Policy : Shorten the Feedback Loops

Commitment to Feedback as a Leadership Practice Feedback loops between people — as distinct from the technical and process feedback loops measured by delivery systems — are among the most powerful tools available to leaders. When people receive timely, honest, and caring feedback about their performance, their thinking, and their impact, they grow faster and deliver better work. When feedback is delayed, diluted, or absent, people drift, repeat mistakes, and lose the opportunity to improve.

What This Means Shortening feedback loops as a leader means creating the conditions for honest, frequent, bidirectional feedback at every level. It means giving feedback as close to the relevant event as possible, seeking feedback actively rather than waiting for it, and ensuring that the teams you lead do the same with each other.

Our commitment to shortening leadership feedback loops is built on:

• Timely Feedback as the Norm – We give feedback as close to the relevant moment as possible. Waiting for a performance review to share something important is too late.
• Bidirectional Feedback – Leaders actively seek feedback on their own leadership — from their teams, peers, and those they report to. They model the openness they want to see.
• Creating Feedback Rituals – Regular 1:1s, team retrospectives, and structured review moments create predictable opportunities for feedback to flow in all directions.
• Psychological Safety for Honesty – Feedback is only useful if it is honest. Leaders create the conditions in which honest feedback is safe to give and receive.
• Stakeholder Feedback Loops – Leaders maintain active channels for feedback from stakeholders — ensuring that teams understand how their work is landing and can adapt accordingly.

Why This Matters Slow feedback loops between people create the same problems as slow technical feedback loops: errors compound, misalignments grow, and course correction becomes expensive. Leaders who invest in short, honest interpersonal feedback loops build teams that improve rapidly and stay aligned with what matters.

Our Expectation Leaders must build feedback into the rhythm of their work — not as a formal HR process, but as a natural and frequent part of how they engage with the people they lead and work alongside.

See Also

This policy is part of a cross-cutting concept. Read the full picture: → [[Feedback Loops]]

Related policies in other domains:

• [[Create Feedback Loops Everywhere]] — Agile
• [[Create Fast Feedback Loops]] — Lean
• [[Customer Feedback Loops]] — Product