What management behavior have you deliberately worked on this year, and what changed?
- Which of your direct reports is growing fastest, and what’s your role in that?
- Where do you suspect your team would rate you lowest, and why?
- What part of managing do you avoid or postpone?
- What support do you need to be a better manager?
Which Raters See Which Behaviors
Not every rater group can evaluate every management behavior, and asking people about things they can’t observe produces noise. The table below shows where each group has real visibility.
| Management behavior | Direct reports | Peers | Their manager | Self |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clarity and direction | ✔ | ⚬ | ⚬ | ✔ |
| Feedback and coaching | ✔ | ✗ | ⚬ | ✔ |
| Cross-team collaboration | ⚬ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Performance management | ⚬ | ✗ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Fairness and trust | ✔ | ⚬ | ⚬ | ⚬ |
| Advocacy for the team | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
Getting Honest Answers About a Manager
Honest manager feedback requires stronger anonymity protections than a standard 360, because the people with the most signal report directly to the person being reviewed. Three rules make the difference: collect upward responses anonymously, require at least three direct report respondents before showing any breakdown, and share themes rather than verbatim quotes.
Format matters too. Long survey forms produce rushed, generic answers, and generic answers don’t change how anyone manages. Windmill gathers manager feedback through short Slack conversations instead of survey forms, and its organizational network analysis suggests raters based on who actually works with the manager, not who HR happens to remember. Teams running review cycles this way complete 360 reviews in about five days.
Turning Results Into a Better Manager
A manager 360 only earns its cost when something changes afterward. Have the manager pick the two lowest-rated behaviors with the biggest team impact, write one concrete practice change for each, and tell the team what they heard. Re-check the same questions in six months.
For the full process, including rater selection, timelines, and confidentiality design, see our guide on how to run a 360 feedback process. If you want the employee-side version of these questions, our upward feedback questions guide covers how individuals can evaluate their own manager constructively.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are good 360 feedback questions for managers?
Good 360 feedback questions for managers focus on observable management behaviors: clarity of direction, feedback quality, delegation, fairness, and advocacy. Strong examples include 'Does your manager give you clear priorities and expectations?' and 'When you bring your manager a problem, how useful is their response?' Direct reports should answer the largest share of questions because they see management behavior no one else does.
How is a manager 360 different from a leadership 360?
A manager 360 evaluates how someone manages people day-to-day: setting priorities, giving feedback, delegating, running 1:1s, and advocating for the team. A leadership 360 evaluates senior-leader competencies like vision, strategic decision-making, and change leadership. Frontline and mid-level managers need the first kind, while directors and executives need the second.
Who should participate in a manager's 360 review?
A manager's 360 should include 3-5 direct reports, 2-3 peers who collaborate with the manager regularly, the manager's own boss, and a self-assessment. Direct report feedback should be weighted most heavily and collected anonymously. If a manager has fewer than three direct reports, aggregate responses carefully or skip rating breakdowns to protect anonymity.
How many questions should a manager 360 include?
Keep a manager 360 to 15-25 questions total, with no rater group answering more than 7-10. Response quality drops sharply on longer surveys. Mix rating-scale questions for tracking with open-ended questions that surface specific examples.