A Quiet Drag on Performance
Twenty-six percent of employees report receiving no feedback in the past year. Not a single conversation about how they’re doing or whether they’re meeting expectations. For organizations pursuing ambitious goals, this statistic should raise alarms.
While debates continue about the value of formal performance reviews, one thing is certain, how well employees understand expectations and how they are performing against those expectations determines whether your strategy succeeds or stalls. Feedback isn’t a soft skill or a side task. It is a core organizational system that either accelerates performance or quietly erodes it.
Mental Models Drive Behavior
Employees act based on how they perceive their environment. If their mental model says, “no feedback means I’m doing fine,” they’ll continue on autopilot. If it says, “feedback only comes when something’s wrong,” they’re more likely to avoid risk and innovation.
Organizations don’t rise or fall on mission statements alone; they rise or fall on the mental models leaders reinforce and the behaviors they allow to persist unchallenged.
Feedback Loops: The Engine of Organizational Agility
In healthy systems, feedback loops drive adaptation. When something drifts off course, the loop identifies it and realigns inputs to drive better outputs. Organizations are no different.
Effective feedback loops illuminate where performance deviates from expectations, provide leaders and teams with insight to adapt, and create accountability that keeps people and systems moving together. When these loops break, misalignment compounds. Small issues become systemic. Leaders end up managing symptoms rather than addressing root causes.
HR’s Role and Why This Isn’t Just an HR Problem
HR should be obsessed with enabling feedback systems. Talent strategies must prioritize clarity and insight at every level. But let’s be clear, poor communication and lack of feedback aren’t “HR problems.” They are organizational design issues and should be leadership priorities.
Organizations must hire and develop leaders who find it unacceptable for employees to drift without direct, actionable feedback. Great leaders don’t leave performance to chance. They make feedback a habit, not an afterthought.
The Leadership Imperative
Feedback isn’t just a ritual. It is a structural multiplier for performance. Organizations that fail to create clear expectations and ongoing feedback loops are running on a system that will inevitably stall. Transformation isn’t about tweaking individual behaviors in isolation, but about designing human systems where clarity, accountability, and alignment are inevitable.
Is your organization’s feedback system fueling clarity or chaos?
Let’s talk about designing systems that keep your people, culture, and strategy aligned, and unlock your organization’s full potential.