Leaders and associates at Capital One distrusted 360 feedback they received. I used research to turn the process into actionable growth conversation.

360 feedback — peer and manager input used during performance reviews — was disconnected from the moments where leaders actually made decisions. Feedback templates varied wildly across teams. Responses skewed positive, not because everyone was performing exceptionally, but because the system gave people no reason to be specific or honest. People leaders lacked confidence in the feedback they received. Associates didn't know how it would be used. The result was a process that consumed time and produced noise.

We interviewed leaders and associates and looked closely at how feedback was actually being written and read. The same patterns kept surfacing: people discounted feedback they couldn't put in context, and they softened their input when they weren't sure how it would be used or who would see it.

From research, we knew that we needed to improve the consistency, quality & actionability of the feedback received for it to be useful during the performance process. Our hypotheses were:

Before we built the system, we wanted to pilot our hypotheses. We partnered with PwC to build the feedback system on these foundations, grounding every question in Capital One's competency framework and making the entire process anonymous by design.

The bet wasn't obviously safe. Full anonymity could have made leaders trust the feedback less (it's easy to dismiss a critique you can't attribute), and “compared to peers” framing risked turning a growth tool into a ranking. We were trading those risks for candor, and wouldn't know which way it broke until the pilot.

The key decision was to make feedback visible during the actual rating conversation, not buried in a separate tool. At the time, people leaders used Google Slides to represent their associates during calibrations. For our pilot group, we redesigned the calibration slide to surface feedback directly alongside the performance data leaders collected.

After the performance cycle, we measured impact by surveying, observing, and interviewing different participating user groups, then triangulating those data sources. This helped us understand what was resonating with users at each step of the performance cycle, how much the feedback was actually used, and how it shaped performance conversations.

The results were strong enough to convince our HR stakeholders to discontinue using Workday as the primary tool for performance and talent, and invest in building an in-house performance systemthat understood Capital One's internal performance process and was grounded in 360 feedback as the foundation.

That in-house platform became PATH (the next case study), where this pilot's bet got built for the whole enterprise.

This pilot improved feedback clarity, quality, and actionability, and helped Capital One move away from Workday toward an in-house performance platform.

What stayed with me most was how much stronger the work became when alignment happened early. Bringing cross-functional partners in from the beginning didn't just improve the solution: it created a shared sense of ownership that carried the project forward. It also taught me that measurement isn't something you do after launch; it's how you understand whether the work is resonating, and how you earn the next phase.