One of the great tales from basketball lore is how coach Phil Jackson led teams like the Bulls and the Lakers to dynasty status. Working with legends like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, he might have let the all-stars run the show. Instead, his success hinged on transparency. Jackson gave players clear, constructive feedback. For example, he urged Jordan to cut back on scoring and involve his teammates more, recognizing that team success required more than a scoring leader.
It’s a valuable lesson for business leaders today. Feedback can be tough to give. It can be uncomfortable. But withholding honest feedback is a disservice—to employees and to the company.
As CEO of Jotform, I encourage managers to treat feedback as an operating system embedded in daily work, rather than something delivered as an occasional event. Here’s why.
Feedback’s compounding impact
Feedback goes beyond merely improving how an employee completes an isolated task or project. You might be surprised to discover how the benefits endure, compounding over time.
For starters, offering feedback boosts employee engagement. According to research from Gallup, 80% of employees who reported receiving meaningful feedback in the past week were fully engaged. In a world where professionals are anxious about the threat of AI, it’s understandable that getting a sense of how they’re performing is encouraging. If I’ve learned anything in two decades as a business owner, it’s that engaged employees are not only more motivated, they also tend to stick with the company. Even when feedback leans negative, it signals that the company is invested in employees and their growth.
As Harvard Business Review points out, feedback helps employees find meaning in their work. On a basic level, constructive feedback aids mastery. Put simply, mastering a skill feels good. If you’ve ever picked up a second language or perfected a new recipe, you understand that validating sensation. When given thoughtfully, feedback shows how an employee’s contribution fits into the bigger picture. It can make daily tasks, including inevitable busywork, feel more purposeful.
For leaders, the challenge remains: how to make feedback more effective and meaningful. Here’s how leading teams make it work.
How to deliver feedback that actually works
When feedback is limited to annual reviews or when it’s only prompted by missteps and errors, it becomes a source of dread. Like a Pavlovian response, employees learn to associate a summons to the leader’s office with bad news. They brace themselves for a difficult conversation.
When managers shift feedback from reactive to routine by proactively including it in regular workflows, meetings, and project cycles, the idea of receiving feedback becomes less fraught. At my company, regular feedback helps employees become accustomed to both positive and negative comments on their performance and view them more as coaching than reprimands (we do this using Jotform’s online feedback forms, of course). Frequent feedback tends to buoy performance, too. Indeed, employees are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree that they are motivated to do outstanding work when their manager provides daily (rather than annual) feedback, according to Gallup.
For the sake of employees’ nervous systems, it’s good practice to standardize and communicate how leaders deliver feedback—whether through a quick face-to-face check-in, a scheduled phone call, or a standing weekly Slack chat. When feedback follows a consistent structure and cadence, expectations become clearer, and employees know what to anticipate. Everyone receives the same level of attention, which reduces anxiety and helps minimize perceptions of bias.
When giving feedback, smart leaders leverage data and AI insights to spot patterns. That way, teams know that feedback is based on real, objective information, not just subjective opinions. For example, you can tap into operational metrics, like error rates and customer response times, and use AI tools to analyze trends and tease out patterns in employee performance over time. One final observation from my experience: the lion’s share of employees actively want more feedback. Younger generations, in particular, are eager for more regular insight into how they’re doing. They recognize that it’s key to advancement and career growth. Thankfully, they also recognize the value of hearing from human leaders. Whether on the basketball court or in the office, they aren’t convinced they can learn everything they need to know through AI tools like ChatGPT—not yet, at least. Leaders can deliver the kind of feedback that boosts careers and strengthens teams.